What Will Do Is as What Does

Looks like my brain has decided I should
Do this now, thinks the neuroscientist.

Looks like the Devil’s trying to get me
To do this now, thinks the pious deacon.

Looks like my search engine has determined
I’m looking for these now, thinks the browser.

Looks like the world’s forgotten to consult
Poets now, thinks the terminal hermit.

Clinamen, the Neutrino Event

While you’re struggling with your people’s struggles,
Or with the struggles of other people,
Or with your personal, universal
Struggles in coming to terms with your life,

Spare an odd thought for things like neutrinos
That are now, this instant, passing through you,
Already through, you never noticing,
Sailing through the open and uncurtained

Window that your flesh is to neutrinos,
Window wide open to a fine spring day
That is you and your sorrows and struggles
To those marvelously light neutrinos,

That may, once in a very rare while, strike
A proton chiming faintly in your thoughts.

Reading Poems to Stall the Hospital

The world works, a poem

Of Sandra Simonds

Insisted, Even

From here. . . . The world works

Wonders, it added,

Then walked back. The world

Works / but not today.

Not for me. Functions,

Maybe, the world does.

Works-for-me implies

Something good enough.

Works wonders suggests

The miraculous.

Not today argues

For an exception.

In a sunny chair

In desert winter,

Aware of failure

Of the internal

Functions of organs

That might as well be

The world, given they

Can’t be abandoned,

Parts of the world work.

The propane heater,

The fridge compressor—

Those things work wonders,

Make a mockery

Of entropy, dance

In defiance, but

An emergency

Room looms, merciful

Nightmare. How world works.

Insidiously Somehow Contriving by Some Way or Other to Represent to the Imagination

If reality really is one
Consensual hallucination,
The consensus is that there must be

More to reality than is seen.
The conviction that there must be rules
Beyond the patterns humans measure

Is as human as taking measures.
How many passages of fiction
Gasp beached by their imaginations,

Struggling to say how something was weird
Beyond words, beyond experience,
Reduced to begging readers to bear

Responsibility for raising
To mind the unimaginable
Glories and horrors they’re suggesting?

When someone gestures to worlds beyond
The known, they’re trying to turn your head
From all your felt details to the blank.

You’ll Never Take the Wrong Path through the Stars

Night’s only not so scary
Now since, unlike the forests,
The oceans, and the mountains

That used to scare you, you can’t
Actually wander off or
Set sail and get lost out there.

Sure, you send small robots out,
Take a few steps on the moon,
Cogitate missions to Mars,

But you’re not really going
Anywhere, not deep into
The night, the great starry night.

You can stare at it blankly,
But you can’t get lost in it.
Inaccessibility

Makes it less mysterious,
Less like the unknown you fear,
More like background lights at home.