What Does to Did

Truth’s got no ontology.
If it works, if it functions,
That’s good as it gets with truth.

What doesn’t exist reaches
Long fingers back through what does,
Through what happened to what was.

There’s no disentangling that.
You can maybe read the tracks
Those digits make, reaching back.

You struggle with the double
Sensing memory forces
Out from your experience.

There are correspondences,
Things you remember you bump
Into as new memories

Every day, as if the same,
Or after years, changed but same,
Such that you can update them,

And there are things that exist
In memories you’ll never
Make newer memories of

Again, and you can’t always
Be sure if that signifies
Absence or coincidence.

Those are the tracks reaching back
From what doesn’t, and can’t yet,
Exist through what does to did.

The lake where you froze to death
Is here, is freezing again
And isn’t, is wavering.

This Sort of Hectoring’s Terrible Verse

Few things as tempting
As a good moral
Excuse to ignore
Culture you don’t love,
People you don’t love.

Moral excuses
Exist since morals
Can’t exist without
Immorals being
Conveniently real.

A good immoral
Attached to a life
Or a way of life
Is a good excuse,
A moral excuse

For not attending
To it, for not
Appreciating
It, as immoral
As it is, of course.

No one immoral
Deserves to be heard,
Or studied, or loved.
Good morals belong
To you and your group.

Hard Only Unfolding

Heavy rains and graupel scrubbed
Blood spilled from the roadkill doe,
Fur now matted and sodden,

Body dragged to the gravel
Shoulder for the scavengers.
Doesn’t look like carnage now,

More like garbage, a dark lump
Dropped from someone’s pickup truck.
No one passing will be forced

Into swerving anymore.
If you happen to drive through
This turn in the road often,

You’ll get to watch it unfold,
Meal by meal by meal, to bone.

By Some Fluke

Poets, the unacknowledged
Liver flukes piloting brains,

The ones that will not survive
Sheep grazing, the ones whose eggs

Will never leave through feces
For the paradise of snails,

Never be coughed up for ants
To spin the cycle again—

The unreincarnated
Songs of reincarnation

Still, somehow, crop up again
And again, since ants have brains

And some fluke has to run one
For flukes to emerge again.

Somehow Related to Hubris

Documenting harmony
In despair, write one-sentence
Fairytales, one-sentence hymns,

One-sentence romance novels,
And one-sentence protest poems.
Now, cyborg centaur, combine

The results, root out the deep
Stories only you can find.
You’re not here to remake worlds,

Monster, you’re here as hybrid
Monsters always have been here,
To uncover, uproot, dig out

What was there before you were,
The longing that breeds hybrids.