But These Are All Tricks

Deceit and cheats are trifles,
And the brain’s sense of smallness
Characterizes value

As shrinking with illusion.
What’s less true must be littler—
Metaphor deeper than bone,

Older than the words deployed
In its service to the hurt
Senses expecting wonders.

But all actual magic,
Darlings, is small. Real trifles
Slip through the rip in the stitch.

Another Day in Another Year in a Remarkably Similar Universe

Surprise, surprise, periodicity

Is costly—the more accurate the clock,

The greater the entropy in its wake.

Accurate, accurate—define for us

Accurate. A clock is a flow meter

For entropy. Periodicity

Is the metric. Periodicity

More perfect is therefore more accurate,

And it seems you’re back to wheels within wheels,

Once again, stacked circles as the divine

Measure, stacked so that each one ticks the same,

The perfect circuit, the perfect return,

As if you cut a hole in the cosmos

And every moment that passed through that hole

As wave of change changed exactly the same.

An ideal clock would burn an infinite

Energy and produce an infinite

Entropy, and thus for yet another

Round you’ve found the ideal can’t possibly

Be. It’s modular, this philosophy,

Its end its beginning, to coin a phrase.

Atom undergoing excitations

And decays, more and more regularly,

More and more entropy, like any soul

Approaching pure divinity, any

Approximation singing in its chains

Of limitation, approaches the same.

Perfection would be the perfect sameness

Of two distinct things—moments, circles, waves—

But there can be no twoness that’s sameness,

No clock without periodicity

Imperfect enough to contain some change,

And nothing’s the same without that least change.

The Luck of the Quotidian

And then it goes on
The way days go on.
Every time you miss
The catastrophe
Vaguely suggested

By skies or distant
Events, you’re tempted
To take it in stride.
Perhaps you shouldn’t.
Perhaps you’ve been marked

For catastrophe
Each and every time,
And ordinary
Life’s astonishing,
Not for its small charms,

Usual blather,
Inspirational
Messaging, and sweet
Moments among plain,
But for your sheer luck,

Near miraculous,
In dodging once more
The deliberate
Intention of days
To take you all down.

OK

The day feels frail and ominous,
The fast clouds over wildfire plumes,
And all its other texts appear
Like neighborhoods of darkened homes,
Shadowed faces in the windows.

Well, that’s poetry isn’t it?
The dire and merely fanciful,
Although it would be better if
There were a few humans in it,
Maybe a recent incident,

A vivid childhood memory
Or another somebody done
Somebody wrong poem. Bit cliche,
The fast clouds, wildfires and all that,
But ominous is ominous.

And Then It’s on to Something Else

Sirens in a small town
Pushed through the predawn dark,
Sudden, loud, and then gone

Like a human life, like
Human life, all in all,
An unexpected noise,

Disruptive and maybe
Exciting, probably
Tragic, then nothing much.

Insects pinged against lights,
And long clouds like bones
Slid by the crescent moon

That shaped your ancestors
In no small part, noiseless
Attractor in the dark.

Decisive Singing Four AM

Almost frighteningly loud
Crickets on the borrowed lawn
Under warm and heavy clouds,

It’s not only Wittgenstein
To whom it’s occurred
You’re always alive aware.

We would point out you’re often
Alive not at all aware,
But yes, you’re not yourself dead.

Why make any decisions?
Because you can’t decide not
To decide and stick to it.

Ache, listening to the crickets.
You’re caught up in this chirping
In the dark with all the rest.

You could give it a rest, but
You can’t because you are. You
Can’t not sing until you can’t.