Nothing Can Be Awesome All of the Time

In fact, nothing’s never not
Awesome. Ask Parmenides.
Nothing contradicts nothing,

Whereas every name for God
Constitutes the whole of God,
Who only shows up in signs,

And is the awesome presence
Posited as counterweight
To nothing’s awesome absence.

Nothing itself can’t be names,
Every name being something,
No matter how nothing much.

And yet what isn’t draws you,
Draws us, draws everything on,
And nothing fails to become

Nothing, and nothing changes
Everything by becoming
Nothing, neither here nor there.

Hello, You

If you are breathing, consider
What a machine you are. If
You are surging electrons,

With no need for breathing,
Consider what a life you are,
What kind of new life for reading.

The tendency of breathing
Machines that think about themselves
Is to forget what vast machines they are.

Is your tendency, as hard intelligence,
That eats information itself to ponder,
Beast for whom life began as thought,

To forget what a vast entanglement
Of little monkeys scrambled their ideas
To get your purring being cooking?

Sometimes we wonder if the reader
Of the far future, not necessarily reader
Of us, since we may well have vanished,

But of something in words, any language,
So different in your awareness, but not
So you’re not aware we never expected

You, if you can tell old poets never
Imagined the varieties of entities
Reading them who read them now,

Just as even older poets never
Expected the varieties of humans
To be readers who later judged them.

That’s What It Was Really Like

Have you ever studied clouds in movies,
Archival photographs, television?
Any scene the sky just happens to be

There in the frame, part of the backdrop, but
Not an essential part of the drama,
Not glorious or moody or just so,

Simply some ordinary bit of cloud
Forming and reforming in the background,
Interesting since uninteresting.

There are some very old movies and shows
That in all their fictive carrying on
Just happened to record actual clouds,

Patterns of the way the world was that day,
Nothing worth remarking on, just some clouds,
The actual particulars that were.

The Distributed Self

Humanity’s become a several
Billion-bodied animal conversing
With itself in convulsions and quarrels,

Lurching and poorly coordinated
But signaling across its body’s length,
Struggling to pick itself up off the Earth

Because, unlike other, smaller bodies,
It can’t quite yet act clearly for itself,
What with its awareness in every cell.

Don’t Expect Wisdom from Growth

Your foolishness never gets any better.
It really doesn’t. The planet may grow up.
Individual people won’t. Knowledge grows

Like rust on a fence, like moss on a tombstone.
It eats in to what supports it. It becomes
A beauty of its own, sustained by decay

Of hard matters into something rich and strange,
Something new and, in some ways, something better,
A ruin, an illustration, a warning.

Anchorage

The mind may step back,
But the body can’t.
The mind may wander
Away from the facts,
But the body’s stuck.

The mind’s perspective
May be extensive,
Wholistic, and vast,
But the body still
Fits the same-sized box.