One Route

Quiet night in the ER.
Shhh, says the receptionist.
Don’t say quiet. You’ll jinx it.

We have a room for you now,
But one always has to choose
A route. Look up from your book

And shuffle behind your guide.
Vitals, visit from the doc,
Initial strategy talk,

Meet the team, access the port,
Chat about priors and pain.
Dilaudid. Next up, the scan.

Midnight rolls around, gurney
Parading the quiet route.

The Crane Dance

The inertial mass of two ideas
Using the same density of code
For the same-sized information,

The same amount of information,
But not just the same information,
Will prove pretty minimal. They’re text,

After all. How heavy is a thread
Of ink or binary ones and nulls?
If Galileo dropped two feathers

On the moon, not only would the moon
Treat them the same, but in airlessness,
Collisions of feather with feather

Would affect both feathers equally.
Yet the impact of information
Coded there could affect behavior

In strikingly unalike manners—
In retrospect, information
From one idea could be the winner.

This is not a thought experiment.
It has no rigor and it offers
Nothing like a testable insight.

It’s a jumble of half-digested
Middle-school physics lined in the guise
Of a literary lyric poem.

The two ideas hidden here are birds
Caught in a ritual courtship dance.
Did you spot the exchange of feathers?

Wrong Spacetime

What is lost,
Anymore?
Confusion,

Bemusement—
Some of it
Hasn’t changed.

You can know
Where you are—
In danger.

Request Slip

Give us the serenity
To accept what can’t be changed,

The courage to change what can,
And the wisdom to tell them

Apart. Give us the wisdom,
First, though, come to think of it,

You know, before we show off
Our incredible courage,

And, then, can we get courage
And serenity at once

Or, actually, maybe pass
On courage, unless wisdom

Identifies a fair bit
Of things our courage can change,

Since otherwise it will be
Just frustrating. Come to think

Again, do we really want
To change everything we can?

And is courage what we need
To get a change accomplished?

Maybe give us the wisdom
To know the right thing to change

And the right way to change it,
And then courage, as needed.

Secretly, we’d be happy
Well-drugged with serenity.

If we can only have one,
Please, grant us serenity.

None

What’s more tempting than counting?
What if there’s a better math?

The math you know is Satan,
Lucifer, too beautiful,

Tailored to a morning star.
The math you don’t know could be

God! All along your problem
Wasn’t, as you thought, the Name.

The problem was the Number.
You’ve learned as much as you can

From all this embroidery,
And it’s gorgeous, and it fits.

One, if there were, wouldn’t fit.
One would, above all, exist.

Most of the Story Stays Inside

People surviving,
That’s the main story—

People surviving
What other people

Do to kill them or
Force them to submit,

People surviving
Forces of nature,

Hunger of living
And crush of physics,

People surviving
To ensure children

Will grow up to be
People surviving.

That’s the main story,
While people dying

To try to survive
Remain counterpoint.

It’s a windy day
And vague, pines tossing

Outside the buildings
With bodies inside,

Bodies of people
Watching screens, talking,

Fixing meals, pulsing
With the main story.

Interesting

Everything else is just giving us
Something to talk about. The writer
Isn’t wrong. There’s a mystery there.

All that matters most in a story
Will involve people interacting
In well-known human animal ways—

Partnering, mating, socializing,
Kin and non-kin cooperation,
All that can go wrong or well with those.

Everything else is just giving us
Something to talk about. In that case,
Why do stories need everything else?

Aren’t people enough to talk about?
Carve everything in any fiction
That isn’t explicitly human

(Mating, friendship, betrayal, so forth)
Away from all of the characters.
What’s left isn’t quite textbook lecture,

Although it may be dense with lessons,
Morals, politics, information.
It won’t work like freestanding essays,

But it will suggest a distraction
From humans is needed to create
Stories humanly interesting.

Something Unnameable

What are you waiting for is a question
Suggesting you shouldn’t bother to wait.
Go ahead. Do it already. Carpe

Diem. The poor day. Mere moment, even.
Whatever time is, grab it by the throat!
But you’d rather not. You prefer waiting.

Something unnameable is on its way.
One life can take what feels like forever,
But when you slide past the lip of the falls,

There will be plenty of people afloat
Behind you who started before you did.
Until then, you’re a leaf on the current.

Look up. That sky’s not going anywhere.
The day. What made you think you could seize it?