Impermeable Priors

Can’t be updated,
Replaced, reheated.
They’re settled business,

Brick walls not cell walls.
They’re not interested
In calculations.

You don’t know the odds,
But you know you can’t
Change them. Some givens

Are givens with no
Consideration,
No kind suggestions.

Face Music

Overhear an adolescent

Describing the art of makeup

As music you put on your face.

Now it’s in motion, isn’t it?

Tough to have music without dance,

Rhythm, some sort of changing notes.

It puts makeup into concert

With expressions and emotions

To imagine it as music.

Think of someone at their mirror

As composer at a keyboard,

Pausing, jotting another note.

Think of a street full of faces

Voicelessly singing their colors.

The Mute Barrens

Language, regardless
Of medium, is

All interior,
Which is why to rip

Opportunity
To speak from someone

Is to slam the door
On whatever chance

They had to invite
Anyone else in,

To prove that they had
An interior.

A human without
An interior

Can’t be a person,
And other humans

All damn well know it.
Live inside someone’s

Language and become
Partly that person.

Refuse them language,
Refuse to see them

Or listen, and gain
Wastelands at the cost

Of your own mental
Depopulation.

Air Hunger

A little Armageddon
For the ordinary lungs
Dying in the hospital

Of life’s ordinary loss,
Pneumonia, COPD,
Inflammation, or cancer,

The cells starved of oxygen,
The body reflexively
Gasping for more air, more air!

Milder forms include asthma,
But in the dying, it’s death
Announcing the beginning

Of descent. On the ground soon.
Above the clouds, then under.

Tag

An enormous motorcoach,
Length of house and width of bus,
Is stuck in the sandy mud.

A park ranger’s SUV
Is parked, disapprovingly,
Nearby, candy lights twirling,

But engine off, no siren,
Silent, more disappointed
Than angry. What kind of fool

Drives a white whale off the road
And onto the mesa grass
To camp on protected land?

Everyone wants to escape,
Nobody seems to know how,
Not the hermits in the hills,

Not the off-gridders, preppers,
Billionaires wanting to park
Their utopias on Mars.

There’s nowhere to escape to.
You’re stuck living here for life.
Good luck driving off the side.