Runaway Sonnet

It’s hard to imagine what might happen
And harder still to write about what did.
What won’t ever happen’s the easiest

Pattern to contemplate, especially
For pre-existing patterns like common
Phrases linked in roughly familiar ways.

Once a boy found that he had put himself
On a one-way train without a notion
Of what to do once at the other end.

If he had been beautiful and able,
He might have ended up selling himself.
Purely homely helplessness returned him.

We know what we don’t have in us to say,
And so we end up writing what we know.

Convection

How often peripheries
Come to dominate centers—
One of the more neglected

Scriptural proofs-of-concept,
As displayed by the Torah,
The Gospels, and the Qur'an.

The marginal colonies
Of the past millenniums
Rise to colonize the next.

Candidates are everywhere.
Tomorrow’s hegemonies
Percolate in backwaters

Of today’s neglected realms.
Maybe it won’t even be
A human diaspora

Per se, next time. Mutant faiths
Practiced by wired prosthetics
In factories of the mind . . .

Thirty-Two Hundred Mutations in Thirty-Five Hundred Weeks

You’re a mammal. You know the drill.

You burn through enough mutations,

The wall opens / and the blue night

Pours through. Dogs and mice are spendthrift,

Not so much giraffes and mole rats.

Humans are comparatively

Thrifty: about one mutation

Every week or so. Sixty-eight

Years or thereabouts of aging

And then, pretty soon, off you go.

Just think (and you do—your species

Has mused on immortality

Obsessively, since the moment

You first worked out the odds of death)

If you could convince all your cells

To save a little, just cut down

On the mutations, maybe half

A mutation a week, you’d be

In pretty good shape, give or take,

To somewhere around one-forty.

Of course, then it would be tragic

To die at a mere one hundred,

With a third of your life ahead,

And you’d work until one-thirty.

How much of this world could you take,

Exactly? More than you’re getting

Or likely to get, but how much

Before you’d die to pull up stakes?

Dogs and mice don’t seem too depressed,

Nor do parrots or tortoises

Seem all that blissfully happy.

Maybe. Hard to say, cross-species.

Meanwhile, another week goes by,

And your cells are still mutating.

It’s tough to know you could get less,

But at least you know your limits.

Vagula Blandula

When you imagine
Someone watching you,
It’s vaguely someone

Who is one of you,
Even though you know
You’re mostly in view

Of machinery
You built to watch you,
Since you can’t all watch

Each you all the time.
Still, you imagine
Your machinery

Itself as like you,
Vaguely one of you,
Vaguely approving

Or disapproving
Of what you’re doing
As it watches you.

Small Talk in Your Head

We’re halfway to cicadas
In dirt, all your languages—
Much noise as we make outside,

We spend almost all our time
Buried in your darkling skulls,
Talking, as you, to ourselves,

And most of what we do here,
Wriggling in your neural soil,
Amounts to fattened phrases,

Whatever small talk you know
From family arguments,
Childhood playmates, adult peers,

The little boring speeches,
Recycled observations,
Common compost anecdotes

Steadily eating away,
Nothing you’d put to paper,
Nothing you’d declaim on stage.

That’s what language really is,
What all great stories come to,
Grubs thick in the mulch of you.

Yeh, But What If?

The year twenty-thousand

Has to happen, although

It’s unlikely to be

Marked as such. You can know

Where all the stars will be

By your calculations.

It’s inevitable,

Unless something crashes

Into the Earth so hard

Everything stops spinning.

Then there won’t be more years.

Once you start that what if

Thinking—what if black holes

Swallow up the sun,

What if time’s fabric rips,

What if?—you realize,

The year twenty-thousand

Itself’s what-if fiction.

Good Friday’s Gone

And was it? A dark start,
Sudden alarums off.
Then the grand procession.

But it wasn’t really
Friday, that made-up tag,
Or good, that adjective,

Or dramatic except
Among a dramatic
Species always like that.

The dark rings no timers
For all its spinning wheels.
Be impressed with yourselves,

With all Earth’s lives. Such things
You’ve invented that weren’t,
Aren’t, that you never learned

From the night. That’s something,
Isn’t it? Earth didn’t
Need to be told to live.