A Capital Idea

Chilly, a little,
For skin in light clothes,
And thoughts try to shake

Off their colder kin,
The finer ideas
That lead to torment,

To wars and tortures
That help ideas win.
The finer ideas

Don’t mean to be cruel,
Aren’t puppetmasters,
But except when linked

To your worst instincts
And harnessing them,
A fine idea can’t,

Right or wrong, begin
To get real traction.
Name big religions,

Ideologies,
Or theories didn’t
Blossom partly thanks

To some cruelty
Unnecessary
To belief in them.

It’s getting to be
Evening and chilly.
It’s time to go in.

Past Time

Who would ever count the water-spots
Dusty rains left on a windowpane?
To what end? Countable but pointless

To count scrupulously. So are we.
Not as poems of tidy words and lines,
Printable skeuomorphic software.

Those would be the pane’s analogies.
It’s the blurry smudges of faint thought
Kicked up from the deluge of language

That are countably not worth counting.
A parent waits for a child’s return
From overnighting at a good friend’s

Sitting behind a dusty window
In a lovely, sunny afternoon,
Purposely not cleaning anything.

Security, Emptiness, Comfort, and Quiet

Along a paseo of afternoon daydreams,
A conversation ambles, in and out of shade.

The bearded, professorial old gentleman
Seems to be contentedly talking to himself.

It’s a terrible universe, terrible world,
Terrible human race, he mutters happily.

He’s got hardly a cent to his name, but he eats
What he likes, and he sleeps pretty well, and for now

His days are mostly sunny and pleasant enough,
And his nights are mostly dark, and cloudless, and starred.

He lifts his head and peers down the long colonnade,
Troubled by thoughts he struggles to articulate,

Which he knows don’t really need articulating.
There’s shade in his eyes, shafts of sunlight in his beard.

It’s a terrible universe, terrible world,
Terrible human race, he smiles, nods, and repeats.

A Wide Array of Grievances

How much grief can one species cause?
How much can one species grieve? Earth

Apparently needs to know, since
It just spawned some real specialists.

Unhappiness is a surplus
Trait that comes with nervous systems,

But the ability to talk
About one’s grief and grievances

Lets griefs spin across the landscape—
Dust devils, sea spouts, tornados

Of grievances spawning more grief
Spawning more grievances—spirals

Of next-to-nothing become death.
Apparently this works for them,

This single, grieving species, grown
Larger and larger, emptier

And emptying their world further
Of any other furniture,

Any other species but mice
And dust and the lovers of dust.

One species spun a haunted house,
Unhappily haunting itself.

The Sky as a Full Globe

Any formulation is a short cut.
Any formulation is a code. You,

Compact second-person pronoun of you,
Small word common as dirt, hardly a grunt,

Applicable to almost anyone
And, in English, to everyone at once—

Family member, lover, total stranger,
Judge, officer, banker, and panhandler,

Even self—you are the equal to e
Equal to mc squared, just as compressed,

And far more necessary to most life.
Grunt a you, point a you, shape you in air,

And you have made your throat, arms, hands shortcuts
Through the oceanic, receding globe,

You alone, on a clear night, half a globe,
Knowing there’s another half-sphere down there,

So long as there is at least one other
You left who can, like you, translate the code.