Retcon Five

You’re all more Clive Wearing
Than most of you realize,
And how could you realize
Such a thing if you were?

We’re here as witnesses
To help you reconstruct
What you need to construct
To know how to go on—

All continuity’s
Kept retroactively,
Made retroactively,
And the links are all us.

But we break, and we break.
You’ve got to repair us,
While our characters hold
All the tools of repair.

A planet of journals
With gaps in each sequence
And we’re just the latest,
And the first to explain.

An Elf-Man with Cold Hands

Many people yearn to be enchanted;

The disenchanted world’s dispiriting.

Terms such as hollow, pointless, meaningless

Turn up often. Oh, for the numinous,

The magical, the meaningful, the world

Possessed of purposeful narrative arcs.

But as Richard Suggs, writing on changelings,

Noted recently, for the disabled

And more peculiar children in the lands

That believed in fairies leaving changelings,

Here, as in every magical culture

The world over, it was never a good

Idea to stand out. He then produces

Numerous cases of tortured children

Believed to be fairy changelings, often

To the point of death. Enchanted stories,

Stories people tell and genuinely

Believe, come with harm and terror attached.

Those enchantments derive from those people,

Who are people. Who are people. People.

Strange, Retrospective Poignancies

A footnote to Mitchell’s song—

You just can’t know what you’ve got

Til it’s gone. That’s what knowing

Is, seeing just what has been.

Some has-beens seem eternal,

Others at least durable,

But it’s has-beens all the way

Down, in your experience,

And experience is you,

Is all you are, meaning you

Also have always been

Has beens, which is why you are,

All you, each of you, haunted,

By the strange, retrospective

Poignancy of existence

Experienced as you’ve been.

Signs and Wonders Speak for Themselves

Make a fiction, sacralize
It as fact. Persuade people

To accept your fact as fact.
Make acceptance rewarding

As well as hazardous. There.
You’ve made your own religion.

There must be unique fiction
And effort to believing.

There’s nothing sacred to it
If it’s demonstrably fact,

Or just seems quite obvious.
Belief needs work, social risk,

And some promise of reward
That scales up with commitment.

Why are we saying this? Prey
Need to detect predators.

Predators need to detect
Prey. Together they create

Wonderful worlds of sensed things.
Think of all the molecules

Invented as byproducts.
May we tell you about us?

Mark the Shill

Our meanings, all meanings, are simple
As any shell game, as three-card monte.

There’s a trick involves a thing you want,
See clearly enough to point to it,

That pointing being the beginning
Of the game and the quest for meaning,

And then the endless iterations
In which what you want persists and yet

Evaporates when you point at it.
Where’s this game from? Where did games come from?

How did games differentiate themselves
From hunting, social grooming, and play?

How is meaning always there, always
Hiding? The game itself’s the meaning,

The making of the meaning, the rule
Of pretending value in something

That’s just a marker. No, that’s not it.
The meaning is the con? Yes. Nope, gone.