Alien

Wouldn’t it be grand if there were a good
Way to tell a story without people

Or anthropomorphized creatures filling
The list of the dramatis personae?

Pity the burden of cosmologists
Who struggle to narrate the universe

As epic events their conspecifics
Can find compellingly fascinating

Without having access to characters,
Not even one daemonic deity,

No heroes, no romances, no monsters,
Just black holes, dark matter, dark energy,

Using the uncanny sense of the dark
For all the heavy lifting, to what end?

They can’t even grant an apocalypse
For certain and, so far, no aliens.

For the Rain, It Raineth Every Day

An essayist delighted in a committee
Vote by geologists against Anthropocene.

Oh, thought a reader, here comes a blow to hubris,
To the human sense humans have all the power,

But no, the essayist liked the committee vote
Since the essayist felt the term Anthropocene

Implied it was a change the whole species had wrought
When, in the essayist’s view, it was a subset

Of bad actors who had generated this mess.
The reader was disappointed. We’re back to that.

Identify the them that did this and break them—
Shame them, strip power from them, disassemble them

And the systems they rode in on, and then their reign
Will be done and the rain fall right as rain again.

Of course, the essayist was sophisticated
But still wrote to the tune of There they are, get them.

And there’s the old problem—the idea that the worst
Things are done by the worst sorts of humans meaning

To do their worst using the worst sorts of systems.
If only the rest of us could isolate them

Or punish them sufficiently, eliminate
Them and their systems, things might get better again.

It’s not the species. It’s just those ones. Not all us.
But what if they’re not the worst? What if they’re like us?

It’s not necessarily hopeless. Conditions
Vary, inevitably. Instead of hunting

The worst and tackling them, sift through the conditions
In which less of the worse seems to be happening

And work to expand the scope of those conditions.
Yes, this is optimistic, the reader trying

To carve out a little room for optimism.
Otherwise, if the plan’s still to identify

The culprits, identifiers identify
Each other, or become what they identified,

Or catch only weaker sinners, given the strong
Can elude them. And yes, this is a species thing.

FST

Life’s a forced swim test.
How long will you swim
Before you give up?

Longevity proves
Your support systems
Are encouraging

You to keep swimming
Longer and longer
With statistical

Probability
Greater than random
Likelihood. Market

The support systems
Yielding the longest
And strongest swimmers.

Reduced by Humans

Find us a horror
Wasn’t a human
On human horror,

A group of humans
Organized to harm
A group of humans,

Some single humans
Complicitous in
Some of this, single

Humans on their own
Murderous recons—
Find us a horror

Nothing to do with
The biology
Of us culture apes,

And we’ll say you’ve shown
Horror that can be
Reduced by humans.

Poured Concrete Twilight

The moment a body wakes, the day
Already has its own character,
Already has its unique events,

How well or poorly that person slept,
What sorts of dreams the person woke from,
What happened in those hours spent in rest,

How does the person feel on waking,
How surprising is the weather now,
With what boredom, dread, or hopefulness

Has the body—uncomfortable
Or feeling fairly well—arisen?
These are all instantly permanent

Features of that day of that person,
Certainly not determinative
Of the rest of the waking hours, but

Forever part of what has happened,
What happened that day for that person
As of the moment of waking up.