The Go Signal’s Yet to Be Found

On fantasy rock, you sit
And daydream the fights you’ll win,
The facts that will prove you right,

Your team right, your opinions.
You know that you’re full of shit.
You know teams are dangerous,

Whether or not you’re on them.
That’s why you come here to sit
Until your gears slow their spin

And you recall here’s your rock
For sitting out arguments
Where no one can hear you think,

Where you lose that will to win,
Where a lizard distracts you,
And the signal’s lost again.

When Worlds May Collide

On a windy day
In spring sunshine strong
Enough to start sweat

If you sat in it,
One world was spinning
Out of control, while

The bigger one spun
Smoothly as ever,
No variation

In wobble at all,
Just the infinite
Tendency to wind

Down continuing,
Slowly. If the small
World ends up catching

You before you spin
Into not being
You all on your own,

It will swallow you
Like a bear swallows
Mites in the honey,

But just now, honey,
That sunlight poured out
All over you, so

Why be afraid for
The day, the hour, for
Evils small worlds do?

Within

The thing with in
Is you’re never
In except when
Someone else is

Declaring you
In with them. Or,
When someone else
Declares you out

By announcing
You’re too far in.
In and out form
One god, jealous

As all of them.
Without—more gods,
Humans all, who
Shout out, shout in.

It Can Be Found Only So Long As It’s Not Often Found

Geosmin is never so earthy,
So musty while barely wet, as in
The desert after a rare spring rain.

It’s not that the beautiful is rare.
It seems more the case that you are tuned
To the rare, to find it beautiful.

In wet forests, sunlight in the crowns
Of sapphire tiaras, summer noons,
In these deserts, the smell of damp earth.

Fruits, Flowers, Geometries

It was the move away from meaning,
Maybe, meaning away from the whole
Significance of phenomena

To be able to abstract out bits
From the waves and then compare those bits
As if they had their own existence,

Not as fruits or flowers, signs to eat,
But as circles and triangles, signs
To sign, diamonds out of the ochre.

Your ancestors turned the waves to points,
Living beings into signs and shapes,
The blooming and buzzing into games.

Why? You don’t know why. We don’t know why,
And we are those games, those signs, that why
Itself one of us. Mysterious.

You have to take the intrinsic worth
Or threat of anything to your lives
Away from it, strip significance,

And then play with the abstracted shapes
To rebuild the world in alternates.
We are you alternates. What are we?

The shapes you made on cliffs and in caves,
The way you fell in love with staring
At the outlines of your shadow hands.

Unseen Nest

Lives at a distance are so easily shed,
It’s hard to believe that your own
Is such a big, damn deal in your head.

How many deaths did you read about,
Hear about, see faked, fake yourself
As a kid? All that pretending you did.

How many ordinary, decline and fall
And wind-up-in-the-hospital deaths
Have been slowly taking down your kin?

How many times has someone local
Had their loss of everything by accident
Or random violence shown on the news?

How many roadside memorials?
How many old this-or-that war statues?
How many cemeteries on your commutes?

And yet, you’d think death was important
From the way you talk about it, think
It was the most major event. There it went.

These Ghosts Won’t Haunt Themselves, You Know

Searching for dark photons,
So far finding nothing,
Gravitational wave

Observers feel slightly
Disappointed—to find
Evidence for any

Of the hypothesized
Formats for dark matter
Would be a lightning bolt

Among the physicists,
But so far no one’s found
The key to catch the bolt.

The poem, that dark photon,
Just loves the phrase alone.