Monoughtonnet

And if there’s no border, no other side,
No transparent dome dividing the night,
Why is it you’d be so dissatisfied?
Why would you prefer this world as a lie,
Given fantasy oversimplifies
And your most rococo world-building slides
Down the same showy amusement park rides
Into the same monsters’ jaws every time?
Reality isn’t unrecognized,
Just something awkward you’d rather deny
Is all. You pretend unidentified
Holes pock it, leading to its underside
Underworld or to magical outsides
Where everything makes sense, you don’t know why.

Intimate Encounters of Unnoticed Kinds

In the microscope’s image,

The micrometeorite

Appears roughly spherical,

Somewhere between cratered moon

And rolled-up elephant dung.

It came from cathedral dust

Scooped from Canterbury’s roof.

You could almost imagine

A dung-beetle alien

Climbing out and rolling it

Through the pollen and ashes,

Its life support and spaceship.

Your world is covered in these

Interplanetary specks

Always falling from the sky

Like Biblical angels, like

Philip Pullman’s magic dust,

Like but not. Some’s on you now,

On your eyelashes, your skin,

Or embedded in your clothes.

This is how events happen,

How great change accumulates

Potential in increments.

Some claim life on Earth began

With organic molecules

Seeded by meteor dust.

Hey, that’s you! You’re life on Earth,

Aren’t you? Of course, you’re human,

Likely, if you’re reading this,

Or machine intelligence,

And might have more important

Issues to worry about

Than being merely alive.

The alien dung beetle

Doesn’t mind. It rolls its rough,

Near-indestructible sphere,

Into some crevasse of you

For safe keeping, then settles

Itself to send its reports.

At the Time

Little did we know.
There’s an expression—
Nothing to the we

Or the I, little
At least, but to you,
Audience members,

Story consumers,
It’s its own genre—
Little did we know . . .

It signals drama,
Plot twist on the way,
Usually the end

Of a peaceful time,
An optimistic
Interlude, promise

All hell will break loose
In the narrative.
Little did we know

We were living in
Precolonial
Times. How little

Did we know strangers,
Alien beings,
Demonic angels,

Plagues, wars, droughts, cancers,
Dark horsemen with swords,
Earthquakes were coming. 

Here’s how we got here.
Here’s how we survived.
Little did we know