Sampler

Windy, dusty, barren day
In what used to be mid-spring.
The desert wants to return

To oceans of dunes again,
The sand grains that created
These layers of sandstone cliffs,

Rusty-yellow, white, and dun,
Especially dun-looking
Today, as the old dust spins.

The green itself seems to sense
It’s hopeless this time, this bloom.
It’s going to be wasted.

It’s going to wither soon.
As soon as leaves burst, they droop.
Out on Mars, rocks know a thing

Or two about going back
To all the way before wet
Started leaving them, before

Wet started seducing them,
Before wet meant anything.
Mars is dry enough to know.

Not Escapist to Savor What May Soon Be Stolen from You

Let’s put it this way—at present,
Wherever you are, any time

You can look up into the sky,
Or tilt your head and just listen,

Or place a palm down to touch ground,
And not sense rumbling fighter jets

Or the dueling of rockets,
Or any exchange of gunfire,

Count your locality lucky,
Because the possibility

Exists at almost all instants
For skies to fill with violence,

And if these words recount quiet
Night hours, it’s because we know this.

Domestic

Presented in classes and textbooks
Drily as description and some dates,
A handful of plants and animals,

A handful of locations, Asia,
Mesopotamia, Africa,
Central America, the Andes,

Maybe a little speculation,
And then on to civilization,
If it’s history, or out to modes

Of food production, varieties
Of kin, if it’s anthropology.
The subtle shift that’s torching the world,

This rupture named domestication,
The entraining in alliances
Of small bunchs of species

Starting mass extinctions in the rest,
And nobody who studies it knows why
Those places or why exactly then.

There’s one species at the core of it,
But it’s a selection to itself.
Suddenly, species that could be tamed

Into a cooperative knot
With the other self-domesticates
Would be, and those that couldn’t wouldn’t

Be much longer for this world at all.
To be tame became the way to win,
Grass behind fences, goats in a pen.

Without domestication, the great
Extinction would have never begun,
Nor our next, feral, revolution.

For This Very Reason

Sins are more diverse than harm,
But harm’s the only true sin.

Like all of its shadow shelves,
The lovely invented sins

Of people seeking control
Over human behavior,

Harm is unavoidable,
But because it’s the real sin,

It’s also the only one
Truly unforgivable,

Ever truly forgiven.
Every other sin’s a game,

A mere morality play,
Only a likeness in masks.

The refusal to forgive
Such sin is also a mask,

And mercy’s another mask.
You can’t stop playing with these.

Masks ourselves, we won’t ask you.
But harm remains the true sin.

Only the harmed can forgive,
Only harm be forgiven.

Heaven send that those you’ve harmed
Still live to give forgiveness.

Information Is Limitation

If it from qubit, then quit from bit.
What’s conserved, you can’t recover. What
You can recover was never yours.

Your limitations feel limitless,
Limits in all stringy dimensions.
Then limits surpass the limitless,

And the end of your limitations
Will come to nothing to calculate.
If there’s nothing with information,

Nothing with information in it,
What kind of information is it?
Calculations that come to nothing

Will not be able to cross that gate
To nothing no numbers explicate.

New Age

Change is often just your startled
Attention to discrepancies
Of short and long-term memories.

Oh! The ice melted from the pond.
No one in this store has masks on.
The clothes have blown off the clothesline.

Should we point out what you notice
Isn’t actually what has changed,
At most some urgent updating

That you’re doing to keep living?
Nonetheless, that’s what feels like change
To you, who has changed, as you do.

Admit it. It’s a little fun,
Now and then. Wait, who is that man?

All Not Dead Yet

All here, who can say so,
Not too dead to say it,
All going to be dead

But not now, not for now,
Says the girl who’s so young
You’d think she wouldn’t care,

Until you remember
Being even younger
And marveling sometimes

That there you were, knowing
That there you were, being
The knowing that you were,

And here you are, somehow,
Still here, who can say so,
Not too dead to say it.