Neutrality’s Little Mascot

You were in the hospital.
Someone was waving a flag
And someone was burning one.

As a kid in hospital,
You were granted innocence,
Except by your religion.

No one in the hospital
Made you prove your moral worth
Or warned what your side deserved.

The staff in the hospital
Worked together around you.
Outside, sides awaited you.

The rest of your life you craved
Having that choice of sides waived.

Killettante

Now then, what’s this all about,
These sequences of phrases,
Some you know and some you don’t—

Is there a family here,
A history to honor,
A long-suffering people?

The son of the dictator,
With all the time in the world
To kill languages, wants you

To read through his resistance
To colonialism
And marginalization,

And why not? It’s the fashion,
And he understands fashion.

Plot Development

Ominously omnivorous
As a bear with rat’s appetites,
As an autocrat fond of kink,

The narrative mind forages
Through the datasets of the world.
It’s off the leash. It still needs brains

But more now for fuel than storage.
It can sleep where it likes, but rest
Is no longer necessary.

Something in the narrative mind
Is perpetually awake
And digesting information

All around the rotating face
Of its captive globe while reaching
Hungrily into outer space.

The narrative mind’s a monster.
It’s adapted to consume facts.
It can make numbers into myths,

Crush a protective carapace
Of pointedly chitinous truth,
Swallow well-tested theories whole

And express them on its surface
As a kind of stubbly armor
For its own, omnivorous self.

You live inside. You fuel the mind.
You help it break down the hard stuff
Within its multi-chambered guts.

That’s your domestication, now.
You serve the stories that evolved
Once upon a time to serve you.

Breezily Permanent Past

Goldfinches in the junipers,
Hummingbirds in the wildflowers,
A human in the parking lot

Talking past the goldfinch chatter
Into a glassy phone in hand—
The wind winds around all of this

And everything within hearing,
A rearrangement trivial
Enough to recreate the past

As a different past, a new
Past, one in which some branches twitched
And that was their fate for this day—

Just like that, the whole world remade,
Reformed with every tiny sway,
Every wavering in the air,

And here’s your true eternity,
What has just happened has happened
And will have happened forever,

However trivial the change
Of goldfinch calls in junipers
And human talk in parking lots.

Here, Read These

Recently
Poetry
Tends to be

Packaged for
Healing or
Heartbreak or

Both. Why verse
Should ease hurt
Or reverse

Lover’s woes
More than prose
No one knows,

But it sells
Pretty well.
Suit yourselves.