Until We Are Pure Spirit at the End

Simeon ben Azzai
Is said to have commented
Man would be even better,

More glorious than the beasts
Than man already was, if
Only he could shit perfume

Or balsam instead of turds.
Oh, culture, always trying
To free yourself from your beast.

One imagines perfumed men
All dying of diseases
Spread by their pretty feces,

Too well-cultured to avoid.
Well, that was nineteen-hundred
Rings around the sun ago.

Simeon ben Azzai
Is a footnote in a book
On embodiments of God.

Nowadays, culture’s dreaming
Of escaping through AI.
Oh, man, your perfumed thoughts then!

You Know That Poem

Fair is the core of rage,
The first flare that jumps out
From you when you sense wrong

Done to you, to someone
You care for, to someone
Innocent. It’s not fair!

Injustice was never
Measured in suffering
But in its unfairness.

Once you sense unfairness,
Once you feel that sharp flame
Jump in you, you don’t want

To hear another word
About how everyone
Hurts and suffers sometimes.

Good puppet-masters know
Which strings to pull for love,
Which tilt will posture trust.

Fair is the string for rage.
Yank hard. Puppets clatter.
Poor puppets. It’s not fair

That fairness is a string
That pulls all the way through
Puppet-masters as well,

Attaching somewhere
In some unseen black hole
In gravity’s own hell.

Labels for Leviathan

Diagnosis is a searching
Form of pattern recognition—

All naming’s searching for patterns
To arrange and predict the world,

Not such an amazing longing
In humans, who are, after all,

Evolved-to-thrive mechanisms.
What’s more amazing’s your dismay

At the sloppy fit of some names,
Woolliness of diagnosis.

Butterfly nets have holes in them,
And, however much they help you

Snag fluttering scraps of your world,
They’re no good for catching monsters,

And they’re no good to butterflies.
You should expect some names to rip

And those that work to do damage.
You meant them to do your damage.

Golden Asses

The athletes and fighters you remember.
Everyday workers you mostly forget.

Seven thousand years ago in Kenya,
The first donkeys were domesticated.

Think of the world, then. Think of that lost world.
Human muscle, human transportation—

Horses having not yet swept in from steppes,
Horses not yet pulling war chariots,

None of the gods you hymn yet invented,
None of your writing systems for hymns.

Donkeys, domesticated, went to work
As your original beasts of burden,

And how much of what you’ve done—from wells,
From mills, from breweries, from mines—was done

By dint of donkeys? Even your stories,
High literature and fairytales,

Hollywood westerns, fables, comedies,
And countless barnyard stories for children

Needed donkeys for their comic relief.
But those handsome horses you lionized.

The Last Is Only

There aren’t others.
It isn’t last.
It won’t be last.
It is itself,

Its only self,
Its lonesome self.
You’ve been living
It as you’ve been

Living—this last
Day of your life,
Forever stuck
Thinking there’s more,

There were others.
What a huge day
You’ve lived my dear,
What a vast day.

Just What Has Happened Here

Maybe don’t ask what will happen.
Maybe ask what will have happened,
Given it always has happened,

Had to have already happened,
For it to have happened at all.
You don’t always know what’s happened,

But you never know what will have.
Yes, yes, you’re good at prediction,
Or much better than you had been—

That’s one of those things that’s happened.
Perfect certainty, however,
Hasn’t happened, not so you’d know.

Come to think of it, maybe don’t
Ask what will have happened, either.

Humming Precariously

The machine makes noises.
It’s working. The power
Is on. The nearby systems

Are working. The global
Systems have not collapsed.
Everyone likes to think

About the collapse. At
What hour will it happen? At
Least it feels like that. At

Some point the machine stops.
It’s just pausing. It’s not
Broken. Ask the neighbors.

You don’t know what to do.
You would like to sit still
And not think of people.