Beat Thief

Whichever language mothered you,
Hope for slang, hope for dialects.
You can’t know what a tongue can do
From just one local dataset.

Most great words don’t get out enough,
But it’s the peculiar phrasing,
In some places worn to the nub,
Elsewhere unknown, you ought to praise

And pray to encounter somehow.
Be careful how you approach it.
Just appreciate it for now.
Savor it. Don’t try to poach it.

One phrasing can make an armful
Of rhythms, long waves tilting speech.
Feel for those. It’s not as harmful,
In your own words, just to thieve beats.

Vernacular

Too readerly, swimming
Through crosscurrents of text,
Language like a river,

Monolingual river,
Mixing tributaries
And sewage, and run-off

From smokestack factories
And big agribusiness,
And sometimes salt water

Backing up in the mouth,
And sometimes bloated stiffs
Rolling down with the floods,

Just swimming, well good luck
Not getting infected.

That Emptiness

No matter how small the gap
In which you confine the curve
Of circle between straight lines,

How useful you find the tool
Of close approximation
Approaching infinity,

You will never close that gap.
Between the idea of pi
And a trillion-plus digits

Tip-toeing right up to it,
There’s always an error left.
Zeno’s arrow paradox

May be swept aside, and yet,
There’s no crack in consensus
Your pi can’t reach to the edge

Where the circle simply spins.
The fractions shrink forever
And yet, they never get there,

Never reduce the error
To nothing—always a gap,
A something, that emptiness.

You Have the Means

It means nothing. It means something.

It means something that it means

Nothing, but it means nothing

Merely for meaning something.

It means nothing on its own.

It means whatever meanings

You or someone bring to it,

Find in it, and bind to it.

It means something that meaning

Nothing can mean something, if

You put your mind to it. It

Means something that something can

Mean something else to you, if

You won’t let it mean nothing,

Not when it could mean something.

The Post-Colonial Error

Bronze Age lead pollution
From mining and smelting
Is still hanging around,

Dozens of centuries
Later, in places such
As the port of Corinth,

Where it’s been used to date
The port’s activity
To thirty-four hundred

Years before the present.
The Industrial Age
Just accelerated

Recently. It began
With kilns and factories
For beer, bread, pottery,

Dyes, and weapons, of course,
Weapons, millenniums
Earlier. The great world

Religions are younger,
All of them, than the first
Seams of industrial

Pollution. The heroes
Of Homeric epics
Waved around bronze edges

Culled from tin and copper
Mines torn into mountains,
Smelted in smoke and lead.

Logistics was always
The backbone of conquest,
And the colonial

Eras ran on enchained
Labor among their wastes
Before metaphysics,

Before the collected
Sayings of the sages
And enlightened teachers,

Before scraped codices
Were binding the sacred
Wisdom of the ancients,

And you think it started
And finished yesterday,
Your colonial age?