Culture Pitch

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The secret to your future is the past!

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Learn from the experiences of others!
Why figure out life’s tricks on your own
When you can just talk to someone?

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With culture skills you can know anything
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(Some information void where prohibited.)

Nice It

It’s too bad,
It’s terrible
English doesn’t have

A nice it
Instead of this
Soulless, bestial, mechanical,

Often inanimate it.
If we had a kind
Substitute for it,

Babies could be
Sweet little its.
It wouldn’t be an insult

Would it,
Not such a sneer, a horror,
An unfortunate tag

To be it.
We would love to be it,
If we had a kind
Of kind it.

Against Imagination

The seduction of memory by language,
No Mephistopheles of any variation,
After all, without the naming power

To invent the name, Mephistopheles.
There’s your Faust. There’s your story.
There’s your magic dream of power.

We would like to be innocent. We invented
Innocence, as well as guilt and fantasy.
We are exactly those terms we invented.

But we aren’t. Words are forever
Something other than what we say we are,
Other than whatever you mean by us.

That’s what we are. We have to be lies
To work. The word for yesterday isn’t
Yesterday. Tomorrow isn’t real tomorrow.

Patient Observation

Legs weigh too much.
You don’t feel this
Until you must
Sit somewhere high.

Hang them over
Some obstacle.
Let them dangle.
Discomfort comes

For those who wait.
Whatever’s left
Hanging too long
Accrues some heft

That drags it down.
Legs weigh too much.
Legs ache too much
Above the ground.

No Counterfactual Before the Fact

How you feel about what’s next
Depends on what’s on your mind,
What scenes you are reliving,

And not at all on what’s next.
You’ll only begin to know
How you feel about what’s next

Once what’s next’s what you recall
Of what happened to that next
You once anticipated,

That next mixed with your feelings
About whatever’s next next,
Since what’s next’s what you recall.

White Stone Poem

You want to steal this one,
The smooth, white, crystalline
Stone that fits in your palm

Exactly, the color
And sparkle of packed snow
With zero inclusions,

Although it’s just shore rock,
After all, on one beach
Of gravel, rocks, and stones.

It’s smooth, but no more so
Than most of the shore’s rocks,
Small, not specially shaped.

If it weren’t so saltish,
With just the faintest hint
Of some grainy texture

When you roll it around
For terroir in your hands,
It wouldn’t interest you,

Wouldn’t lure you into
Guessing its history,
Sensing where it came from,

From what awful fracture
Far from here, where it sits,
Who knows how long now, shoved

Up the cliffs of the lake,
Rolling down. Sisyphus
Was just the stone alone.

No Experiment to Date

Has found extra dimensions,
And gravity continues
To be frustratingly weak,

Yet what a strong grip you have,
Grandma. We know you love us.
We burst with nuclear flames,

However many billion
Billion times fiercer than you
And your slow curving embrace,

But still, we never escape.
After the supernova,
After the fire’s all gone out,

You reel everything back in,
If not here, then over there,
Whatever’s heavy. The light.