Stereophonic

Can’t stay asleep.
Can’t stay awake.
Name the wise risk
The clever takes.

The clever one!
Who stays asleep,
Who stays awake,
Risks being wise.

The People in the Dark

Once the black paintings
Have been destroyed, and
The puppets appear
To act alone, ghosts
Can skim through the dark

Like whales filtering
The ocean for food,
Like an audience
Absorbed in the tale
Across the fourth wall,

Gathering stories
They can use later--
Then you can attend
To the puppets'
Travels and travails.

Ok, Here We Are

You spent a day as a guest
Of someone you’ll never meet
With a mansion near the coast.
Or, you’re pretty sure you did.
You could have been daydreaming.

The lawn was so extensive,
It felt like a city park—
You sat where you could
Follow the shade easily
Around an enormous trunk,

Spiral shell to trace the day.
Someone owns this, you whispered
To yourself while noticing
How skillfully the trees embraced
The variations in the light.

What is ownership, exactly? you asked
Yourself for the thousandth time.
You feel you’ve never felt it,
The sense that someone or something
Really, wholly belonged to you.

Privilege and provision, sure,
Those you can sense as plenteous,
Abundant piles of supplies.
Consumption you comprehend
In your bones, your hungry bones,

But ownership? Once you stood
Beside a scuffed compact car,
Holding a slip of paper
Indicating ownership.
What did you feel? Just okay.

On Going Away

The body doesn’t like the day,
Which arrived dark, in too much pain.
Maybe there’s something you can take,

Or maybe today’s that day reached
When the pain stops going away.
Maybe there’s nothing you can take.

You sit, quietly as you can,
Trying not to move any way
That offends the tumor and friends

Who are busy at their buffet—
The body’s bones, organs, and veins—
Try not to annoy them today,

Let them eat your remains today.
Remember, now, who goes away.

Ehh?

Whenever you startle awake
From dozing in the wheelchair, you

Twist to look over your right side
For the contents and characters

You’d just now been dreaming about,
As if you expected them there,

All the apparatus of dreams,
Never in front or to the left—

Always over your right shoulder.
You’re not awake until the world

Redistributes itself smoothly,
And the empty corners have gone

Back wherever emptiness goes,
One side world, other glowing void.

Inner Alien Nation

One writer writes, It’s foolish

To think you’re anything

But alone, while another

Writes, You are never alone.

Ha. You’re never of one mind.

One skull, sure. Too many minds,

A world of mind, which you hold

As much as one hotel room

In a megalopolis

Holds human population

Of the whole world passing through,

But only that slim fragment

Of inn that for the night is

Whole. When it comes to the mind,

Whitman called it first—the skull

Is small, but it does in fact

Contain multitudes, and they

Do contradict each other.

Not only are you alone,

It’s foolish to think you’re not—

Or are—or aren’t both at once.

Therefore, the bits of mind fight

In globes of bone, and all this

Gets called something like a poem.