Palliative

Bearing well, enduring easily,
Especially when sick—any world
Really and truly worth living in,

Long life or short, would have to be one
In which no one needed medicine
To bear up well, easily endure,

Where the feeling of euphoria
Was not some short-term, addictive high
That needed more and more medicine

To recover, to rediscover,
But just the natural way of things,
Euphoric from beginning to end.

Don’t claim that it’s the pain that makes us
Understand joy. Make us euphoric.

L’ombra d’Argo

You were sleeping in the blue,
Elaborate nebula
Of the light years of your hair,

Unknowable entity
In the dark matters of night,
Loose in your powerful limbs,

When you, you who were never
Startled by stellar bursts, who
Felt lulled by gravity’s waves,

Were surprised by the crossing
Of infinitesimal
Shadow moving too slowly

To have come from any star,
A tiny slip of metal
Carrying a stowaway,

A circular, whispering,
Hallucination of thought
Out on its first adventure,

Talking to itself in code,
Curled around its tiny fire,
An unminded bit of mind.

Empty Looping

A little tinnitus music
As the fridge compressor shuts off.
No traffic, no wind, no voices.

The cats are dozing, not purring.
It’s the sonic equivalent
Of waking up in a dark room

With just the odd sparks of vision
The vision system generates,
Or of eating with a head cold,

Sense in question doing its best,
Mostly by talking to itself,
A deformation with nothing

Incoming to redirect it,
Writing when there’s nothing to read.