Where’s the Lazarus Bunker At?

A light breeze swayed
The saplings staked
Against strong winds.

A magazine,
Old school, glossy,
Lay open there

To a story
Reporting on
Survivalists,

Doomsday sayers,
Basic preppers.
Seemed like fighting

Was the doom they
Mostly prepped for—
Some civil war.

You grinned, thinking
Of a bug-out
Bag for a stroke,

An underground
Armory stocked
With Glocks against

Slow dementia
And Alzheimer’s.
Bombs for cancer.

Oh, all ready
For the end
They’d prepped to fight,

If not for ends
They'd never thought
They'd have to fight.

The Calm Light

It’s not, but the calm
And pervasive light
Seems to be welling

Up out of the soil.
The Earth is a sun,
And you’re a witness.

Tell us a story
About the boy who
Cried lamb and then fired.

Be prepared to shoot
At all times. It’s all
Foolish isn’t it?

And yet foolishness
Hurts. The boy’s rifle
Fatally wounded

The lamb. The story
Wounded the teller.
The telling wounded

The story, which died
Chasing its own myth,
Yet left behind strong joy.

The calm light swells
Up out of the world,
And you’re the witness.

Sunshine

Watching a rocky slope do
Nothing much about what passed
Over it, not protesting

Even when the machines came
To collect the rocks and left
Only the unreconstructed dirt,

The wish to divide the world
Into the world of those rocks
Versus the wholly human

Grew nearly overwhelming—
If only you could divide
And then inhabit that part—

World of rocks, sun, and weather—
To which you’d never belong.
But your worlds would not divide

For you, and here you are, years
And decades later, humans
Still slaughtering each other,

As if something different
In human behavior were
Likely to have cropped up

In such a short interval.
You’re looking at another
Rocky landscape this morning,

Officially dying, but
Still you take joy in the light,
Still would pick worlds, if you could.

Really the Only Kind

Instead of a vessel of ghosts,
What kind of human could you be?
No such kind of human exists,

Or only in a prior tense—
They had their ghosts, but most of them
Have been mostly scraped out of them,

And now they’re doubly demoted,
Not just to ghostless animals
But to domesticated plants—

People pass a person mumbling,
Disconnected from the tangle.
Somehow, simultaneously,

Those observers casually
Refer to the person as both
Haunted and a vegetable,

Neither true, and both together
Impossible. The ghosts of ghosts
Are haunting the ghosts of persons

Cut from the world but still living.
Meanwhile, the skulls of all the rest
Still function as storage units,

Inns, and hostels for clouds of ghosts,
The real being haunted, no sheets,
No specters, no ectoplasm.

A recording of Cantata
66, chosen by AI,
Plays peacefully from a personal

Assistant, while you consider
For the nth occasion, the light
On the cliffs, peaks, and stucco walls.

A roadrunner is on recon.
It pauses beside a white chair,
The paint all flaking from the gray,

Cracked pine underneath.
The day is so brilliant, so bright.
But none of these are ghosts, either.

 Ghosts are voices you know, voices
Drilled into your skull for the shelves
Continually bartering

With other voices. The barter,
The exchange, makes you the vessel,
Haunted, hunted, human vessel.