Gieta

It’s night on this side at this hour.
You are penniless and dying
In all likelihood, but you’re loved,

And with all the terrible things
People are doing to people,
To the world, and the world to them

At this instant, it’s peaceful here
In your rented room with your bed
Made of an old futon ready

To warm you again, tinnitus
Mingling with a new recording
Of ancient airs, only mild aches

Like familiar mice in your bones.
You’ve rolled down the blinds and nothing
Will pull you from words, but not yet.

Tiny Structures of Debris

Peripheral thoughts float by,
Imperfections of the eyes,
Linked, translucent elements,

Bacterial revenants,
Maybe, hallucinations,
Illusions, complications

In any case, confetti
Tossed by unseen, unsteady
Fingers of dead languages.

There are no advantages
To be gained from having spots
Cluttering sight with faint thoughts.

Washing Up

One war started with a botched invasion
And a lot of brutal bombing. Poets
Of the invaded, underdog nation
Were published frequently in translation.

Then another war followed an attack
Of supreme, indiscriminate mayhem
With a determined effort to render
That mayhem moot by retaliation

Sparing none of the trapped population,
And so poets of the earlier war
Were washed aside to publish fresh poets
Trying to survive the new genocide.

Thus wars toss up poets behind headlines
As storms raise and erase wrack on shorelines.

Breaks

Take one. Give one. Be one.
Have one hatchet your bones.
Clean break. Psychotic break.

Spring break. Those are the breaks.
There are more. Missouri
River Breaks, Montana,

Recall visiting them?
Recall all the landscape
Breaks near the highway sides

Where you would stand and stare
Over the broken stones,
Thinking how you would break?

Delusions are called breaks
With reality, but
They’re less like prison breaks,

More like solitary
Confinement in one’s own
Corner cell of the real—

Fractures, ruptures, pauses,
Gaps In stratigraphy,
Suggestions of nothing.

Divil a Bit

Well, it’s another way of saying it,
Another element in the circle
Of ephemera around the black hole

Of that most remarkable conception,
The black hole’s antithesis, actually,
Rejecting everything, even a frame.

There’s such a cloud of terms approaching it,
And not one admissible within it,
Not even so much as divil a bit,

That it should strike you as miraculous,
That remarkable paradox in which
Each of you, of all things, will end as it.