Oysters, Meerkats, Turnips

Does a pattern care
If it continues?
Well, surely some do.

How much of what is
Really wants to be?
What is that pattern

Of really wanting
To exist? And when
Did it first exist?

There’s the argument
That whatever is,
Whatever will be,

Must have always been
Inherent. Wanting
Is a blossoming,

More than a seeking,
In that case, although
It sure looks and feels

Like an absence and
Not an inherence
Among what’s hungry.

Indivisibly Divisible Thoughts of Individuals

How broken do we have to be
Not to mean? We’re fragmentary
Almost all of the time in speech,
But redundancy lets us mean.

The branches of spruce and the flight
Feathers from which quills were once made
Look similar in silhouette.
Spiral galaxies pirouette

Around such coincidences,
But meaning’s kin to gravity
More than to signs’ interactions,
Gathering cumulatively.

Then is it, as with gravity,
Inhering, or is it the light,
Thrown electromagnetism,
Waves echoing as projected?

There’s some kind of continuum
Between random phonemes and texts
Crafted by wise algorithms,
And most of us lie along it,

Neither spoken whole nor wholly
Broken, but whether we’re glowing
From internal fusion or tossed
Around to bounce off surfaces,

We still seem uncertain to us.
Even gravity curves and waves.
Every fracture makes connections,
Whether compressed or uncoiling.

Differently Abled

Say you swapped your body with the weather.
Say you could stay awake while doing this.
You’d finally gain a little control
Of the weather, at the price of losing
Control of your body altogether.

You could obsessively regulate rain,
Make days warmer with a little effort,
Or cover yourself in snowdrifts to sulk,
But pain or comfort would schedule themselves
With no regard to what you did at all.

Things would be different, but only on
A gradient reversed from what you’ve known—
With the most intense incapacity
Closest in, more input farther from home.

Inefficiency Never Knows Its Limits

Every moment is equally real.
Every moment’s banal and sublime,
Although you may be in no fit state

To notice each as such at the time.
It’s a serious problem, of course,
As this short-circuits the best-laid schemes.

There’s no fundamentally finer
Time to exist, except in daydreams.
On the plus side, your experience

Differs so much, minute by minute,
That whether the world’s never better,
Nor worse, means little when you’re in it.

On the down side, you mostly feel less
Than each moment’s as good as it gets.

Onions and Attitudes Cafe

Monstrosity, say the fans,

Lies in the beholder’s eye.

That’s how monsters multiply,

There being so many eyes—

The man who murdered two teens

Begs, I am not a monster,

Prior to his sentencing,

While lonely, outsider teens

Identify with monsters.

Maybe we can constrict this,

Being language, your monster—

Monsters are hybridity,

And thus a threat to order,

Sure, but the valence depends

On which part of the creature

Threatens humanity most

By being both alien

And only old memories—

Body, personality,

Or something out of the mind.

All monsters are transgressive,

But some transgressions you like,

Or admire, or maybe pity,

While others you truly loathe.

Down at the dreaming cafe

Where the joke sign promising

Sandwiches, &tc.,

Served with Gossip,

Opinions, and Attitudes

Has lost several letters

From weathering since it closed,

Monstrosity lurks under

One of the outside tables,

Trying to decide which kind

Of monstrosity words are,

Neither human, beast, nor mind,

But everything human beasts

Have made of mind, the signage

Incised and fading on clay.

Useful Extra Evil

No one’s perfect, but no one’s
Imperfection’s equally
Evil. This is important.

This is where theology
Fastens to society—
Everyone’s imperfections,

For whatever claimed reasons,
Must remain distributed
Unequally. You may say

You own some, but not so much
As many, and never more
Than most among so many.

Beat your breast. Confess your sins.
Do what you can to fit in.
Honor the right ancestors.

Vow to do better because
Evil is always out there,
And out there evil’s greater.

There’s No Fix for What Can’t Quit

Obsessed with causal theories
And social obligations,
Many people ask themselves,

Is something in us broken,
Or have we broken ourselves?
Let this thought occur to you—

You are desperate (life is),
You are hungry and make waste
(Life does this, and life eats it),

And you are obligately
Social (most social lives are),
But you are not yet failures,

And if anything’s broken,
It’s whatever engine brakes
Runaway technology,

Which is also the engine
Of all you could call success.
Who knows if this has a cliff?