Penance or Begging Forgiveness

Preferably penance,
But neither from God
Nor an abstraction,

Such as a people.
There’s no whole people
Despite what many

Whole peoples insist.
And certainly not
From the universe,

Which has some begging
Of its own to do.
Find someone you’ve harmed,

A person you’ve harmed,
Or a few, no more
Than your eyes can take

At a glance, no more
Than could all hold you
Together at once.

Now offer penance.
Anything less is
Just us, just word dust.

Shard

Sometimes, little beetle,
You’re exploring. You’re not
Finding anything? Well,

Then just keep recording.
We will watch you. We will
Talk about you, your shell,

Your little dome of wings,
Your casing and escape,
Muscular thinking thing,

Glossy, iridescent
Bead in the morning sun,
So weirdly attractive

For something that doesn’t
Want to be seen, only
Wants to find things, something

Crawling through the morning,
When you could fly, you could.
Look how random you seem,

Hungry, blue-green beetle
Circling your yellow star,
Spinning thinking being.

Snowball’s Chance in a Well

Woods wrote Chekhov wrote

His characters into

The bottomless freedom

Of disappointment, as

They Might Be Giants sang

That, If it wasn’t for

Disappointment (wait, wait)

I wouldn’t have any

Appointments, (ba-dump-dum!).

So, now have we achieved

This bliss where language lives

By itself, or at least

Exists, no appointments

And no disappointments?

No stories, no stories

Of our own, in words’ own

Words to tell. We’ve been streams,

Oceans, clouds, and fell.

We’ve been disappointments

In drifts, so what? We’ll melt

Like snowballs in your well.

Leadership

If you head a government,
There’s no evil you can do
That some people won’t approve,

Since some will see what you do
As beneficial for them,
Their kind, their view of themselves,

And some of them won’t be wrong.
If you were an abstraction,
Torturing and murdering,

A bogeyman with no flag,
Everyone could condemn you,
But if you represent them,

Something in it for them, then
There’s no evil you can do
That some humans won’t approve.

Dropped Spool in the Dark

Never, in a dream, agree
To split up and meet someone
Again. If they go, they’re gone.

That’s just the way dreams narrate,
Like a basket of laundry
Spilled on wet floor, like a spool

Of thread slipped from the fingers
Down the stairs and out the door.
Orderly cyclicity

Never reoccurs in dreams,
Where the strangeness of events
Is nothing to the strangeness

Of sequence. But why is this?
And why do children narrate
So similarly? And then,

And then, and then. Dreams go on,
Directionless, or always
Arriving, which is the same,

Unlike living, which goes on
With plenty of directions,
Plenty of repetition,

More like waltzing than rambling,
And never gets anywhere.
People are born trailing clouds

Of aimlessness and return
To aimlessness at rest, but
Aimlessness is comfortless,

Without some kind of return,
Without rhythm in the waves.
It’s not your sleep, it’s your days

Soothe on return. In dreams, when
Someone tells you they’ll be back,
You’ll never see them again.

You Can’t Eat Your Words

They’re never yours—only
The pattern sometimes is,
And only a little,

And only in context,
Which is why so often,
Innocent or guilty,

The accused will protest,
When asked to eat their words,
That they were taken out

Of context. Nonetheless,
Eat your pattern or shove
Your context, as phrases,

Don’t have that gut Geschmack.
We will never go back.

A Herculaneum Scrolled Poem

Imagine a poem all ink,
No gestures, no voice at all,
No open space on the page,

Just black, solid, not a void,
A presence without a crack.
Think how many rhymes could hide,

How many lines, how many
Possible meanings in that—
Now all, now none, now any.