As the Water Recedes

Boland’s salmon,

Haunted, haunting,

Keeps on leaping

Into the weir

It still doesn’t

Know was never

There. It’s somewhere

In your thinking,

Always waiting

To catch you, that

Nonexistent

Weir you don’t know

Isn’t there. What

Is it for you

You know you can’t

Know never there?

Honestly

We thought of home, of the books we would have to burn with all their lies.

Would you put a stop to a lie?

Would you ban or burn any book

That you knew was a brick of lies?

Would you ask how you knew,

Who were you to be so certain?

You can think of books full of lies

For which many people have died—

To spoken lies one answers back.

Or maybe you burn the liar.

Is it easier to attack

Lies spoken right in front of you

Or lies printed in some format?

Thing is, the books most worth burning

Are most loved as worth preserving.

Of Matters So Light the Wind Can Carry Them

You want to be dust.
It’s a dusty world,
Dusty universe.

Most of what you are
That isn’t dust shakes
Ideas blown like dust,

Settling in your skull
And forming a skin
Of dusty notions

On the connections
Of your synapses.
No, you won’t be dust

When you go, no more
Than you are dust now
Shedding dust yourself.

While Nihilism Gardens and Ends the Drought

Nihilism will not tend the garden

The goodness of your tribes still worries you.

Leftist poets and born-again Christians

Have this much in common, you think, having

Bunked down, in your own mind at least, with both—

They talk an awful lot, and thoughtfully,

About whether they’re doing the best thing,

Forensically displaying their actions

And dissecting themselves with those scalpels,

The acceptable terms of righteousness,

The signifiers of seriousness

About ethical dilemmas within

The context of their own tribal discourse.

Their sincerity’s both real and display,

Each line plowing the tribe’s furrows deeper.

People Won’t Be Like This Forever

The species is changing,
It just doesn’t know how

Many ways or whether
They’ll sum or cancel out.

Every species changes
Into other species

Or none, although some
Change little and get by.

This species is finding
New ways to change itself,

Creating and trying
To follow through on plans,

Although those planned changes
Will accomplish the least,

While the unplanned changes
Introduce the new beasts.