Hamster Wheels Will Spin All Night

Given nothing’s not measurably changing,
How is it nothing much is changing?
Given nothing much is changing,
How is it nothing much is the same?
Given nothing much is the same,
How is it nothing is the same?
Given nothing is the same
How is it nothing’s not measurably not changing?

Still So Far

The simple answer isn’t
Always the one you want, so

In those cases, you value
Subtlety, complexity,

Epicyclic nuances.
In prayer to a deity

Who feels unavailable,
Attribute it to your doubt,

The deity testing you,
The crisis of faith all yours,

A problem to be worked on,
A dark, tangled wood to cross.

Don’t announce the deity
Isn’t there to answer you.

Correction

Preventing a behavior,
Your own or someone else’s,
Your own or another beast’s,

Is almost impossible,
Short of killing or maiming
The behaver. Behavior

Can drive itself, relentless
As life that unleashes it.
Drag the behaver away

And, soon as you turn your back,
They’re back, chewing the carpet,
Injecting the heroin,

Singing praises to their god
Or best-beloved dictator,
Embracing in the arbor.

Whatever you’ve tried to stop
Persists and persists, for life
Is purely recidivist.

More Mere Being

A cemetery’s no place
For ghosts, apart from the names
And numbers on the gravestones.

A cemetery without
Visitors is as empty
As an abandoned ruin,

The stump of a ziggurat,
A roofless monastery,
The mound of an ancient tell.

Its as good as wilderness
For solitude, or better,
Wilderness being parkland.

The bodies here are being
Merely existence again.

Leave the Last One Behind

Done. You want to brood
On it, savor it,
The way, as parent

Of a newborn child
You would watch her sleep
When you should have been

Catching up on sleep,
The strangeness of it,
That emerging life.

But it’s not a child,
Not emerging, not
A life, just something

You made, rearranged,
Really, at the most,
More like the towers

Of blocks the same child
Would build a few years
Later, similar

Pattern every time
Made from the same blocks,
But satisfying

For a few moments
Before a good shriek
As she knocked it down.