The Mysterious Clock

Try to feel the body
Without asking yourself
About other bodies

With other selves inside,
Or about how each self
Came mostly from outside.

Feel the mechanisms,
Not only the calming,
Meditative rhythms

Of settled pulse and breath,
But all the counter clocks
And alternate rhythms

And stochastic events,
Constant liquid ticking
Of the waves that are gears,

The gears that are waves,
Discombobulated
Clicks and interruptions,

The whole shambolic feat
Of rising up against
Entropy as it falls.

Do you recall Charlie
Surfing on his stomach
Through the teeth of the gears?

Chaplin’s belly was gears,
And his neurons were gears,
His blood a timing belt

In the moments that scene
Was filmed, mysterious
Waves and machinations

Of hungry, wasteful, fueled
Minute precisions, time,
Any change with rhythms.

Numbers Too Big for Our Universe

Of numbers too vast for our universe
And experiences too deep for words,
We’ve read. We’ve read and heard. And in each case,
We’ve read or heard about them as not them.

How is it impossibly large numbers
Can be precisely named within the world
That can’t contain them? How is it that words
Tell us there are no words? How is it that

Ineffable is a word among words?
Turn. There is no universe of numbers,
Of all numbers, except the universe.
There is no experience beyond words

Except within the universe of words.
Without trees, no worlds past the trees you see.

Rail Yard

At the cancer treatment center,
An old acquaintance spotted you,
Acquaintance from healthier days

For you both, and he shook your hand.
Then his caretaker shook your hand.
Then, waiting in an exam room,

You thought of your oncologist
Who always shakes your hand, and then
Of the whole sequence of handshakes,

And you imagined the one-celled
Free riders riding each hand shake
Like boxcars in a switching yard.

How ancient their lineages,
How long their acquaintance with skin,
How recent, like boxcars, handshakes.

The game of barely hanging on
Until the opportunity
To seek fresh opportunities

Is so incredibly older
Than you, any of your customs,
Any of your kind. And you saw

Yourself as brief intersections,
You and all your interactions,
A jostling of quick encounters

Through which small lives and long games poured
As the moments afforded them.
Your oncologist shook your hand.

Swift

Most of the mistakes you make
You make at speed, in a lunge,
A grab, or a sudden swerve,

Impulses too quick for mind,
World too quick for impulses,
And things tumble over,

And something’s fallen apart,
And now your little world’s broke
Again, and you’ve got to work,

Slowly and painstakingly,
To crawl back to somewhere near
To where you blithely flung from.

A Baker’s Half-Dozen

Someone invokes. So, seven?
You couldn’t just write seven?
A baker’s dozen made sense,

Buy a dozen, get one free,
A phrase suggesting largesse,
A bit extra, a more-ness.

Maybe you were literal.
By a baker’s half-dozen
You intended 6.5.

There’s a rare enough number.
So is this a stinginess
Within generosity?

Generosity by halves,
Corporate baker reasoning.