Unchosen None

In the fantasy movies
A favorite name is One,
As in, The One, as in you,

Our central protagonist,
Ordinary as you seem.
This plot will show you’re The One.

A peculiar concept, one,
In practice a contronym—
On the one hand, unity,

Whole, entire, and unbroken—
And yet, singularity,
Something unique from the mass,

From the many, sheared, alone,
Just one, just the one, The One.
Know what the plot really wants?

The hinge of all equations,
The only one of its kind,
The None. No casting The None.

A Note for the Current Survivors

Go check the moon. If you don’t
Check it, this time it might fail.
Ha. Ha. There are iron rules,

Relentless oscillations
You rest in as helplessly
As cradle-boarded infants

In steel-banded cradle boards.
Your moon will not forget you.
The phases will continue.

But go check it anyway,
To absolve your importance.
All in order? Carry on

With dreaming in your swaddling
How powerful you’ve become.

Hyperbolic Trajectory

He writes, or his character

Writes as he writes him, the phrase,

Truth of the infinite fall,

And, reading it, you recoil.

The conjunction of the three

Bothers you—truth, infinite,

Fall—each one nullifying,

Negating the other two.

There is no true infinite

Fall. Gravity does not surround

The universe like a wall.

There is no infinite fall.

No true fall is infinite.

You fall, true. Then land, finite.

The Kingdom of Decay

Is never horrifying
For long. You’ve evolved to be
Revolted by those stages

When the lives eating remains
Could parasitize you too,
But then other lives eat those

And, in turn, get colonized,
As the underworld kingdom
Goes to compost, then Eden.

No matter what kind of life you are,
Your trophic level turns up
Eventually, and you’ll eat

All you can at the buffet
Of the kingdom of decay.

Fragile and Perishable

The ground is hard
Below our bones.
But we still crawl
Around the ground,

And hop, and fly,
And know we fall,
Know we can fall,
Which makes it hard.