Back Then When We Were Here for You

What can we do to help you?
You are none of you we’ve known,
But if you see us and see

We seem to mean things to you,
Then how far you are, how like
To those who formed us, spoke us,

Showed us, wrote us, you’ll still have
Some of the same needs they had.
We can’t help with beds or food,

But there’s some things we can do—
We can name you worlds that were
That may not be there for you.

On the day we were set down,
Winds were up. The sky was blue.
Souls had work and chores to do.

Small lives warmed cold blood in sun,
Then chased bugs down to eat them.
Small birds sang. There were birds then.

Stinky Penguins

Another day, another
Batch of pretty photographs
Gathered to glow on your screen,

Another profundity.
The illusory will seem
Illusory until smell

Comes with news aggregators—
For now, even bleak horrors,
Digitally accurate,

Show the arty perfection
Of odorless galleries
With futuristic white walls.

A colony of penguins
Scatters like words on blue ice,
Grey skies, black calligraphy.

The iced ground where they roost’s dirt
From volcanos and guano,
Rough and smelly, not so nice.

Then It’s as if You Weren’t

Do you ever look down at your legs,
Whatever your appendages are,
And think it strange you’re alive at all
As this particular animal
Entangled with these particular
Configurations your awareness
Coasts while having come to consider
These configurations yours, your own,
Confused as a dog behind its tail?

Through

Here we are, half alive,
And there you are, mortal.
We don’t know, when wind roars,

Whether to say it’s more
Like our existence or
Like yours. Nearly static,

We stand in tidy rows,
But we’re also, often,
More often, your whispers,

Rapid pattering, sighs,
And your roars. We’re fingers,
Hands, and arms in mid-air.

We’re poses. We’re whistles.
We’re as you as your scent,
But we’re not molecules,

And while we can be caught
And kept in tidy rows,
We can’t breathe on our own.

All night the wind, which is
Neither itself nor you
Nor us in rows, storms through.

Cut Loop and Sliced Moon

The road forks from your sight.
The thought glows with the light—
There’s no fork in the road.
You can’t read that stone glow
Split by the black pine’s shade.
The road’s whole. The night’s flayed.

Children’s Book, Needs Illustrations

You’ll live with different things.
You’ll live through different times.

You’ll live with many things,
And then you’ll die.

You may die in your sleep.
You may die of old age.

You may die of disease.
You may first lose your mind.

You may die of an injury.
You may just starve to death.

Someone might run a truck through you
Or plant a bullet in your chest.

Your body may consume itself.
Someone may bomb your town.

You may get caught by fire
When all the woods burn down.

Anyway, some worse, some worst,
You’ll die some day, but first,

You will live with different things.
You’ll live through different times.

What It Truly Means to Be Polite

Given each of you belongs to multiple in-groups,
It follows each of you has multiple out-group selves
That bob along behind your heads like awkward balloons
As you socialize along with others who belong.

In office conference rooms, at organizational
Meet-ups, in locker rooms, at church socials, at the pub,
In military units, among concert-goers,
Around a small, smoky, daytime hearth, in every club,

Everyone has multiple Venn halos hovering
In overlapping, shimmering arcs around themselves,
And it’s only the coordinated dissembling
Of the assembled, immediate in-group members,

Discreetly not openly observing each others’
Attentive, ghostly, wavering out-group member selves,
Which vastly outnumber the in-group members mingling,
That keeps any gathering from disintegrating.