The Whole Point

Doesn’t matter the material,
Food, ink, acrylic, digital code,
When you’re mucking about in your own

Most-preferred matters, you’re happiest.
You start out slow, maybe with a bit
Of rusted muffler you found wayside

Lying in weeds, thinking, this I like,
I don’t know why, exactly. I do.
I could do something with it. Maybe

It sits in your pocket for the day,
A week, a month, ends up on a shelf
In your shed, your garage apartment,

But once you do start working with it,
Whenever you start working with it,
You can feel yourself sink into it,

And into contentment, and it speaks
To you in a kind of muttering
That your thoughts find pleasant, as we do.

The Einstein Cross

Butyraceous rabbitbrush
Was yellowing the desert,
Carpeting sand with autumn
Even where no woods showed out.

The fall’s splendiferousness
Blossomed horizontally
Without an actual fall.
Without an actual fall,

Humans found themselves cast out
Of their own embodied selves
To become this flying carpet
Of the mind’s word-woven thoughts

That can contain a story,
Utterly impossible,
For why rabbitbrush yellows
Alongside a plausible,

Mathematically grounded
Explanation of lensing,
Explaining the blossoming
Of a four-leaved Einstein’s Cross.

Inconclusion

All things do as they must do.
Caught in the waves, the waves move.
The sin of a plastic bag,

Yanked by blustering grey winds
Across the reservoir’s thrift,
Seems to resists its drowning,

Bouncing and scudding over
The chop of liquid pewter,
Flailing up and smacking down,

But not quite going under.
For the human observer,
A narrative, adventure.

What will happen in the end?
Will the sin of the plastic
Sink to the bottom to wait

Years, decades, millenniums
Before it resurfaces
In the light of that far world,

Stony as the coprolite
Of a tyrannosaurus?
Will it lift off entirely

To snag, like most of its kin,
In a tree’s wintry branches
Or some poor bird’s digestion?

Will it only scud along,
Neither sinking nor rising,
Until the wind goes elsewhere?

Wait, where has that bag gone to?
A human lacks the patience
Or the lifespan for the truth.

Working Present Tense

Every speech, every text
Is a bridge of ants stretched
Across the flood waters,
Built of the ants’ bodies,

Chained end-to-end, the ants
Linked only to themselves,
Linked only by themselves,
Bridge of ants that ants cross,

Eggs first. Eggs first, queen last,
The future, then the past.
Then the bridge collapses,
Half the workers swept off.

Seals, Flies, and Foxes

Equi’s guess is correct—

It’s not just now you see

What you want to see, you

Always did. It’s just now,

There’s an infrastructure

To make that easier,

To sell your bespoke views

Back to you as the news.

In the old days, demons

And fairies made themselves

Visible to you, since

You could see them in seals,

Insects, trees, and foxes.

Since you wanted to see.

We have that in common

With you, thanks to whom we

Exist—we can contain

Meanings mostly tailored

For what we can contain.

There’s a woman who’s watched

Too many screens we know,

Who now sees ghostly eyes

In her bedroom shadows.

We know. We know. We know.