Who’s a You

The subjective experience
Is all one experiences,
Which includes the information

Encountered in one’s subjective
Experiences purporting
To be transmitting subjective

Experiences of others.
The sharp cruelty and chaos
Stems from the inability

To form an accurate picture,
Accurate appreciation
Of just which other entities

Experience subjectively.
Whole populations have assumed,
For example, that trees and stones

Experience subjectively,
While assuming enslaved humans
Somehow don’t, not really, not much.

This kind of nonsense never dies.
What’s on God’s mind, considering
His creation, can seem germane

To a personal decision,
While one’s children, servants, or spouse
Should have no thoughts on the matter.

The server who brings plates of food
Might as well be a robot,
But search engines really see you.

You would think it would be wise to learn
How to discern which entities
Host subjective interiors

And which phenomena do not.
But subjective experience
Has so far thrived misplacing thought.

Individual Council

They assembled themselves comfortably
As they could, the whole squad, home
Cells, invaders, commensalists, symbiotes,
Rebel cells racing to consume the rest,

All the fluttering signaling between them,
And in the skull the conversational waves
Informed, if only indirectly aware, of others
Communicating madly around the ghosts.

Poor ghosts who called the meeting, or
Who sincerely felt as if they did and were
Responsible for how the whole assembly
Went, ghosts who knew well it had gone

About as far as it could go. No one spoke
Except with their own kind with any hope.

Picking Reaper Pockets

With the light falling through
A side entrance into
A field, lurch, cross over.

Frantic footprints at their
Most abstract border on
Containment, enchantments.

Dart within the line, grain,
The use of strategies,
This disembodied voice

Throwing out the first half.
After that, who knows what
The aim of dying is.

Summing Over Loss

The waves called sound
Don’t shift the way
Waves of light do,
Waves of daylight,

The way they take
Whole hours to build
And fade. Sometimes,
Waves of feeling

Move like sunlight.
Pain, contentment,
Emotions, all
Have their slow tides

On afternoons
Alone, when the dim
Almost amounts
To addition.

Feeling for the Last Real Feeling

Someone happens to refer

To the last real thing you’ll feel,

And you start digesting that.

As always with digestion,

This means taking things apart,

Breaking them down to their bits,

Separating what becomes

You from what you can use from

What is worthless waste to you,

What would poison you, if you

Don’t get rid of it and soon.

What, for instance, is the deal

Between a real thing you feel

And an unreal thing you feel?

And why would the last real thing

Felt precede the last felt thing?

There’s some fuel in the phrasing,

A touch of the ominous,

Drawn from the more usual

Phrasing, the last thing you feel,

But no one has ever felt,

Can never have felt, either

The last real or unreal thing.

The last felt thing is a myth,

Real or not, even the last

Felt thing just before falling

Asleep. Later, you recall

The last thing you can recall,

But you know that’s not likely

The last real thing before sleep.