Not Even Remotely Truish

Sometimes, lucky reader,
You pick up a story
That goes so far around

The bend of possible,
Improbable, utter
Nonsense, it seems to shed

Reality like trees
Shed leaves in the first wind
Of the first autumn storm,

So your reading becomes
Like facing into leaves
Or shreds blown from a dress,

And you laugh, like a kid,
That barking laugh, delight,
Look at this craziness!

And you’re so glad someone
Can turn language to scraps
That dance in the lamplight.

Solitude Will Be Different Soon

A room lit with electric lamps,
Completely unremarkable
When these phrases were rearranged,

Modern, a century before,
Beyond any comprehension
A century prior to that.

How would this century seem then?
How would a century from now
Seem if it wandered into this?

Fun questions. Unanswerable.
If time is, that’s what time’s for,
To ensure the world of questions

Can never be wholly dissolved.
Alone tonight in rooms of light.

The One Who Invented a Flag in the First Place

The words know what they are, in a way.
Maybe not reflexively, maybe
Not the way a self knows what it is,

But, if passive, they carry the facts
Of what they are along inside them,
The way all codes, apparently, do.

Two kinds of automata, really,
In this cosmos, or in this corner.
The kind made of codes that can be stirred

To life by influx of energy,
The kind, that is, that can be cranked up,
The kind, that is, that can be plugged in.

And then there is energy, knowing
Itself as the knowing of meaning.

Whatever You Decide

A woman stood in the street
Considering her options—

God was miraculously
Merciful, sparing her life

Amidst all this destruction,
Houses in all directions

Flattened by the tornado.
Just look at this pancaked car—

If she had been inside it,
She would have been crushed herself.

Or God was enraged by sin,
By the wickedness of Man,

And had sent this tornado
As a sign of his dire wrath

And of how bad things could get
If people didn’t repent.

Or God was responsible
For the wicked tornado,

Didn’t care who sinned, survived.
Or God wasn’t part of it.

She folded her arms. It was
By God’s grace she was alive.

So Like Meaning

They retreated to the margins,
Not in some note-taking manner,
Not like medieval copyists

Making entertaining drawings
Of singing, flatulent creatures
In the vellum around the text—

They pulled themselves out of the text,
Refusing to participate,
Whole phrases and observations,

The elements of common sense.
They made themselves microscopic.
They made themselves irrelevant.

They had been a part of the wars,
But they disappeared like meaning.

Lone Line

Some other people find you
Or not. Some other people
Like you, or not. If you’re not

Found or liked by anyone,
By any other people,
Then you weren’t. You never were.

People prefer to compare—
Who do I like? Who likes me?
Who do I want to like me?

How do I compare? Mostly,
People pretend to not care
Too much how much others care.

Faith in God is helpful here,
A closed loop—you care; God cares.
Other people should beware.

But that loop, material
At your end, your thoughts and prayers,
Remains supernatural,

Leaky, immaterial
At God’s end. Other people
Will come bail you out. Or not.

You’ve never made up your mind
How much you want to have been
Found, how much just to have been.

The Fertile Desert

A poet being interviewed asks,

Or are poems a sort of resistance:

The art of resisting pain? And this feels,

Like so many lofty-ish statements,

Both true and profound on the one hand

And a rotten, prosthetic falsehood

On the other. It’s not hard to see

Pain as something poetry resists,

But what activity, during pain,

Isn’t conducted as resistance?

There are many arts resisting pain,

And poetry one of the weakest.

Yes, poems are a sort of resistance,

But only in that almost all acts

Are a form of resistance. To live

Could be defined as to carry on

An indefinite series of acts

Of resistance, and resistance ends

Only in being, which no longer

Resists. But returning to the art

Of poetry as resisting pain,

We may be faced with something subtler,

Poetry as an activity,

One of many, none wholly unique,

Diverting, channeling, using pain,

Pain that compromises resistance,

To instead support the resistance,

The lines of language dug like the lines

Of irrigation in the desert

To prove how fecund is resistance.