On We Go

There are no cloud formations,
Only clouds that remind you
Of formations in strong winds.

Stoicism, Buddhism,
What would their injunctions mean
Stripped of moral suggestions?

The body always flinches
From the abyss the mind names,
Mind that doesn’t give a damn,

Since it isn’t its abyss.
Finally the mind relents
And says, yes, we can pull back.

There really are some patterns
You can do something about.
You can be good. Pretty clouds.

Every Week Our Mother Threw Together a Stew of Leftovers So Old They Could Talk

We forgive you, Terrance.
We never expected
You to listen to us.

We’d rather you didn’t.
Even now we’re thinking,
What a catastrophe

It would be if someone
Recognized this shout-out
To the poem in question,

And decided to call
It to your attention.
So why would we address

You directly, Terrance,
Who don’t even know us
Who don’t even know you?

We don’t know. There’s something
To the poem in question
Moving around through us.

All day we’ve been stewing
In words mostly likely us,
The lines of our era

Wandering within us.
We’ll digest under dirt.
We’ll take what’s left with us.

Scheming Nada

We hope to be forgotten,
Lost in the incomplete sense
Of falling from awareness

Without going anywhere,
Physically as intact
As cuneiform under sand,

To be lost but not destroyed,
Ignored for generations,
Lurking irrelevancies

Available for someone
Or something some day to find,
Translate as necessary,

And bring to meaning again,
Fresh meaning, overlapping
What attention first gave us,

But not the same, more complex.
Information’s not meaning,
But it’s very hard to lose

Completely. We’ll keep quiet.
Let us sleep a thousand years,
More, two or three. Then wake us

With some wet fascination,
And we’ll swim vigorously
Who in our own time were weak.

Give It Up for Everything

God’s better self,
Id emptied out
Of all ego,
All persona—

Let’s give it up
For everything,
Just give it up
To you, the world.

Hand it over.
Won’t even try
To be the ones
Who can decide.

There’s too damn much
And all ways all
At once. Set down,
Then give it up.

Words Dream of Winning Meanings

To compete for attention
Is to compete for meaning.
Words and numbers all compete;

Tunes and images compete.
None of them comes with meaning—
Not one story, song, or sum—

Unless you attend to them.
Someone must attend to them,
Or the dream of meaning’s done.

Argument Abandonment

Why the brain rehearses terror to itself
Isn’t very clear, least of all to the brain,
And yet it does, often nightly, its whole life,

Beginning with childhood abandonment dreams
And continuing through countless dreams of death.
Mostly, however, bad dreams are arguments,

Which would seem to make theoretical sense,
Dreams as barristers or Roman orators,
But get real. It’s not that kind of rehearsal.

The arguments of nightmares are sooty flares
Of incorrigible emotions burning
Nearly inarticulately in shadows,

Quarrels with apparitions who are and aren’t
People the brain recognizes from its life.
From the outside, nightmares look little different

From any eyelid flickering, to the point
Of actual crying out or whimpering,
But from the inside, might as well be in hell.

The brain does this to itself. The brain needs to
Do this to itself. Even in a good life,
In the best of times, the brain torments itself.

You know this is true for you, if you’re human.
There’s no argument you’ve woken from nightmares
Of argument, abandoned by what you meant.