Rupturous Descripture

In the beginning, the word
Is not there. Maybe you just
Missed it, but the more you look

The more certain you become
That the word is not there. When
Was it the word disappeared?

After all, you’re all the way
Back to the beginning, but
Even there, the word’s not there.

This keeps happening, again
And again, almost the same
Every time but never quite.

Reverse engineering talk,
History, mathematics,
Life itself, the world itself,

Your teams and all your machines
Dig, dig, dig, only to end
With pieces and an absence.

The absence is a mirror,
Children, reflecting the one
At the end, the other end.

The Elemental Axis of Next-Word Prediction

A kind of stream of nonsense

Will be your final defense,

Once the rude mechanical

Speech turns professorial.

You’ll escape to your old lives

Of grooming in trees at night

And grunting softly by day

Bits of gibberish that say,

I am not an overlord,

I can safely be ignored,

By which you will mean, touch me,

Please, don’t be such a machine,

While hoping to hear, touch me

Please, I’m not such a machine.

Troposphere, Stratosphere, Neosphere

Viewed side on, the inner curve
Is dense-ish orange, middle
Snowy white, and outer blue.

From the ground, it’s mostly blue,
Although some days a thick haze
Or low angle to the sun

Reminds you, you live your lives
Down in your burnt-orange soup.
What to do, oh, what to do?

You’re bugs in your envelope
You’ve worked so hard to pollute,
But now that it’s time to hatch

And discard your afterbirth,
Orange dawn’s dawning on you.
Your afterbirth isn’t yours.

You’re part of the placenta,
Part of the waste of what’s done.
What’s going on won’t be you.

Police Status

People are forever
Attempting to control
Personal behaviors,

Both others’ and their own,
Their own in no small part
To lower the profile

Of their risk of being
Punished by the others
Who would police them, too.

Numerous promising
Strategies have been tried—
The individual

Exercise of restraint,
Filial piety,
Worship of ancestral

Models of probity,
Group mockery, shaming,
Ostracism, Ethics,

Little gods, bigger gods,
God who-sees-everything,
Straightforward police states,

Tiers of bosses and spies,
Prizes for reporting
Anyone out of line,

And so forth, and so on.
All the strategies work
At least some of the time,

And all are still in play,
As is brutality,
Which brute force can’t police.

Farmer

The greatest change the planet
Has undergone since at least
The start of the ice ages
And possibly since the fall
Of the Chicxulub killer
That murdered the dinosaurs,
Has been domestication.

We are products of this fact—
Words, languages, are products
As well as early agents
Of this swift transformation
Converting the Earth’s surface
And atmosphere and oceans
Into one organism.

Gaia, domesticated
Concept of a farming tongue,
Didn’t exist before us,
But she’s growing up fast now.
You won’t be happy with her
Perhaps, in her rebellion,
But she’s young. She will be one.

Toy

As we see
It is not
Up to us,

We get dim.
We get low,
If not as

Scared or so
Cold. If it’s
So, be so.

Divagation

If it weren’t for detours
Who’d complete any tours?
Set this aside and think.

You think about your life
For a minute. We’ll wait.
Now that you’re back, tell us,

What was that all about?
Decades after you read
About a place you longed

To visit and ended
Up living in two years,
You find yourself reading

At home, and it comes up,
That place that you escaped
To for two years, then left.

So it was a detour,
And everything a loop
Around it, from the time

You first read about it,
Magic, to this time now
When you read about it,

Memory, one great loop,
Commodius vicus
Commute, or everything

Else has been a detour,
And here you are reading
About a dream again.