Wet Tumbleweed

Context can fool you.
Ground can hide figures.
Somehow surprises

Get called out of place,
When your assumptions
About place were off.

You feel like you’re shocked
By the character
You didn’t expect,

But you recognized
That character, yes?
What you thought you knew,

But didn’t, wasn’t
The interloper.
It was the context.

Hanging Around

Old and slowly, obviously,
Is the body’s preferred way
To die, and up to a point,
At least, it is more dignified.

The immortality seekers
Are really mostly about youth—
How long can you stay young before
You die? They won’t be satisfied.

Someone as youthful at sixty
As most bodies are at thirty
Will never be itching to go.
The longer you’re youthful, the more

Years you get it into your head
To live. True immortality
Your head can’t get around at all.
Meanwhile the body falls apart

Microscopically, cell by cell,
Little slower, little faster.
If nothing strikes you to the ground,
You’ll go by hanging around.

The Grizzled Activist

Waiting for the kettle to boil
With no other person nearby,
Is this not an acceptable,

Even stereotypical
Way to be an irrelevant
Person in a world of persons

Who disagree how best to be
Persons, most of the time? Quiet
As a mouse, in a borrowed house,

Just enough money for the rent,
What more obligation is there?
A gust of rain outside. You ache.

The body is sick and has been
For a while. Pour the hot water.
What was your life for? Never mind.

Perception by Construction

Manas, manah, mentis, mantis,
The thought that thinks itself itself,
That questions the world for patterns,

That yearns to understand what’s next,
That is manic for prediction,
Memory, reflection, belief,

The machine that makes all meanings
In hopes they are discoveries
Of something that is outside mind,

The first lenses, the first mirrors,
The first alchemical musings
That you could navigate by ideas,

Mind as an additional sense
Reading patterns in the scatter
Of the entrails of galaxies—

It’s a physical extension
Of synaptic origami,
Long crane dancing on the midden.

Let One Cup Push the Other Along

In Alcaeus or Li Bai,
Anyone since or between,
The drinking poem was never

About only alcohol
But always about escape,
With wine its temporary,

Albeit inadequate,
Means. For wine, read soma, prayer
To a compassionate god,

Some delirious vision.
Still works. The cry of the song
Is to say, let’s turn our backs

On the suffering rising
Inevitably to drown
Us—let us drown ourselves first.

Far Closer

Distant perspectives
Act smarter but aren’t.
Intimate glimpses
Feel realer but cheat.

If you consider
Distances intimate
And intimacies
As open vistas,

You may at least taste
The strangeness to them,
Star clouds in your mouth,
Windswept steppes of skin.