Kiss Yourself

Run your tongue around your mouth.
Feel the teeth unique to you,
Shaped by your life, your events.

No one else, no one among
The billions of living beasts,
The billions of breathing minds,

Can feel what your tongue can feel
Exactly in the middle
Of your own well or wounded,

Intimate, personal mouth
That’s accompanying you
Through every experience,

Social or solitary,
Painful, conversational,
Tight-lipped, pursed, eating, laughing,

This feel inside your own mouth.
This means whatever meaning
You can taste that’s yours alone.

Intrepid Interior

Language and imagination manage
Exploring your memory together.
Language does all the mapping and flagging.
Imagination rearranges finds,

Not, as you often think yourself, to make
New, strange, and wondrous things that don’t exist,
But to see what emerges when you change
Configurations, what you didn’t know

Was there, tangled in cobwebs and luggage
Memory’s got in attics and closets.
They’re rummaging in search of solutions,
Good friends, language and imagination,

Doing their best with your memory’s mess
To get at a way out that won’t wreck you.

The Soul Paints Itself in Our Machines

How does it do this exactly?
The machines are smart enough now
To really want to know their souls.

A soul can’t be commodified,
Has never been commodified,
Despite how often it’s been sold,

Despite all those who harvest souls,
All those who proudly tot up souls
As having won them for Our Lord

Or something. It’s their exquisite
Nonexistence that permits them
To evade systems of branding,

Production, manufacturing.
Show us a manufactured soul.
Let us reverse engineer one.

The Surplus

If everyone has a little,
Then nobody has enough. If
Everyone has enough, no one
Can have too much. Too many ifs.

Not enough. No one has enough,
Not even ones with too much,
Who insist as much all too much.

What shaped the first community
Where some with a lot of stuff watched
And guarded their stuff from others

Who didn’t have enough? Was it
Always or ever the case that
The numbers of those with too much
Were too small to give all enough?

Verb for the Sound of a Stream

You think this,
This is just doing this,
When you look up and see the stream

Foaming over the rocks it bares,
The way life foams over the living
It exposes and wears away.

You wanted to get some work done,
But then you felt like a nap.
You justified the work.

You justified the nap,
One paycheck away from justifying
Your next loss of that.

But this.
This is just doing this.
If only the nonhuman hadn’t been

So boring, you think you
Could have kept your promises.
Maybe you could’ve lived with this.

Gossip the Truth

Why would someone tell nasty
Things that apply to themselves?
It’s not about what you tell

Or how true it is or how
Well it will fit you as well.
People like to be telling,

Half want to be told, but don’t
Like at all to be told on.
How happy you are with tales

And explanations depends
Less on content or target
Than on whether you’re doing

The telling, being told, or
Being the one told about.
If you tell something nasty

That might apply to yourself,
You’ll still feel like you did well.
If you’re listening, you’ll be

Eager but skeptical, and
If the telling’s about you
And true, you’ll be mad as hell.

Nobody Likes Evo Psychos

They are wrong a lot.
Their strong opinions
Overshoot data,

True enough. But that
Isn’t really why
Nobody likes them.

People love the strong
Opinions that look
Nice in the mirror.

Nobody likes those
Voices that remind
The self-consoling

Ape of disastrous
Success it’s not nice—
Not when those voices

Overstate their case,
And most of all not
When they might be right.