The Settled Recitation of the Wandering Peoples

All other words you may change,
But these words you must recite,
Must feel them in this order,

Like sand between your fingers,
Like honey on your tongue,
And then you’re free to wander,

Conquer the world, if you want.
These words will be your orders,
These words in just this order.

Long after you’ve forgotten
How they were put together,
The language from which they come,

You will caress these heirlooms.
You will feel you have a home.

Literal Grim You

When what you want is some relief,
The problem’s asymmetry
Between artisan, art, and
Customer. Or consumer.

Connoisseur. The collector.
The aficionado.
The art critic. Whoever.
To the woodworker, the wood

Feels hard to work with, feels good,
Although the grain of the wood
Comes from a life it once had
No woodworker ever knows.

And as for the connoisseur,
Well, what speaks to you, once made,
May not have spoken at all
In the making, or may have

Found voice just at the finish.
You need it to stay with you,
To offer you some solace,
Satisfaction in yourself,

Sense you’re sensing something true,
Even if you do woodwork
Of your own, as a hobby
Or your hard vocation, too.

You can’t match all these patterns
Tongue and groove. There’s the wood, dead
Now, literal. There’s the grim
Woodworker. And then there’s you.

You Are the Bleeding Edge of Patterns

A quarter million atoms

Assemble each ribosome,

Switching states every second,

Hundreds or thousands of times.

Elucidation of this

Was a cultural triumph,

Although most nooks and crannies

Of culture remain wholly

Unaware of their triumph.

Nonetheless, your cells themselves,

Like the cells of so many

Other species, even some

Yet to be discovered, run

Smoothly on these engines,

Millions and millions of them,

Quarter million at a time,

Thousands of beats a second,

As you read these very lines.

The universe inside you

May be even scarier

In its organization

Than the universe outside

With its emptiness and fires.

Midway lies the precipice.

Nonetheless, There Are Always Those Who Resist

Bad apples, bad barrels,
Authoritarians
And milquetoast conformists—

If species-specific—
Seem to come leavened
With yeasty resisters,

Although the resisters
Seem always outnumbered,
So that all viciousness

Resembles tournaments
Of seeded opponents—
Some upsets, mostly chalk.

What a horrific thought—
That here’s a recipe
Baked in societies,

Always some brutalists,
Some conformists, some moles
Who tunnel No Man’s Land,

And a few resisters.
Find us a history
Absent this chemistry.

Meanwhile, the quietest
Quietists, the hermits
Hide, knowing they’d be dragged

Into the square and flogged,
If not executed,
By any team that won.

Ideophage

Ah, which cycle is culture
Up to these days, the lytic
Or lysogenic? Drilling

Into skulls, burrowing deep,
Lurking while carried along,
Or poking holes in thoughts’ walls

To burst a self entirely?
Funny little hungry phage
With no metabolism

To call its own. Alien
On its own planet, culture
Is, cumulative culture

That is. Happy invader,
Hopping into your head now.

People Rarely Believe as Strongly as They Believe

It is by now
Acceptable
To report deaths
Due to curses.

People are seen
As capable
Of perishing
From their beliefs,

For believing
So intensely.
One asserts this
While distancing

Oneself from faith.
But would one risk
Death to believe
Others believe?

X of 0

There are many ways
Of reckoning counts,
Given anything
Can be divided
Or subsumed again.

How many leaves, how
Many needles, how
Many trees, groves, woods,
Forests, how many
Ships sail the forest?

How many verses
In all your scriptures?
How many bark strips,
Tablets, codices,
Digits to code them?

Once you had names, you
Couldn’t stop naming.
Once you had numbers
You had to count them,
Keep estimating.

Proliferation
Is more like birthing,
More like creation.
Math fits the cosmos
So well it makes it.