Bury Them Somewhere

Many’s the time folks have quoted Old Frost—

The utmost of ambition is to lodge

A few poems where they will be hard to get

Rid of . . . a line itself now as well lodged,

Or nearly, as his most reprinted poems.

One could point out that it’s merely phrases,

Not whole poems, that get stuck in people’s brains,

But that’s as it may be or should not be.

For truly immortal poems, we suggest

Aiming over humans altogether.

It’s a pity the gods do not exist

But as terms. They’d make the best audience.

Short of deities, maybe aliens.

Get your poems on the next Voyager or

The Innards Are Discouraging

When people give people advice
On how to stay healthy, they say,
Eat well, exercise, be happy.

Eating well changes day-to-day.
Exercise is a mountaineer
On a ridge between two canyons,

Too Little To Do Any Good
And Pathologically Too Much.
You’ll live a little longer,

Maybe be a bit happier,
If you keep your cleats on that ridge.
And speaking of being happy,

Our advice there is, Jut Be It.
Stay Positive. Reject Grimness.
Don’t Worry. These are quotations

From management professionals
And equivalent to saying,
The key to immortality—

Don’t die. Advice is like humor
Is like frogs, as E.B. White wrote.
(Look it up. Wisdom loves Bartlett’s.)

Although, unlike frogs and humor,
Dissected advice never dies,
It just grows more discouraging.

Regular Swimming and Lots of Sleep

Such a fascination for finding activities
Statistically likely to extend quality life
You have, Grandma. In this world,

Everything’s similar to some other things,
Which is why memory works at all,
And what it works for is more predictions.

Illuminatory hallucinations, predictions,
Based on imagination, based on
Memories, themselves hallucinations

Of sorts from crushed experiences. Absent
Sensory checks, memories shapeshift
Into those changelings known as dreams.

You might notice, when you sleep less,
You dream more, and more vividly—
Phosphorescent memories surfacing

To mate and feed in the black waves,
Growing more concentrated and turbulent
As your nights shorten. Nothing like sleep.

The Phantom Galaxy

Can you get your mind around
Near one-hundred billion stars
Thirty-two million light years

Away from where these phrases
Have bumped into you, on Earth,
We’ll presume? Of course you can’t.

What’s the good of knowing facts
One can never comprehend?
They make beautiful pictures.

The Phantom Galaxy’s there,
In all its spiral glory,
First eyeballed through telescopes,

Pixelated by Hubble.
Maybe it is instructive
Just to admit the vastness,

Admit incomprehension.
Perspective, yes. Perspective
Puts the world in perspective.

Does it? On a cloudy day
In the desert, checking chores
To be completed by noon?

Everything’s Yoked by Faint Likenesses Together

Imagine how you’d dread the Perseids
If every shooting star inflamed some pain,
If every year you knew those days would come
When random needles would shoot clear through you.

We say this because it’s strange how likeness
Can illuminate, can make seeming sense
While being utterly irrelevant.
Every orbit, the bead of our whole world
Swings through the bits of dust sprayed by a comet
Shedding particles in the solar wind.
For a number of days those dust specks burn.
Humans celebrate them on moonless nights,
But of course they burn through in daylight, too.

If the planet were like some of its lives
It could learn to dread needle intervals.
But that comparison doesn’t make sense.