Overnight in Ontario

Four people who had each made
A dim-witted, foolish financial choice
For low stakes were rewarded
With sudden wealth—one considerable,
Three others enough to retire.
It said so in the news. Four people
In one night, in one province of mostly
Sparsely populated Canada, got rich.
Although fortune’s odds are terrible,
Still the wheel’s payouts are multiple
And sometimes quite concentrated,
Though clumps must be coincidental.

Think how much careful design and deep
Understanding of probability, how much
Banking system built on nation states,
Armies, and transactions conducted
By fairy numbers, how much intention
It took to produce any such a coincidence.
The truly accidental fortune or misfortune
Could never be remotely so intentional,
Although also, somehow, rarely so random
As what millions designed well to be so.

Devious as Leaves

But no more, proud as you are
Of your overt cleverness,
Primate. You are smart, silly,

Half-assed, half ass. You are wise
And solemn as the birch leaves
In a brief, mountain summer,

Executing strategies
Honed by ancestral epochs
They weren’t part of, didn’t see.

Since your past’s as much longer
Than your imagined future
As comet’s tail to bow wave,

Why not imagine facing
That way? These leaves, gone in spring,
Never anticipated.

Running on Fumes

Things are not going well for people right now,
Not as a whole. There’s no beacon in the world.
All the faiths and ideologies are old.

You need a new plan for social perfection,
Not because it would work. It would give you hope,
And it might be better, something to work for

More than the current clotted mess of too-crude
Solutions to solutions’ own violence.
Prayer and fears of the end spin old news again.

Pest

When death happens fast enough,
Life’s just broken, not so bad.
In the morning, on the porch,

You check the traps set to keep
The deer mice out of the house.
Whenever you find one snapped,

There’s the small, crushed, flattened skull
Caught by the bar in mid bite,
One quickly broken device.

The thing you dread is finding
One that almost got away,
Not broken head, broken leg,

Knowing that life’s been dragging
Its disaster all night long,
Trying to escape by dawn.

What a Creature You’re a Part of Faking

There’s a scene in a kids’ cartoon
In which a.bunch of tiny gnomes
Assemble into a monster,

As good a figure as any
For the absurd monstrosity
That’s the tower of humanity,

This unfathomably massive
Assemblage of individual,
Foolish gnomes, grown terrifying

As long as all coordinate.
When the monster collapses, gnomes
Tumble, spray, and sprawl everywhere,

Lacking any true cohesion,
Glue, multicellularity.
But while it works, it is fearsome.

Ideas That Actually Generate New Ideas

The characteristica universalis
Of Leibniz is real, if not quite so cohesive

As he dreamed of—the language of all thought goes on,
Endlessly exfoliating syntax and terms,

Whether mathematical, metaphysical,
Archival, or nothing but ordinary speech.

No single analogy will do, no charades,
No deoxyribonucleic acid pairs,

No zeroes and ones—it’s all of them and then some,
All the likenesses it can cook up for itself.

It has machines within it. It is like machines.
It is like more than machines. It is what it means.

Fictitious Murders

Make good stories. Real
Murders are too rare
And too ungraceful

In motivation,
Means, or solution.
Really, the real ones

Go mostly unsolved
For lack of effort
And resources, not

Because they’d be hard
To figure out. Real
Murders barely fill

Content appetites
For true-crime podcasts,
Gnawed over like bones

By a pack of dogs.
Fictitious murders
Are pretty, clever,

Diabolical—
Maybe bloody but
Only routine when

Part of war stories
Or action movies,
Where it’s pretended

Slaughter’s not murder.
The single murder
By someone unknown,

Well, that’s a riddle
And fun if you like
Riddles, but rarely

Will it tell you much
About why people
Keep killing people.