It’s a Spherical Thing

Cooperation starts small.
Bacteria form snow globes
Of themselves in structured rings,

Communities, if you like,
And teams can go smaller yet.
What is a cell with a wall

If not cooperation
Between many molecules
To ingest, grow, waste, and split,

Their dances elaborate
As any building project,
And then some? Your trick

Wasn’t to cooperate
But to add a wobbly ring
Around older forms of this,

And then a ring around that,
And then a ring around that.
Your outer rings are fragile,

Shatter easily, collapse
As bubbles. The frailest form
Of cooperation’s you.

Don’t be too hard on yourselves.
You’re just glimmers of great spheres,
Delicate and weird, new here.

The Sea Is No More

The monster is gone.
You rest on the shore
Which, now, is bare stone

Looking out over
Airy green meadows,
Hillocks of lost ships.

The apocalypse
Yawns and stretches out
Blue geography.

You have outlasted
The end of yourself
And all of your kind.

You know you’re dreaming,
Soft John of Patmos.

Nescience Ascendant

Not that you think so.
You think you know more,
Don’t need to know more,

Don’t need to be told,
Laugh at anyone
Who hints you don’t know.

You know what you know.
The things you don’t know
You don’t need to rule,

To run your small world.
Know how to make more,
How to make the most,

How to hold power.
Power is no joke.

Yaw String

Let’s not start with an anecdote.
Let’s just strap you in the cockpit,
Hand you a dire scenario,
And hit you with a hail of facts.

Say you’re cruising at altitude,
And everything is going fine.
Then all your instruments go dark
Just as you glide into fog.

Ice begins to pelt your windows.
Here you are, now what are the facts?
Spatial disorientation
And loss of situational

Awareness. Your ground-up senses
Are at a loss for data
And wildly misinterpreting
What sensory inputs they have.

Your visual, vestibular,
And seat of the pants feel all spin
On contradictory headings.
Unless the instruments come back

To let you know what’s up, you’ll crash,
Probably after you’ve blacked out,
No longer aware of caring,
Your only mercy at the end.

September, 1929,
Doolittle made the first flight,
From takeoff to landing, solo,
Solely by means of instruments.

Think of the madness and the trust,
To sit in a hooded cockpit
Believing only the machines.
Picturing it makes you shudder.

But he did it. It’s illegal
Now to fly any other way
Under most conditions, given
Human physical frailty.

Meanwhile you’re flying the planet
With senses you’re too smart to trust
To land a single-engine plane,
Terrified of the machine minds

You dread taking over your world.
You close your eyes as you’re screaming,
Unable to control your roll,
Nosediving inside your own flames.

Retroprojective Verse

Headlong as Joanne Kyger,

We, you and us, flesh and words,

Rush to run away from this

Into the arms of not us.

Well, she was still young, writing

Of hopeful rushing, Joanne

Was, and then more decades rushed

Past her, and then she wasn’t.

This morning, those bodies crushed

In recent catastrophes

Remind us, whether you rush

Out into the world or sit

With us, smitten with glory,

What’s not is dimensionless.

Beyond the River

A large space of scattered people
And no important polities,
Administered by bureaucrats
Exiled there from the Capital,

Civilized but irrelevant
Space for large, domestic creatures,
Small wild ones like foxes and hares,
And the feral. You be careful.

Satrapies like that have been known
To spawn militant religions,
To play powers against each other,
To invent their own holy texts.

Not a lot of renaissances,
It’s true. But that country beyond
Is excellent for the strange-eyed
Poets who think they know something,

Have seen something everyone’s missed.
They haven’t, but everyone has
Missed something and feels it. Only
The feral can half get it back.