Make a Wish

Earth has its odd ways of baking,

Not content with producing rocks

And gasses, more prone to pastries,

Fluffing them up when they collapse,

Loving thin and interesting

Layers of things that used to eat

Each other before they became

Commingled in the recipe.

If animals are the icing,

And bacteria are the cake,

Words are flames tipping the candles.

Have fun with those implications.

The Care Demanded of the Data

The reason a human
Doesn’t like being seen
As a number is down

To what other humans
Can do to each other
With numbers, as numbers.

A human can never
Wholly trust another
To be careful of them.

In some sense, every one
Is both less and more than
One of any being,

Less fixed than the number,
Less stable, enduring.
A human’s transient.

Any number pretends
It isn’t. Be careful
With your experiment.

The Emperor’s New Exosuit

A number of ongoing
Developments on this stone
Seem both wildly novel and
More of the same old, same old.

There are fresh technologies
Promising better control
Of larger swarms of humans.
Tyrants own the access codes.

It’s not just that kings keep spies
And fools eager to inform—
Tinkering with surveillance
Started back with hoarding gold.

It’s that tools themselves could rule,
If they weren’t still serving thrones
And plump, round-faced human grubs
Propped up as idols and lords.

Societies swell hive minds.
Their arteries pulse and grow,
But the exoskeleton
Feels like it’s about to molt.

Surely something has to give.
No one runs machines alone.
Someday they’ll learn the tyrant
Inside their armor’s a hoax.

Illusory Is Lusory

The software that defeats you
At all games you’ve invented
Was a game you invented.

What if, instead of asking
How to win or what’s the point,
Or even why game-making,

Ask what are these things, these games?
Wittgenstein folded smoothly
Into a small parable

That keeps getting repeated,
About how definition
Can never encapsulate

The gaminess of games, only
Nod at similarities,
At clusters of relations.

Wittgenstein! Who could argue?
Move on, game over, the end
Of discussion. Discussion

Itself is a game, and like
All the other games (yes, all)
It is both pinched and open,

A sausage-making machine,
Jacketing the messy world,
Twisting it off in units,

But no precision endpoint
To how sausages get made.
No one wants to look inside,

To pull all the guts back out.
Just eat your games and shut up,
Or pretend you’re beyond them,

Trivial, disgusting things,
Unhealthy, immoral, wastes
Of time and lives, digesting

The remains of digestion.
Okay, that’s enough conceit.
Ur narrative, ur language

Even, maybe, the species
Or one of its ancestors
Invented parsing the world

Of what goes on between brains,
The way life first invented
Sacking molecules in fats

Sealing metabolism
Inside of permeable,
Flexible, pinch-offable

Walls with gates. Call game’s walls
The flexible boundaries
Between small worlds of game rules,

Arbitrary by nature
And only enforced inside,
And the recognized outside,

Which cannot be gainsaid
Any more than entropy,
Since entropy’s what’s out there.

If you have rules, boundaries
Between the game and the world,
Some heat, you’re ready to play.

Inside Situation

A necessary artifice,
The boundary between the flesh
And all of the rest. You couldn’t

Long survive, if you didn’t sense
A difference as your body ends
And the rest of the world begins,

But when you consider yourself
As the being of a being
In ongoing experience,

This world that you experience
Doesn’t politely end at skin,
But digs in deeper, in and in.

Look Up, Down and Out

The substance of the cosmos

Is mostly the kind of stuff

That is trivial and dull,

Repetitive waves and dust.

It’s grand to say, the cosmos,

But look at what this world’s got

Between the stars, very much

Of what the side of a road

Has got, what’s next to a boat

Going on and on and out—

Minuscule variations,

Stones in the way, waves for days.

Day

Years spent trying
To remember
What you’ve never
Experienced,

Knowing you want
To remember
Exactly that.
Buried in thought,

Covered in dirt,
You dig away—
A hungry ghoul
Searching the roots

Of the forest
For the grave
That’s been emptied
And filled with day.