A Writer Who Is Most Commonly Described as a Poet

One person is back as One Person,
Celebrated individual,
Life form praised in a cloud of language

For a surrounding cloud of language,
Replete with gaps and doodled drawings,
A multiplicity that can be

Tied to a single heartbeat and name.
One Person, that Author, that Writer.
No one seems excited the reverse

Is true, if not truer. Every word,
Every instance signed, spoken, written,
Emerges from a cloud of persons,

Myriad bodies, brains, heartbeats, lives,
Myriad persons for that term, one.

Information’s Dimmer Guests

It’s a bit like shadow puppetry
With nothing but the fingers and hands,
Or like playing with shadows at all,

The way you and your daughter used to
Amuse yourselves, boring desert days,
By posing around the porch to see

Who could create the greatest grotesques.
All those silhouettes only outlined
Patches of modestly decreased light—

They would have looked eerier, glowing,
If you could have thrown those tints at night.
You didn’t really make them. Sun did.

But you were the ones blocking the sun
To invent the shapes. You were the ones.

But Is Only the Third for Now

The dead may have three kinds of houses.
One kind’s living, beings as they were,
Bodies descended from dead bodies.

The dead may also dwell in culture,
In languages, monuments, and texts,
In all those sorts of inheritance,

And the dead find a third residence,
Open to them all, with or without
Descendants, the liquid nesting dolls

Of small ways of speaking and living
Inside of anyone living now,
The most haunted kind of house of all,

The phenomenon of a person
Who may find three kinds of houses soon.

Freon

Somewhere a compressor
Alternated grinding
Higher and lower pitched

Rotating engine sounds,
Maybe the grocery
Refrigerating food

All night long. Making them
Cold again, not just cold,
But refrigerated.

The world was ending, was
More advanced than ever,
Was nothing anyone

Said, as everyone knew
But continued saying
Opinions anyway,

Alternately grinding
Brighter and darker pitched
Rotating engine sounds.

Never Again and Again

So the dying goes on, and unless
It’s their own or their loved ones’, people
Choose, must choose, which deaths they let move them.

No one’s moved by all deaths equally,
But many are understandably
Angry about those deaths that move them,

Angry others aren’t moved equally.
Arguments boil up over which deaths
Were cruelest, most unnecessary.

Whose death was the most inexcusable?
Most innocent? Most vulnerable?
Whose indifference was the costliest?

Whose was the most hypocritical?
Whose owned unmovable righteousness?