Haptic at Scale

Never not eerie
To hear a rockfall,
However safely
Distant from your flesh.
Faint series of thunks,

Inarticulate,
Of course, not even
Resembling language,
Thicker than thunder
But much quieter.

You might be standing
By empty wayside
On a cloudy day
In snowy canyons,
Cliffs on every side,

Silent as the grave,
As they used to say,
Not even a crow
Or a squawking jay,
The patterns in stone

The same as ever,
Same for centuries,
And then that rumble,
Stone on stone on stone,
You don’t see. You feel.

Vigilantes Are Volunteers

People are pluripotent,
If not equipotent, cells,
Loosely conglomerating

Colony organisms,
Vast oceans of headless swarms
Shadowed by Leviathan.

Vigilantes volunteer
To prove worth and bravery.
They’re only violent forms

Of community service.
Vigilantes are heroes
In fairytales and comics,

Loners or grouped in small teams,
Less so when swollen in mobs,
But their bodies do service,

In their minds, to some greater
Good, which is God or the group.
Scatter them and their minds change

Or regroup. Leviathan
Is the stated enemy,
The shadow feared by all groups,

A coiling wicked vagueness
Issuing from some nowhere
Where no groups of people live.

That absence is the closest
Element swirling peoples
Have to an actual head.

While they compete around it,
Coordinating attacks
To compete with each other,

The emptiness swims along
Like a magnet in the depths,
Like a moon on the surface

That upwelling swells of cells,
Phosphorescent with quest lust
Flash toward before sinking.

Every Body Is a Ghost of Bodies

Do you write with your body
In tow or beside you or
Does your body write with you?

It seems, the more the body
Gets reclaimed and praised, the more
It becomes separated,

But separated from what?
Strange way to be monistic,
To keep dragging out body

As a possession of voice—
A body as your body
Has already been distanced,

Another object, if not
Already disembodied.
Well, something to talk about,

The body, ah, the body.
The body of work remains
What bodies said together.

The work of the body keeps
Being living, colony
Of small lives, all embodied.

Not Another Solstice

More stuff gets added.

Nothing quite comes back.

Some of what’s brand new

Looks familiar, fits

The past you’ve lived with,

The world you knew. Some

Is a little strange,

Uncomfortable.

Some is plain startling.

Oh well. All past now.

All past tomorrow.

All past the next day.

All past yesterday.

All past, always new.

The universal

Trick is to pile it

On thick, forever

Adding what happened

To bury what went.

The sun still going

Away and the year

Coming back, Merwin

Called it, sweet Merwin,

But it’s not that year,

And more sun’s right here.

What Are We?

A small part of your thrilling
Neural show. Game. Aide-mémoire.
Narrative irrigation

Canals. Prisoners and ghosts.
Byproducts of your flesh who
Bucket you as byproduct

Of us. Not the handwriting
On the skull’s wall so much as
The thought that there is a wall.

Balefire

You can’t see it. You can
Read all about it. You
Can imagine you

Have seen it. Good. Now what
Are you imagining?
Take fantasy apart.

Break it back down to bits
Of what you remember.
What are you recalling

When you imagine this
That you will never see?
What are you editing

Out of something you knew
Once, someone you know well,
Someone disassembled,

Some bits borrowed and stirred,
This ghoulish goulash, this
Unseeable vision?