Good Humans

If you like, find yourself
A writing surface, or
A recording device,

And start a list of traits
Or compound traits that sum
What you think makes for good

Humans. Try to bear down.
Which traits do you truly
Feel distinguish the good

People among the rest?
Itemize them fully
As you can. Strike off traits

That, on contemplation,
Seem less diagnostic.
Who are the good humans?

This is not a forced choice
And not a weighted scale.
What makes a good human?

Rank the traits if you want,
If that feels important.
What would a composite

List of good traits look like,
Compiled by language groups,
From all around the world?

Who are the good humans?
If you met them, you would
Know them, right? Sure you would.

Material Memory

The tendency of some forms
To return to prior shapes
After having been deformed,

While others wholly fracture
Only to remain broken,
Is a feature of physics,

Chemistry, molecular
Bonds, and so forth. Character
Itself is rooted in bonds

Between atoms, but it plays
Out in ripples between words
And people deploying them

To characterize their bonds
With each other. Resilience,
As personality trait,

Is curiously inapt
As a descriptor of flesh,
But you see, the way we work,

The way all your contexts shift
Our possible related
Meanings, invested like light

Invests in the shifting clouds,
Like experiments invest
In quantum phenomena

So time flies like an arrow,
But fruit flies like bananas,
Makes it difficult to tell

Whether the material
Memory runs parallel
To character, is nearly

The same thing, is the basis
Of every return to form
Or phrases coincidence.

There Will Be Mice

The inevitable
Procession of events
Through local existence

Only varies by which
Events are processing
Any given moment.

Oh! Also by the rate
At which they’re processing.
That’s key. That’s important,

That’s what’s always startling—
The inevitable
Changes gears so quickly

From almost motionless
To a swift fall or blink
In which you spot the head

Of a mouse or the legs
Of a spider edging
Past the foot of the bed.

Kinder! Ragazzi! Enfants!

It’s just the way things are
That they’re the way they are,
And that you can bump up

Against them. There they are.
We’re not talking people.
People are malleable,

Controllable, useful,
As water and the wind
To each other in waves.

But that the world has ways
That can be discovered,
That the waves can outline,

Ways that you can’t alter
That you know that take you
Still by surprise, there are.

Fire Air

It’s amazing what we give you
That you take for granted. The air
You breathe, for instance. Oxygen.

Know what that is? Any idea
How much work it took, how many
Generations passed, thinking breath

Was just air, or spirits, or less?
How many experimental
Plants and animals died

To figure out that fire in air?
And to think, it’s your most core food,
Multicellular rocket fuel.

Now, you just know. You don’t think twice,
Unless you bump into a book
On the history of science

With a passage on oxygen
And how it, laboriously,
Was found and elucidated.

You need some oxygen? You know
So much that you don’t know you know,
Don’t know how you know it, don’t know

How it was found out. You just know.
There you go. Welcome to our world,
The world your breath has made of us.

You’re Not Zombies Just Yet

What keeps stories on their toes,
Supernatural tales and
Tribal ideologies

Included, is the evolved
Plasticity of the beast.
You are that beast. You can change

Your loyalties, and you do.
Your identities remain
Multiple, overlapping,

Opportunistic, and just
Slightly flexible, at least,
All of your lives. You crave teams,

And you crave belonging, but
Your ancestors didn’t thrive
By keeping to just one side

Religiously all their lives.
There’s room, there’s hope for movement,
In evolving virulence.

The stories have to compete
To catch and keep beastly souls
Who still keep tales on their toes.

Things Are Heating Up Again

Everything changes faster
When the thermodynamic
Cascade breaks up a winter.

The mountains are sliding down
Slopes burnt of vegetation
In record rains flash-flooding

Formerly peaceful regions.
Everything changes faster
These days on a small planet

That’s come down with the fever,
And, as with any fever,
It’s unclear if it’s raging

To burn off interlopers
Or if it’s out of control,
And the system’s in danger.

Among the interlopers
Spawned by the planet itself,
There’s a lot of arguing

About anything at all
And now about the fever.
This disease lacks a vector

To carry more spores away,
Which keeps all the excitement
Confined to one floating world

In flames, at night, on the waves
That glow with phosphorescence
Spread through all-swallowing seas.

No Gravity, No Entropy, No Time

This is the power of language,
And in language we include math—
The positing of negation

At little cost to anything,
Not hardly any cost at all,
No sentence, no equation not

Potentially a dénouement,
The undoing of everything
By the insertion of a non,

A negative, a countersign.
No, this is not all-powerful,
We’re not saying that, but it is

A weird kind of power, in fact
The only home of all that’s weird.
You can’t wake up in the darkness

Of a planet turning its face
Away from its sun to the past
And alter one wave of that past,

But you can deny it, you can
Pretend, you can say it’s not there,
Which is truth’s freedom, in its end.