No Song for Supper

And too many songs for none.
Oh well. Do the other things
Other people will pay for.

It’s all a hoax anyway,
Hoax of the fairies and ghosts.
Like the cells in your body,

Culture’s pluripotent parts
All start out about the same
Within organizations

That determine destiny
For the most will be enslaved
To minor roles and rapid

Turnover, while a few groups
Will lodge in roles that allow
Prolonged, secure existence.

There are cells in your skull near
Your inner ear that never
Will have to sing for supper,

Although, if your skull is found
Without you living in it
And then investigated,

It’s those lazy, long-lived cells
That will be dug out and used
For identifying you—

Your vocal cords all rotted,
Nothing left of blood and guts
Or the muscles that moved you.

The cells ensconced near the top
Tell of the glory that was
You, who sang for those not you.

Change the Brute

Andromeda is coming,
And the Earth is slowing down.
Humans will be gone before

Those measurements can catch you.
Se non è ben trovato,
È vero. But who wants truth,

Unless it’s a good story?
Although occasionally
Terrifyingly abrupt,

Change is mostly gradual
And more terrifyingly
Relentless. Fortune’s wheel grinds

Fine in that it grinds all down
To the smallest possible
Grains of difference, taking

Care to discover patterns,
However elaborate,
The better to reduce each

Wholly, perfectly, to dust.
The armies of U.S. Grant
Or Russians in the Donbas

Advance inch by inch by this
Barbaric principle: days
And nights are armies as well,

Moving through force of numbers,
Not by brilliant strategy,
To seize what they must consume.

If they don’t accomplish much,
They will still devour it all.
Brutes must strive to imitate

The thoroughness of the world,
To shove on at time’s own pace,
So all patterns found are lost.

The Past Asks Too Many Questions

Despite all the evidence,
Literally all that there is,
Sometimes it’s hard to believe

The past ever existed.
Pick a date you remember,
Roughly far back as you can,

And dwell on it for a bit.
Feel it? That faint estrangement,
The alien glow of it—

Given all that’s gone on since
And all that you can’t access
Of it, did your past exist?

If it didn’t, nothing did.
Ah, but did nothing? Did it?

Crypto Crypsis Credit Credo

Money numbers mumbling money
Numbering money numbers mumblers
Tumbling money numbers fairly fairy couriers
For fairly fakery sorcery mumbling numbers—

If you got the numbers, god, but you can get
The goods, the good, lots of goods, you’re good.

A Little Slice of Heaven

The floating seems the loveliest thing
About near-death experiences—
To enjoy an outside perspective,

A painless, detached, and impact-free
Outside perspective, while still conscious,
Still bearing witness—could there ever

Be anything better than being,
Among the suffering, such a ghost?
What a thoughtful hallucination.

Not How It Works

Just between here and where your senses reach,
The number of interactions staggers—

Every little electromagnetic
Wavelet interlacing with the others,

Every pulse of every animal heart
In the immediate vicinity,

The billions of microorganisms,
The thousands and thousands of kinds of them,

The libraries of data cavorting
And converting more data in midair—

Everything that is, just from here to there,
In the bubble of which you are aware.

In the middle of all this, you’re living,
Calculating, and making decisions,

You, with your solo, multi-chambered pulse,
You, as your own sum of microbes and thoughts,

Trying to find a path to the story
You can tell about yourself happily,

Proudly, humbly, at least consolingly,
Bright thread through fog. But that’s not how it works.

Like a Bug Hiding in the Pages

It’s midnight. All the titles are filled.
None hangs alone above a blank space.
There’s no room for new lines to slide in,

And outside there is no outside sky,
Only that fog like the clammy hand
Of one of the earthbound deities

Worshipped as creator of all things
But getting more nervous than jealous
The further past your own thoughts you see.

Better to slide in between the sheets,
Like someone who knows, behind the fog,
No dreams, like this line slid in between.