Extracellular Children and Other Weird Products of Metabolism

Aren’t we all? Every poem, every trace,
Every track, tract, townhome, exosome,
Every hopeless case and anxious face.

It’s so hard to live without losing
Something to some other living things
Along the way. Goes without saying,

Really does. Most lives refuse to say
Anything about what they’re losing
To the other lives along the way.

Just build something close to the highway.
Try to get rid of all of your waste.
Try not to give the good stuff away.

When levees break or faults liquefy,
When sheriffs show up to evict you
Who can’t be bribed by what you can pay,

When the black mold makes itself at home
With the latest invasive blood ants,
Or when you’re just so sick of the place,

Make yourself a little poem, and place
Yourself in its mobile vesicle,
And pinch yourself off and drift away.

A Red Fragment Is Carefully Recovered

In all the endless books on time—
How’s it shaped? Was it invented?
Does it even, really, exist?—

One all-time favorite metaphor
For illustration purposes
Is the shattering of a dish.

Such infinite ways the pieces
Could fly, but only one way back—
Thus statistical certainty

Says time means there’s no going back.
But there’s scatter, and then there’s trash,
And information in that trash.

Sure, there’s fine uniformity
In piles of well-graded gravel,
Or sand or salt for the market,

Small hope of any treasures there.
But you know you’re on a midden,
Intentional ruins or not,

When you spot a bit of fossil,
Scrap of old glass, painted fragment
Of something broken, nondescript,

Yet not completely nondescript.
If anything like a god lived
Ever, however long ago,

However since crumbled to ash,
Anywhere in this universe,
We have faith in your sifting skills,

The odds you’d find some bit of skull,
Some fallen wall, faded symbols.
Carry on with those telescopes.

Birth and Death of Math

Say your parents and grandparents
Happened to have died, having lived

All their lives, reasonably long
Lives, with ten fingers and ten toes.

Say you know some folks who started
Out with a deficit, maybe

Seven fingers, or just two toes,
Or who had a full contingent

To begin with, but lost a few,
Or most, of those. In their coffins,

Do your grandparents clench their fists?
Urned or scattered, do your parents

Wriggle their toes? Probably not,
But who really knows? There’s much more

To dying than losing digits,
Much more to life than having them.

But having pronounced that like it’s
Some sort of wisdom, ask yourself,

Would you not rather, if you can,
Keep the digits you have on hand?

The Sleeping Passions

The worst riddle of dreaming

Is why awareness must be

Participant in them.

Fine if the brain needs to dream

To winnow, shuffle, and comb

Through tangles of memories,

Finding ways to fit the new

Usefully among the old,

The better-prepared to wake.

But why drag awareness in

To feel hallucinations,

And most of all, most of all,

Why the out-of-proportion,

Unhinged, over-large, intense

Storm surges of emotions?

Listen to someone struggle

To adequately narrate

The terror or the pathos

Or the fine charm of their dream.

They’ll explain the happenings—

The flights, ghost lovers, longings—

But it’s not enough, is it?

Even the teller knows it—

It doesn’t seem that scary,

It doesn’t sound that perfect,

But it was terrifying,

But I felt so peaceful there.

The scientists who explain

Successfully dreamed feelings

Could unknot the need for dreams.

But Just Ourselves

It’s sort of
A three way
Dickinson

Imagines—
It’s the third
Character--

Afterthought--
That claims them
In the end.

Earth’s Strata Are Littered with Little Engines

It seems like most lives,
Most aspirations,
Just run out of days,

At least among those
Capable of hopes,
Tormented by things

With feathers, perching
In their skulls for years
And screeching at them,

Needing to be fed,
Waiting to be freed.
Dreams shift a little,

On their swinging bar,
Fluff their clipped wings, sing,
Peck at tin mirrors,

That sort of thing. Years
Go by in the same
Way, more or less, same

Skull, same thought patterns,
Still puffing uphill
Against entropy,

Hopes kept in a cage
By the engineer
For early warning

In case the boiler
Gives off toxic fumes.
You shovel fuel in.

You want to win this,
Achieve that, find love,
Find your inner self,

Peace of mind, transform
Your neighborhood, leave
The world a better

Place for your offspring
And theirs, and you do,
You do some. You lose

Some. In the middle
Of chuffing hard work,
Of projects and dreams

(The average person,
One researcher claims,
Has about fifteen)

You run out of steam.

What Your Brain Growls While You’re Out

The reflective wakes up with
Some other part of the brain
Whispering, death is coming,

Death is coming, the world is
Ending soon. The motel room
Around awareness murmurs

But keeps symbolically mute.
It is not much past midnight.
Everyone has been asleep.

No one yet should be awake.
But the reflective reflects,
This has happened traveling,

This or something much like this
A number of times before.
It’s almost like eavesdropping—

Awareness wakes up too soon
And catches the brain warning
Itself the world is ending

Soon. So far, hasn’t proved true,
But what, to the brain, is soon?
Does this brain know anything

Or is it simply pacing
Thoughts like lions in their cage,
Toothless, restless in their rage?

Death is coming soon. The world
Is ending soon. But the dawn
Will take forever to break.