Probably Not

Kind of a shame there’s no end,
Given the amount of life
We spend on little endings.

Even disintegration
Never gets to know the end,
Only involves more ending.

There’s ending and there’s ending,
But watch what happens
After endings. Things begin

To head toward more endings.
If there really were one end,
One goal, one edge to knowing,

One end, and we could see it,
There it stands, always has been,
And, past it, always nothing,

No more starting over, no
Recycling, repurposing,
No back to the drawing board,

No more the middle of things
No more oh well, life goes on.
Wouldn’t that be comforting?

You'll Show Control

Superstition is just
The unrequited love
Of control. No one has

Control under control,
Ever, but when even
Pretense is difficult

To maintain—as with war,
Lotteries, the weather—
When mastery’s hopeless,

And a glimpse of control
Is rare, people seduce
Causation however

They can—with rituals,
Dances, special clothing
Like the senninbari

Belt hidden under clothes,
A thousand stitches sewn
By a thousand women,

That will control bullets,
Keep them from killing you,
Prove your love of control.

And will control love you
Back? No, you know, but still
You hope to show control.

Gone Moment Caught Going On

At a glance, the photograph
Of an airport terminal
Looked crowded, and probably

The terminal was, that day.
But, scrutinized carefully,
Only a couple dozen

People could be distinguished,
Travelers waiting for flights,
Milling around the gift shops.

In a few hours, all dispersed,
Most hundreds, if not thousands,
Of kilometers away.

An old thought circled in mind.
Each skull in the photograph
Held a mind chewing on life.

However statistically
Measured and defined, each mind
Had to have been occupied

That moment, whether or not
Memory lost most of it,
With an awareness of self,

With various bits of want,
Wishes, and anxieties
That went on and on and on.

Hugging Catastrophe

It’s exhausting. It’s planning
Some huge event where the details
Are vortices of more wicked

Surprises, more unintended
Consequences. Anticipate
As many as you can, you’ll fail

To have prepared well for them all.
If everyone on the planet
Except a few protagonists

And their antagonists vanished
To set your story up nicely,
Nice and tidy, tightly focused,

Have you considered the details
Of what would immediately
Fall, crash, burn, explode, seize up, smash?

It wouldn’t simplify the world
To excerpt most of the people.
Life didn’t get simpler after

The plague of Justinian or
The Yellow Turban Rebellion.
Divert a river and all kinds

Of chaos emerges downstream.
You can’t chart chaos in advance.
Dystopian storytellers

Are just excusing what they crave,
A simplified social setting.
If you really meant to model

The end, not use it as pretext
For tales of a few survivors,
Prepare yourself to be worn out.

It’s exhausting. It’s gaming out
More variables than atoms
In your head, where you just wanted

To isolate some characters,
Dose them with fear and violence,
And then watch where the gossip led.