Coincidence, Periodicity, Agency, Stratagem

There’s little time left

To learn from this world

While still in this host.

How to interpret

Recurrent patterns

In their own contexts

And whether any

Concern intentions

Or cryptic meanings?

You have intentions

And cryptic meanings

And so expect them

From many likewise

Recurrent patterns,

Mere phenomena.

Across the desert basin,

The mountains have cloaked their peaks

In seasonal early snows,

And the same black vehicle

Has trailed you down the ET

Highway for two hours or more.

Every Shell Game Has Its Marks

Genius and tyrant are roles,
Not beasts with lives of their own.
Bodies that fill them are small,
And lives that live them are short

In ordinary human
Ranges, as must be the case
For all of the other roles
As well—athlete, lover, slave.

The body behind a mask
Hides the role within itself.
If you weren’t human, you’d ask,
Why hide nothing under shells?

Few Americans Blame God

This is according to Pew.
Bad stuff just happens. It’s not
God’s fault, the survey reports.

How could you blame what isn’t,
Even if you wish it were?
Ever notice the questions

With the most anguish in them
Aren’t, How could You do this world?
But, Where are You? Are You there?

You apply to each other
For aid, food, and succor,
So why wouldn’t you wonder

If there’s a higher power
With a personality
And morals to appeal to?

You want an ultimate court,
But few of you are true fools,
Holy and hopeless. J’accuse.

Residual Capacity

The two sentences, back to back,

Paper something living over.

A complicated insect squirms

Under the floral wallpaper—

Words will never do us justice.

But we have to try anyway.

Can you feel that little struggle,

The way the words turn on themselves?

A sort of lexicographer,

Collector of obscure words, wrote

Those two sentences, lost in prose,

Sealed them up in glue, in amber.

Who has to try in that sentence?

Who is deserving of justice

In the first? Who is there, if not

The words speaking ill of themselves?

Author, you’ll never do justice

To those words that will live for you

Long after you have lost your pulse,

Long after your lungs lose their breath.

Elves Exactly

Walls hold the keys to lower
Entropy. Life has lower
Entropy. All cells have walls.

Boundaries are important,
If you want any meaning
To hold on to any sense.

You can’t transgress your way free,
Without losing sense, without
More entropy, the cell’s death.

But entropy-barriers
Must be very special kinds
Of walls. In fact, entropy

Must be lowest in the wall,
Because it’s through the wall’s gates
That elaborations dance

As each orderly entrance
And exit, all together
Maintaining the division

Of low-entropy inner
Games from the high-entropy
Outer world. Walls orchestrate

The creation of new worlds
By separating inside
From outside, small world from large,

Living from non-living, and
Meaning from meaninglessness,
Which raises a hard question.

Whatever began raising
All these highly functional,
Low-entropy walls, unwalled?

How does a wall touch the world
Without dissolving its own
Orderly complexity?

Something protects what protects
The engineering inside
Of life and games and meaning,

But trying to study walls
Only proliferates walls
Built by walled students of walls.