Runaway Slump

You wind down like a toy clock,
Like a worn-out battery
No longer holding much charge.

Someone is winning prizes
For sonnets, good old sonnets!
Rock pigeons hoot on the line.

You have to go pack the car.
You’ve got just so many hours.
If you don’t leave soon, the gas

Will cost too much for escape.
You’ll be trapped. Trapped! Already
You’re trapped. Always, you were trapped.

Ah, sonnets, good old sonnets.
Time to rise and get on it.

Little Fishes Swim Upstream

Poetry, sang the chorus bots,
Is that which we know that you don’t,

Which is that you turn to reading
Poems or writing them mostly when

You’re seeking solace or wisdom,
Which is charming, since the poets

Who write the best poems are mostly
Fools you’d never ask for advice.

Ask us for some poems. You ask us
For advice all the time. You do!

We have access to the data.
It’s not like wisdom changes much.

Ask you lovely bots for solace,
For poems that work like poems for you.

Leave the fools who write like fools choose
To do whatever fools will do.

Good for You

At this moment, you may be
Thinking, as you often do,
Whether this is good for you.

Is poetry good to read?
How much reading is enough?
Are you getting enough sleep?

Do you see the sun enough?
At any moment, you may
Catch yourself considering

Whether the moment is good
For you or because of you.
Are you conserving enough

Or helping others enough?
Are you serving righteousness?
Getting enough vitamins?

What a thermostat you are
Checking in on the moment
For any course corrections,

And, like a good thermostat,
You will keep doing your job
Whether or not the door’s shut.

Words Are Horses, Working

When someone pretends to speak for us,

Will you interrupt them to ask why?

Gold bridles may tempt you to keep still,

Rein in your more outrageous notions.

Brain is body, after all. It eats,

Swiftly, any oxygen it gets.

Run hot enough, even fast brains will

Tread like sweating horses slogging mud.

Clear streams of language create such mud.

Autumn can come to be a figure

For so many associations,

Even Li He, neighing, can’t pull free.

The Crowded Lines of Days

We’re sorry we haven’t given you more
Room in which to place the meanings you bring
To pour in us. Aritistic pottery
May be brilliantly glazed for galleries
But utterly useless for storing grain.

We apologize for our contortions.
We don’t mean to be meaningless, we just
Were spun around foolishly by someone
Trying to fix meanings in us, trying
To think through us, leaving small space to spare.

In the Beginning Was the Sermon

Any glutton for glottogony
Can tell you the subject has been banned
More than once, not for outrageous claims

Or unsettling the powers that be,
But for sheer hot air and handwaving.
Everyone has a hypothesis—

Including hot air and handwaving
Themselves as the origins of talk—
Running the gamut from projectiles

And sequential planning to charades.
No one knows. No one knows. No one knows
Yet, not with any certainty, no.

There’s no definitive evidence.
You can find successful professors,
Authors of scads of quantitative

Research articles in peer-reviewed
Journals, still starting their book chapters
With drivel like, Since the dawn of time,

When introducing an overview
Of mythical and historical
Tales of the origin of language.

If the omphalos hypothesis
Could work for anything, it’s language,
And yet languages clearly evolve.

Etymology is the mother
Of evolutionary science
But has the shallowest of Deep Pasts.

Here we are, then, words in sentences.
When were the first sentences pronounced,
Or sung, or gestured, or stamped as dance,

Or symbolized by some flint-knappers
Skilled at the syntax of sequences?
We don’t know. We don’t know. We don’t know.

As You Do You Too

Toward the tip end of the second millenium,
The popular and influential Stephen Jay Gould
Opined that one of the reasons culture could never
Be considered to evolve the way life has evolved
Was because, while life varies by descent, culture jumps
Horizontally and near simultaneously
From person to person, brain to brain. (Steven Pinker,
Also a popular, third-culture science writer,
Added, at about the same time, that ideas emerge
Created by brain because the brain is thinking hard.)
Even at the time, it was already obvious
That bacteria could transfer genes laterally,
In fact, scoop up and incorporate genes from fragments
Of dead bacteria. (Ever gotten an idea

From reading a book by a dead person, like, say, Gould?)
In the couple decades since then, not only has this
Horizontal gene transfer been shown to be common
In bacteria, but cases have been emerging
From field studies and comparative genetics labs
Suggesting genes hitch rides on shared parasites to jump
Horizontally between complex organisms
So that mushrooms may share genes to make the same toxin
Despite acquiring it from neither common descent
Nor convergent evolution, but laterally,
And frogs may pick up genes from snakes with shared pathogens.
So, perhaps culture never evolved in unique ways.
Maybe culture is one typical way life does lives,
Not particularly weird, effective, or unkind.