Not Even the Devil

Believes with all his heart.
He doesn’t have a heart.
He’s the goddamned Devil.

Mind is so terrified
Of the end of the mind,
It’s the end of the world,

Which it isn’t. Devils
May go, gods may go, mind,
Author of all, may go.

And then people will stop
Asking stupid questions.
There will be no people

Sharing mind to ask them.
God! To be Devil then!

Homeopathic Infrastructure Collapse

A grey veil falls
Behind the cliffs.
The power goes out.
The room goes still,

Appliances
Silenced, heater
Off, no voices.
This won’t last long;

Savor it now.
All thrills are threats
Thinned impotent,
Potent toxins

In succussion,
Diluting death
Until nothing
Of threat is left.

Cutting Paper Leaves

Carefully, digital gamelan
Playing in the background. Green sweater
And combat boots on the laptop screen.

Nope. Now it’s a deep-field cosmic view.
Look at those smears of amplified light
Calculated to have been headed

This way since before there was a sun.
What fresh perspective does this give you?
None. You’re a human, a few decades

Gone. Not even the combat boots mean
Anything without a proper noun.
You know it’s all vaster than your life,

Your awareness of any of it,
Your memories of what that vast world
Did to your parents and they to you.

If you turned away from everything
Slightly interpretable by you,
A music-free, screen-free, print-free room

Alone, what then would become of you?
Simply existing’s a discipline
Used as a cruel and unusual

Punishment in solitary cells.
The local mountain lion lolling
In the cliffs among the bighorn sheep

Is not happier, gets cold, hungry,
Moves its bowels, prowls for more food, dies.
Does it suffer from a need to know?

No. Now the gamelan’s given way
To guitar and violin. You can
Change your tune but not the listening.

Twelve Hundred Years Apart

Dancing back and forth, early
Winter, early in the day,

Between a new collection
By a young poet, a new

Translation of an ancient
From the far side of this shell,

The playful mind asks itself,
Well, what do these pieces have

In common makes them all poems?
Let’s forget about the lines

In various directions.
Call those local artifacts.

Is it the self-reference,
The way words conjure poets?

There’s that. Also the focus
On a small life’s small events.

The carefully arch language,
Intelligible, but stiff,

Suggesting laundered clothing,
Hinting it’s an occasion

To be in a poem, and words
Should conduct themselves as such.

These are present or absent
Traits in many famous poems,

Famed poetic traditions.
There’s another thing, along

With the smallness of focus
And the seriousness—pace.

The phrases are all rowing
Against the lip of the falls,

Moving forward, yes, about
To end abruptly, but slow,

Working to savor their own
Conception before they’re lost.

Forecast from Skull Observatory

Each body forms its weather systems
Within the weather systems of the world.

Each linguified awareness is a kind
Of weather station partly built

By the body, partly by the world,
Mostly monitoring the body, partly

Monitoring the world. If the storms
Of the body grow too severe, the weather

Station of awareness loses track.
If the storms of the world around it

Grow too severe, the systems merge
And that’s the end of that.

Meanwhile, awareness will continue
To record what it can of the systems

That built it in its lonely outpost
Where weather howls through the skull.

Live by the List, Die with a List

You’re pretty anxious, aren’t you,
To get your projects finished,
Do some good, make your mark, raise kids?

Often, having accomplished
Some accomplishment you sought,
Some experience you craved,

The most valuable aspect
In retrospect is simply
That you experienced it

And can tell yourself you did.
Almost everyone agrees on this—
Hence, cliches—been there, done that,

Checked it off the bucket list.
It’s odd then, that you persist.