May Not Work, but It’s True

The night you were alone
And didn’t want to be,

Someone did think of you.
Someone’s always thinking

Of you, someone alone
Except maybe for poems,

Trying to picture you,
Trying to reach to you.

Tenoxtitlan

They also invoke, Enrigue

Suggests of words, meaning beyond

Signifying and signaling.

Invoke and evoke are both terms

Hinting at how meaning occurs,

Especially aside from signs

And signaling information.

In the informational sense

Two labels distinguished only

By orthography can both mean,

As it were, the same thing, the same

Town with alternative spellings.

But in the mind, within the skull,

Evocations wildly vary

From person to person, even

When they’re in no disagreement

Over the reference and versed

In the same shared connotations,

And one person may use a word

To invoke the authority

That stands behind what’s in their mind

And another deploy the same

Term in hopes of generating

An aura, which may be their own.

These are meanings, what words can mean

To an attention invested

In them, meanings attention brings.

Doing It and Doing It

Making any act a crime
Never stopped it happening—

A massive apparatus
Of enforcement possibly

Made the act extremely rare.
This goes for the crimes you know,

Consider as must-be crimes—
Murder and theft, for instance—

And the crimes you consider
Should never have been called crimes.

And it will probably go
For some act legal for you

That will be made criminal
Under future conditions.

People will keep doing it,
Maybe less than you do it.

Same Grubs in Better Armor

History told as a series
Of wars, civil wars, and dates
Of battles and short-lived kings

Often assassinated
By friends or family members
Is both wearisome and boring.

A chronology can cover
Centuries, a millennium,
With nothing getting better long.

Only introduced inventions
Ever rattle the succession.
Sometimes large religious movements,

People pouring in from elsewhere,
Or the arrival of a plague
Can change dramatis personae,

But the cycle recommences
With succeeding wars and rulers,
Conquests, internal divisions.

If it weren’t for the retention
Of new tricks of technology
As people found them, history

Wouldn’t ever change. Then again,
History, including weapons
And pens, began as inventions.

Consider a Spherical Cow

What are the salient parts?
What do you have to include?
What can you risk taking out?

It’s different from prediction
When you’re really telling it.
Math models have to align

With the incoming changes
That constitute your new past.
Language models have to tune

To lingering memories
In people who have each lived
A singular, finite life.

Language models reach inside
A skull like a box of wires
That are also guitar strings,

Tangled and tuned differently
In every linguistic skull,
To try to coax chords from them,

Tunes beyond them, yet themselves,
And the modeling of chords
Must stay in those spheres of skulls.

Untied and United

The limbs of the deer
Are loose on the road.
This one has been rolled.

The thoughts of the child
Still circling the skull
Of the elderly

Patient by the side
Of the corridor,
Intact and disjoint.

The way sentences
Snarl like fishing lines
And have to be cut,

Copula severed
From both the subject
And object, is a.

How long will it take
For flesh to let go,
For corpse to be bones?

Life against Fire

The figures of speech
Favor life—they’re twins,
Life and fire, like death

And sleep, though it’s less
Clear which is stronger.
Or, one’s ancestor

To the other, which
Makes things clearer
Since fire’s much older.

There’s a peculiar
Thought—what if fire is
Not older than life?

What if hunger was
First, what if hunger
Is the dark matter

Fueling gravity,
Holding fires of stars
Together that should

Scatter? Fire as one
Of life’s waste products,
Hence toxic to life.