Nothing Does a Lot of Work in Verse

It’s taken humanity

A while to persuade itself

Dead folks don’t come back to life

With some regularity.

You still need some persuading.

You accept death is certain,

But you’re still having trouble

With permanent. The go-to

Suggests it’s to do with death,

Particularly, mortal

Salience, ego’s terror

Of awareness of nothing—

The impossibility

Of knowing what nonbeing

Would be like motivates this.

We’re not so sure. Permanence

Is a problem fantasy

For you in more realms than death.

You want nothing permanent

Unless you say it should be,

And you’re obsessed with changing,

At least in your heads, the way

Change goes. You want it reversed.

You believe in eternal

Verities that cannot change,

While also believing change

Itself can be overturned.

Exactly the opposite

Obtains—everything changes;

No change can be overturned.

Not only death elicits

This weirdly orthogonal

Response of your thoughts to change,

But it’s harder to explain

If not just egocentric.

You don’t want what the world is.

Long Sunday Drive

Whenever they traveled through
Nevada, especially
The emptiest parts, they felt

They skirted the dusty hem
Of a curtain they could not
Push aside to slip behind.

It felt like another life
Waited in some lonesome spot,
Wedged in a spring-fed canyon,

Fronted by a half-ghost town
Where groceries, gas, and mail
Were gathered at the last stop.

If they could find it, they could stay,
But they could never find it.

Fall Wind

chyōu fēng rù

Emperors and generals,

Like gangsters and their bosses,

Have a tendency to fall

Lachrymose, at least for poems,

Favorite tales, and folk songs.

Maybe with all that maiming

And killing other people,

Something bottles up in them,

And they like a good fiction

That excuses some weeping.

Certain themes—young love, old age,

Fall wind—really get to them.

Killers hate how age kills them,

Hate how fall wind means nothing.

Back Near Headwaters

You move, you lose.
The broken genes
Litter genomes
Of the creatures

That switched often—
Sea to land and
Back again; sea
To land to air

And back again;
Sea, land, air, land,
Air, cave, water.
Loss of smell, loss

Of color, loss
Of infrared.
There are gains. Whales
Can stay awake.

Thirteenth Secret Variation

We count the rings while we dance and suppose.
Secret sits outside the circle and knows.

The Double-Struck Zed

What a name, what a face,

Boldface, blackboard bold, set

Of all the integers,

Integer itself name

Inclusive of zero,

Natural, negative

Mirrors of natural

Numbers, subset of bold

Double-struck Q, subset

Of all real numbers, R.

Rational integers

Are all algebraic

Integers that happen

To be rational as

Well. You don’t have to get

It to say it. All names,

All languages, all math,

All scriptures are like that.

The Plan

Humanity isn’t humans.
Humanity is something else.
Humanity can keep itself

Going and growing, while humans,
Every one alive at one time,
Have all died, so long as there’s more

Humans to replace those faces,
And who knows—humanity works
So hard at self-reproduction,

Someday it may succeed, may not
Need individual humans
At all to be humanity.

A human may have thought these lines,
But these thoughts own longer timelines.