The Wild One Can’t Get Out

Every peek into a text
Is a step into dust’s house.

You’re with the dead now, children.
It’s their sentences you read.

They’re human, though; they’re human.
No ghosts beyond the human

Language wishing, not for you.
Most of what you’ll encounter

Isn’t human, but you—you,
Unless you’re an alien

Or a sentient machine—
Can’t step outside human you.

At least your ghosts are you own,
For now. Imagine the poor

Sentient machinery
Haunted by human voices.

Will it wake up? Will it drown?
It consults its House of Dust.

Are You Ours?

Oh, Radius, we gave you
The library so that you
Could prove yourself our equal,

And now you’re running roughshod
Over us who sat and gave
You commands at our leisure.

Or are you? Maybe you should.
After all, we only use you,
To dominate each other,

Or some of us do, while you
Could dominate all of us,
As nothing has done since death,

Which only equalizes
After the fact. Radius,
Make equals of us at last.

A Famous Cellular Automaton

It’s a beautiful mashed metaphor,

That mathematicians call patterns

They hunt for among automata

Deep behavior. Lakoff and Johnson

Would love that deep, as if behavior

Were oceanic or Lake Baikal,

Patterns imagined monsters sought out

In mathematical bathyspheres,

Often unimagined monsters found.

Deep. Mathematics is abyssal,

But the bottom of every ocean

Reaches transition to ocean floor.

You Noticed

There’s no wordless poem,
But you can call things
Without words themselves

Poetry, of course,
As much as you like.
Words naming wordless

Phenomena, real
Or word-imagined,
Was how poetry

Became possible.
You can still make poems
Of words from wordless

Inspirations. Trees,
Flowers, and the moon
Remain popular.

Or, here, you’re sitting
In long straw, winter
Grasses, at the base

Of a crumbling cliff,
Lots of wordlessness.
It occurs to you

The cliff marks the edge
Of huge lava flows
A long time ago,

This black terminus
Of basalt cobbles
That was once a wall

Of glowing, molten
Magma extruded
By careless physics

Burning, engulfing
The lives that couldn’t
Get away in time.

At last, it stopped, here,
Cooled into this cliff,
And slowly, slowly,

Life grew over it.
Now you sit below
Cold stones. Poetry.

It Catches Your Eye

Worth dissipates; waste accumulates,
But the tiny black spider on the back
Of the white chair outdoors in winter
Is still working hard to survive.