Pain Takes Priority over Banks and Foreign Wars

There’s the predator snoring
Around your torso. That one
Is hard to ignore. Others

Almost close enough to touch
Prowl around your house and home.
It’s foolish to ignore them,

But sometimes you do, given
They’re so exhausting to watch.
Then there are the predators

Mostly out of sight, too far
Away to concern you much.
Any of them could get you,

But it’s this one curled around
Your guts you’d hate to wake up.

Run Off

An interesting art
You hadn’t seen before,
Not one that imagines

Life after disaster,
Or even disaster
Rampant, as it happens,

Not an art of ruins,
Melancholy longings,
And lonely wanderers,

Not an art to thrill you
With heroic struggles
Against gathering dark.

It’s an that creates
Catastrophes it needs
So it can think through them.

It sends a flood of words
Washing away that house
Life invested in you.

As Much as a Much

Somewhere a journalist swears

At autocorrect, reading

The phrase as much as a much

Buried in their article.

From context, that second much

Had been intended as month,

But while as much as a month

Would have made much better sense,

As much as a much feels right,

Feels rebellious, defiant

Among the words, an echo

Of too much of a muchness,

(Look it up) but more modest,

Also tautological

And just slightly prosodic.

The world is both nothing much

And just as much as a much,

For which lives suffer too much.

Why Don’t We Stop

These lines are just wandering—
They’re not tourists or migrants.

Every morning, we set out
In search of destinations.

Every so often, we find
A suitable spot to pause.

Why do we go on so long?
We don’t know where we’re going.

We hope if we keep going,
We’ll find out along the way.

Cheap Water

It’s been weeks since the last rain
In the valleys, snows up high.
Today a faint hope of storm

Adds a melancholy grin
To all the foreboding news.
Not so hard to understand,

These words, are we? No tricks here.
Just some lines that will be lost
Soon enough, making patterns,

Reporting to you live, from
An era when people thought
About disaster daily,

But collective disaster
Hadn’t happened, yet. What if
It did or it never does?

Small rains spatter the windows.
Satellites blink in orbit.
Armies mass. The lungs fill up.

Time to pour another glass
Of cheap water from the tap.
This world destroyed someone’s world,

Coming into existence.
Someone’s world will destroy this,
Coming into existence.

Survivorship Bias

Researchers adapting the unseen
Species model from ecology
To medieval chivalric romance

Estimate ninety percent was lost
From manuscripts in that tradition.
All the stories left, just ten percent.

But how is this not like everything?
Pick a random date from your childhood.
It’s likely to be a blank in mind.

You’ll remember some day adjacent,
A form of survivorship bias
Memoirists require for coherence.

What you recall may be distorted,
But most of your life is simply gone,
As are the times in which you lived it.

Think of all the details of a day
Around the world that day, that one day.
Archives and data centers have lost

The bulk of it before it’s finished.
Feel the solar wind burning your face,
As you race like a bright-tailed comet

Around your centers of gravity
Through all your small, elliptical life.
So much vanishing trails behind you.

Every Judgment Is a Partial Suicide

Each pronoun is a paraphrase.
Whatever one does, the bright forms
Will go on shining in the dark.

Somehow, that never excuses
Actual actions. It’s too much,
All the monitoring people

Must do, of themselves and others.
It’s too exhausting. No wonder
Your barely sociable mother

Took to monitoring weather.
It was better for her, better
Than her children’s moral failures

Or people who astonished her
With their outrageous behaviors
On the morning talk shows. Better

To channel-surf in search of storms
As she grew older. She never
Could excuse sinners, however,

So long as sins never referred
To her. Somehow they never did.
Paraphrase. Blur. Storms long past her.