Evening Drawing

Art should work like lotteries—
Unbiased exploitation
Of the desperate desire

To find some unbiased way
Where it’s possible to win,
At least possible to win.

At the end of every poem,
Every composition, in
The corner of all paintings,

There should be a pause, a blank,
A tiny hesitation
That lets you know the artist

Is about to be chosen
At random. Then someone’s name
Is called and the gap is filled.

Hold your breath. We’re almost done.
You could be the winning one.
No? Not yet? Yes? Again, nope.

Yes Yes

No one runs out
Of thoughts or words,
If they have them.

They just become
Ashamed to be
Habitual

Reusing them.

Then they go blank,

Or the ice breaks
And they go back
To pouring out

The words and thoughts
They had before.
Here, have some more.

Cross the Last One

Defining tasks
Is happiness
In drips and drabs.
Each lists insists

Once it’s finished
There are no more
Tasks. You’re all done,
Nothing is left

To do. Bliss. Yes,
For a minute.
The world, of course,
Is not a list,

Is not defined,
Is never done.
Still nothing lures
You on and on.

Agnostic in an Empty Church

The man in the back pew
Gasps a prayer for one last
Gasp lowering local

Entropy, just one low
Pressure to vacuum up
His nearby entropy.

He knows that he can’t last.
He knows the ways thing break
Contain many more states

More disordered. He knows.
He also knows that prayer
Knows no efficacy

Beyond coincidence.
But coincidences
Exist. He prays for this.

You Waiter

The server vanishes
Into the back, order

Up! How quickly can you
Think of something unknown

To create while you wait?
Everything is humming

With commerce and the end
Of manufactured things

All around you. You are
A consumer, ready

To starve at last when this
Collapses. Wait for it.

Caprine

The bearded ones, the ugly bison,
The stinky oxen, puffed up, shaggy
And huge headed to look more massive,

In defensive formation, circling
Their rumps, their bearded, horned heads facing
Out toward the desperate wolf packs—

Never common as megafauna,
Not even in Pleistocene heydays
Of cave bears, mammoths, sabre-toothed cats,

Hanging on although all those have gone—
Hoofed tussocks, grim mounds, the arctic goats,
Stubborn as old-fashioned poets, snort.

Six or Seven Railway Cars of Gravel

Get knocked out of an asteroid
Of a few million tons of rock
By a guided killer satellite.

Gravity, weak as it can be
Among the insignificant
Of mass, was nonetheless enough

To have pulled those stones together
In a loose, globular droplet
Of rock and ice tumbling through space.

Then a team of scientists aimed
And shot a chunk out of its flank
To prove they could protect the Earth

From the next asteroid to dare
To redirect evolution.
Given the scientists evolved

From survivors of the last blow,
This seems like poetic justice.
Gravel, though. Debris. Space rubble.

Midnight skies may look velvety
Between their sparkling lights, but that
Dark conceals a lot of random

Dust and schmutz, the wayside gravel
Of barely, loosely assembled
Similar shapes changing at night.