Precision Graveyards

One way underground
Storage locations
For nuclear waste

Have been depicted.
Apt phrase. Seems novel.
But really, haven’t

People been at this
Impossible task
For a long time now?

All the precautions
To keep ancestors
Contented, spirits,

Vampires, and zombies
In the ground. The tombs
Precision crafted

To hold dark powers
At bay, portals shut
On demons and ghosts

For eternity—
Have they ever worked
In a million years?

Imaging

The eyes are heavy now.
Cats and daughter slow blink
At each other napping.

The book is slow going.
The bad weather’s coming.
The skies are windy grey.

The initial results
Gave an inconclusive
Diagnosis, and now

More tests will have to wait.
There’s two day’s worth of food
Although the belly aches.

Virovorous

A microgram of virus
Made into a microgram
Of you. Seventeen percent

Efficiency doing so.
Not too bad. The going rate.
How long can you keep this up,

Here in your Petri dish fixed
With no supplies but virus?
How long can you live off thought?

Eat the Apparatus

No one knows what numbers mean,
In and of themselves, that is,
But it’s not that numbers can’t

Measure or don’t measure things
More or less accurately,
Not that meaning eludes you

Although you get frustrated
That you don’t know what numbers
Really, truly mean. They don’t

Really truly mean a thing.
You mean things and you can make
Meanings of so many things

That you can’t decide just which
Meanings your numbers should mean,
Which thing you were measuring,

And whatever you chose it won’t
Measure meaning. Imagine
Trying to count all meanings.

Disintegrating Renter

Everyone who isn’t shot
Or killed in an accident
Or a suicidal act

Eventually falls apart.
Timing matters. Diseases,
Stresses, and reckless living

Can speed disintegration.
The art of slowing prolonged
Decrepitude is practiced

And promised and sold
And researched around the globe.
There are acceptable years

For finally collapsing
And wisdom attributed
To simply not collapsing,

But everyone falls apart.
At the unstable meeting
Between animal and mind

A person realizes
Sometimes what it is to be
Self by negotiation

Between the many ideas
Of mind extending past lives
And life’s relentless living

Through each body for a while.
You rent, as it were, a home
High on the volcanic slopes

Pushed up and then eroded
By the vast tectonic plates.
Sometimes you feel the shudders.

It’s green and snow and crumbling.
You balance, watching lava
Flow and then disintegrate.