Narrative Abandonment

All the bits of stories
That you never finished,
Wouldn’t it be fun to
Call them a collection,
Print out that collection,
And call that flash fiction?

Nothing flash about them,
More like amputations,
All abandoned projects
Barely beyond concepts,
Dropped as soon as started—
The heart quickly hardened

Over stumps of fables
About worlds full of holes.

The Honors of Successful Controversy

Worth it or not, you want it,

Or at least the body does.

It takes enormous effort

To go against the body

Determined to keep living

Irrespective of life’s worth,

The reason that suicides

Are both relatively rare

And overly violent.

If the thoughts could cheerfully

Advise the body drifting

Off to sleep, die in deep sleep,

Darling, before the morning,

Or even the morning dreams,

And the body could do so,

The species would soon dwindle

Peacefully, longevity

Being the quirk of a few

Who were mostly curious

And confident they could go

Any time they wanted to.

The Quiet Crowds

How many uncounted molecules float
Between you and the nearest obstruction?

How many interactions will they have
In air, while you’re not paying attention?

There are methods for summing over them,
Laws of gasses, means of estimation,

But no one deploys those methods always,
Every moment, at all hours, no one could.

The air goes about its quiet business,
More events than you can ever notice,

And much of that moves through when you breathe in,
Stirred atoms altering your decisions,

With never a rest or gap between them,
Never an end to their interactions.

Torn to Bits

There isn’t much horror to peace.
If you’re lucky, life carries on,

And you’ll never be traumatized
Too much by what happens or what

Happens to you, and you’ll lose youth
And love and loved ones, but slowly,

As the bodies around you age
Intact, not one blown to pieces

In front of you, not one cut down
By violence, no children killed.

If you’re lucky, you’ll reach the point
Where the only horror you’ve seen

Is that, even wholly at peace,
Perhaps especially at peace,

A person will detach from flesh
To vanish into wilderness,

The body going on intact,
The person never coming back.

You’ll witness how awareness splits
Before the body hosting it
Can quite give up on hosting it.

Collection a World Later

On an afternoon in the desert

With a half-moon and half of a wind,

You stumbled upon Derek’s claw-print

In concrete / After the bird has flown,

And, well, it’s a bit sentimental,

His portrait of an old, widowed man,

Dying in a farmhouse At the edge

Of a new estate, but then again,

It was a young man’s poem, and young men,

When not mocking or mad at old men,

Can be awfully sentimental

About melancholy old loners,

Fancying themselves half among them.

Now Derek himself had aged and gone,

Leaving this among his many poems

From a fairly long life in Ireland,

Where he had been well celebrated

Enough and had presumably not

Died as comprehensively alone

As the old man in his young man’s poem,

His claw-print after himself had flown.