What the Kid Did

Do whatever, helpful, hopeless.
It’s wasted if you’re frustrated.
It’s wasted if you say it is,

Or if other folks say it is
And you buy into what they say.
Otherwise, it’s just what was done,

What you did, whoever you were,
During the brief era you were.
A small child shuffled in the dust

Just out of sight of the village,
Neglecting the goat-herding chores,
Five or six thousand years ago.

Do you remember the child’s life?
Do you think it was wasted time?

This Can’t Be How Our Brains Perceive the World

Transparency lacks transparency.
It suggests you can see everything,
But consider the kitchen window,

A transparent expanse of backyard
Or urban landscape or whatever
The window happens to be facing.

True, windowless kitchens aren’t the same,
But who dices vegetables thinking,
What’s on the other side of the wall?

There are those watches with crystal backs
So you can peer at the working gears,
And some AI scientists insist

It would be better to be able
To see how those algorithms do
The voodoo they train themselves to do,

But the gears themselves aren’t transparent
And the black box of the mind at work,
Made transparent, would only reveal

Non-transparent internal functions,
As the kitchen window only shows
The inscrutably solid outside.

Most of Dying’s Healthy Living

There are something like
Sixty-three million
Sensible moments,

Half-seconds roughly,
To experience
In every orbit

The iron-cored Earth
Turns around its star.
Sixty-three million.

Even if you lived
Deeply in each one,
What animal mind

Could memorize those,
Even for one year,
Never mind sixty,

Seventy, eighty,
Whatever you live?
Come on, admit it,

You have to have been
Asleep or absent,
Deceased in some sense,

For much of your life,
And most of your life
That you have sensed left

Long before you ceased
To sense more moments,
Like this moment now

Which you’ll probably
Miss or be dead to
Before the year’s done.

Lost Time Is Where You Find It

Cloudless at dawn, birdsong,
And the light canyon winds
Let you know already

The more enterprising
Campers, tourists, hikers,
Will be hitting the trails.

All the hotels are full
In your narrow town
And more are being built,

And the technologies
Harvesting memories
Nest in every pocket.

You live here, wondering
At the resources spent
By visitors, how views

That separate people
Into contesting sides
Are set aside for views

Of the towering cliffs,
The bighorn sheep and deer,
The pictures editing

Fellow travelers in,
All other tourists out.
We will pretend we aren’t

At odds with each other.
We will pretend others
Aren’t here all around us.

We’ll return with pictures
Of bison and sunsets
And green canyon trailheads.

You sit in your rocker,
Content with your own aches,
Imagining the plans

Of the people pouring
Through the canyon today,
Cloudless, getting warmer,

Birds quieter, the world
That made this moment far
And then farther away.