Luck’s a Builder Unimpressed by Artifice

Ah well, the delicate existence
Of exquisitely non-living things
Like poetry, cloth, and pottery.

A library’s no different than dung
To the climate and geology
That may or may not chance to save it.

Some small bones vomited by a fish
In a warm Devonian ocean
Endured by statistical fortune.

The elegant writing on mud bricks
Was preserved thanks to its qualities
As mud. Mourn the papyrus copies,

But even baked clay takes its chances.
Most splendid urns crumbled to fragments,
And most of those shards ended as dust.

Of textiles there’s scarcely anything
Wasn’t deposited in a tomb,
And most of those tombs were soon looted.

Ok, so a great many such things
From tombs to linen to papyrus,
To clay jars stuffed with bark-paper scrolls,

To burned, buried, mud-brick libraries,
To fish vomit and dinosaur dung,
Have outlasted billions of humans.

The ends of things aren’t as circumscribed
As the ends of lives. Still, endurance
Heaps coincidence for pyramids.

Tell Is an Ancient Term

One way archaeologists
Compare rates of violence
In ancient communities

Is by extrapolating
Carefully from the remains
To estimate how often

Skulls had been coshed in. The good
Life, then, is to live somewhere
Where it’s highly unlikely

Someone will smash your head in,
Relative to background rates
In the times through which you live.

Living people can sense this
Without archaeologists.
Folks move in the direction

Of diminished skull-smashing
Incidents, or diminished
Equivalents. But how much

Sorrow is there, has there been,
That how much smashing of skulls
Answers a telling question?

He’s Actually Searching for What’s Outside

Do you see that man
Frantically swiping
With his forefinger
The gleaming tablet
In his other hand?

What is he doing?
What is he trying
To get to or find?
We want to ask him,
But we’re way too shy.

You’re not answering
Either, so we’ll ask
Ourselves. The answer
Is that whoever
Is searching that fast,

Traveling that fast,
Not pausing to check,
Believes that they know
Their destination,
Only hurrying

To get there quickly.
That shouldn’t ever
Be mistaken for
True searching, which is
Almost motionless.

The Perfectly Carved Sense of This

Imperial core, pit of the peach,
You’d like to think it was government,
Capitalism, Communism,

Some entity you could root against
Among the weaponized traditions,
One specific, terrible system

Among so many systems clanking
Like armored tanks on the battlefield.
You’re terribly right it’s not enough

To write from within, to ask people
To be better, to be good yourself.
What optimism to break system,

However. Have you seen how many
Systems have been blown to smithereens
And abandoned through millenniums?

Each system is another monster,
Another chimera created
Out of insect-like, faceless humans

As imagined by other humans.
It’s everyone’s system for itself
In the Battle of Armageddon,

Which never gets a lasting ceasefire,
Never gets it over with, never
Really begins, but they’re always winning.

Rat Fires

The interpretation of dreams
Begins in the dreams, lies mostly

In dreams, and most of what you think
You dreamed was only your in-dream

Interpretation of the scenes,
What was who and what events meant.

As for dreams’ intense emotions,
Explosions had their origins

Nothing to do with the doings,
Power cords dream rats were chewing.

Checking for Split Ends

You twine your hair,
Common habit
For a person
Idle enough

Or distracted
Or bored. If asked,
Why you do it,
You’d probably

Shrug ruefully,
Say something like,
How should I know?
Why should you know?

Explanation’s
Just habit, too,
Idly grooming
Tangles that grew.