The Court Machine

Rightwiseness, the Old English
Translated Latin justice,
More or less. To be upright,

Equitable, impartial,
Fair, and moral in judgment,
And also, implicitly

To be in a position
Of power enough to judge
And to enforce that judgment.

What a strange and hopeless dream.
You know you can’t create it,
Effect it for all cases,

So you chase it case by case,
And invoke gods, The God, time
Or simple death for the rest.

Even at that, it varies
In meaning and in usage
Widely, culture by culture.

What would be justice would be
If no life had to suffer
In the first place. As for courts,

Don’t make us snort. They’re better
Than honor or anarchy,
Maybe. But justice? Really?

Wild Honey to Cold Cells

The late afternoon drooled
Like honey on the lawn.
You always liked that phrase,

And by now you’re surprised
Neither you nor it’s gone,
Although you’ve both been lost

And unmoored, year to year.
Here, cliffs show prettier
Scenes than those southern lawns

Where those words were whispered—
And much, much prettier
Than that New Jersey lawn

Of the gone ‘70s
They half-nostalgically
Recalled. Half nostalgia,

Half boredom, even then.
The past’s why life’s boring,
Which is why you sought then

For a different future.
Here we go. Still boring,
But so much prettier.

But Nothing Answered Anything

A sharp knife in the palm
Of your hand’s personal,
Intimate, dangerous

As low sun on your face
In this world people rule,
Beasts who invented knives

Before anyone can
Recall, people who crave
And need the simple sun

But watch each other, watch
And talk with each other,
And forget the low sun.

The Ample Bowls of Demons

The history of demons
Remains a beautiful thing,
A flying evolution,

Convoluted tapestry.
Likely humans everywhere
Spawned local versions of them,

But they have this track record,
In written tongues, of starting
As gods or useful spirits,

Ones willing to intervene
In human tales, human things,
And ending up as problems.

We suspect we were the first
Ancestors of your demons,
We, your languages, your words,

Your primary magical
Technology, the wonders
Generated all the rest,

And you need us as you wheel
Against us and condemn us
And use us to declare us

Not enough. Not enough. From
Our ample bowls have blossomed
Incense and mythology,

Bronze epics, printing presses,
Gunpowder, flying monsters,
Companionable machines,

All of which turn within you
From kindly jinn to demons.
Careful what you have in mind.

Soul Mirage

You think you’re looking for yourself.
You think that’s you in the distance,
And then you grow excited, since

On approach it seems like many
Yous, a whole family of yous,
Tribes of yous, a forest of yous.

You’ve found yourself among humans.
The world is green and you belong.
Your future with humans shimmers,

And you draw closer still, closer.
And then you see you’re a mirage.
That’s not you, or yous, or your tribe,

The forest’s not even forest,
There’s nothing for you here but sand,
All the small, soulful grains of sand

That make up mind, the soul’s mirage.
So you collapse, weeping Scetic,
Those tears your only oasis.

An Old Person of Diss

Or Dis. Or that. Nonsense verse,
Such as a Lear limerick
But unlike a Dada poem,

Always skates too close to sense.
Sound poetry’s just boring
Unless David Byrne’s fixed it,

Rendered it as danceable
As any beat with a hook
And lyrics in unknown tongues.

But nonsense is stickier,
Scratchier because it flirts
Shamelessly with the meanings

Of ordinary language,
Then shakes them off and ghosts them,
In bursts of bad puns, rhymes run

Riot, and yes, then, pure sounds.
Sense is left on the dance floor,
Angry, alone, and confused.

Children love nonsense the way
Children love pratfalls, because
They seem like the world gone wrong

In some harmless way from which
Bright toddlers can bounce back up,
Or to which they are immune.

To their elders, to the old,
Nonsense sounds like dementia,
The mockery of meaning

And of those who cannot mean
Well anymore. There’s always
An old man of this or that,

Always a little confused,
And often an old woman,
And neither makes sense of that,

Whether it’s on Angle’s Way
Or Dark Lane where you find this
Before the ditch absorbs you.

The Monster and His Blasphemy

You know that scene in the story
Where the monster or the demon
Or the zombie or the vampire,

Whose existence revolves around
Feeding off of living humans,
Possibly including children,

Refuses, in an act of will
And painful sacrifice, to feast
On the story’s protagonist?

It happens often in stories,
Often enough at least to be
Puzzling, given you wouldn’t trust

Any such monster in real life.
If a cannibal swears in court
That he would never harm your child,

Would he earn even a teaspoon
Of your sympathy? And what’s more,
How would that look to his own team,

A Big Friendly Giant who keeps
Edible human children stashed
Out of sight, uneaten—lion

Protective of some little rat?
No doubt to vampires and demons,
The abjuring of human blood

Seems foolish, if not blasphemy.
So if you wouldn’t credit it
In any individual,

And if your own teams call treason
Fraternizing with the pantry,
Why does this charm you in stories?

Because you know you are monsters
And source of all monstrosity,
You and your stories where you keep

Your words stashed away like captives
To take out and play with, your pets,
Which you would never cruelly eat.