Less End

At first you were, but then you weren’t.
Then you realized that you could

Be even when you couldn’t be.
Others could just be when they were,

But you could be their memory.
You could be everything you did.

The obstacles of objects stopped.
Existence hovered over you.

You were only good at being
What you weren’t, what you’d done, not what

You’d been burning with your breathing.
Now you could be without burning,

Be without being. Curious.
You couldn’t move. You only touched.

And yet there was a word for you,
A word like you, big with being

No more than existing. You weren’t
Pretending. No more pretending,

Being as you weren’t, with touching.
Never knew when you touched right back.

Specific

Was once a derogatory

Term for a kind of quackery,

Someone’s claim to have found a cure,

A singular cure, specific,

For all cases of some disease,

When everyone knew diseases

Had multiple causes and thus

Must be cured in multiple ways.

Turns out, some specific cures work,

Although to find one remains rare.

Correlations as tight as that

Tie few threads in life’s tapestries.

Could there be a specific cure

For cruelty? For misery?

A number of faiths offer these

To millions of adherents,

But no one really believes them,

Especially not the faithful,

Who behave as if cruelty

Must be both inevitable

And, in some instances, needful,

Even for sweet divinity.

But what if it were as simple

As Vitamin C for scurvy?

Wouldn’t that make the future weird,

A world in which no one was cruel

And no one was miserable,

Humans flying from birth to death

Like free bloody birds—as Larkin,

Miserable Larkin, might have hissed?

Sitting beside a barbed-wire fence,

Watching a herd of cattle graze,

It seems beyond imagining,

A future without cruelty,

And in its specifics it is.

Yet somehow you can posit this.

Ghosts’ Own Memoirs

History could crush you in an instant.
Still, events happen too slowly to be
Comprehended by the longest lifespan.

Science is prophecy for atheists.
Unfortunately for theists, it works
More often than any faith-based vision,

And if probability is the best
Perspective you can ever hope to have,
There’s no chance of final comprehension.

That doesn’t stop prophets from explaining
How supernatural certainty awaits
Anyone willing to take them on faith.

Caught between the slow arc of the cosmos
And the promise of sudden extinction,
Their foolishness is awfully tempting.

The one perspective needed is missing,
The retrospection of the ancient dead—
Not words preserved from when they were living

And subject to the same short-sightedness
Every embodied awareness suffers,
But the full-length memoirs of ghosts as ghosts.

If languages themselves, having persisted
Through so many short-lived incarnations,
Gesturing, echoing, and slithering

Among the generations of fresh skulls,
Had managed to retain more memory
Than mere trivial etymologies,

They could have constructed a narrative
That transcended life’s sequence of fragments.
But no, cultures are like bodies like that—

Just multicellular organisms
Compounded of masses of little lives,
Every one with its own walls, its own chance

To turn cancerous, the whole assemblage
Redundant from its core to its borders,
Self-bounded units, again and again.