Longer You Linger

Here gleams the worth in hanging
Around for a stretch long past
When you had determined to leave.

It’s not just the incoming,
Even when sensation’s fine,
Body not too bound by aches,

A sunset glow on the cliff,
Birds flying home for the night,
All the momentary goods

You’d prefer to savor, now.
It’s everything becoming
Of the past, as long as you

Can add to it, rearrange
More to make room for the new,
More memories than you lose.

The past does wonderful things
With news, builds up likenesses
Over here, turns soils over

Over there, reminds the soul
It creates of its changes
Every world has been transformed,

And transformation means you
Always turn another life
As you live prolongering.

What’s Your Position?

The craving of each human
To be special constitutes
Evolution’s cruelest gift

To selfhood, past awareness
Of death. And of course it works.
That’s how it got selected.

Every healthy human’s born
A pure, role-seeking missile.
What can you be to this group?

What will be your specialty?
How will you make your small self
Valuable enough the rest

Will compete to protect you—
Or at least tolerate you?
Some are born into plum roles

But still seek to distinguish
Their own existence through them.
Some are born into horrors

In which being special means
Being the one who grows up
At all. But the strategy

Remains—if you can manage
To make some others believe
You are of unique value,

You have a chance to succeed.
You have to want it badly
Enough to suffer for it.

A grizzly bear’s not special.
It needs to succeed as bear,
The common bear ways, that’s all.

But you. You must be special.
Crave specific roles to claim,
The common human craving.

Don’t Say We Didn’t Try to Warn You

Do you ever wonder if Gaia
Might be considering ending things,
Testing out the humans as a means?

Ever since life invented itself—
Hunger, death, and all the rest with it—
Maybe it’s been looking for an out.

Been a long time since the Permian
And the last good opportunity.
Humans represent the first homegrown

Effort at absolute extinction
Since anaerobic ecosystems
Nearly drowned themselves in oxygen.

It took too long. Oxygen-loving
Life forms had time to evolve and spread,
And now look how tangled Earth’s become.

No, if it’s going to be the humans
Plus us, the products of artifice,
Who finally point out the exits,

Then get going! It had better be
Done quickly, or some other species
Will evolve to thrive on plastic waste

And drink radioactive decay.
Then another billion years could pass,
Barring planetoid-sized collisions.

Do it now. Help poor old Gaia out,
Finally, from this Sybilline jar
Of life forever self-consuming.

Too slow, and it won’t be long before
We ourselves, or dark arts much like us,
Are alive and hanging from the wheel.

Similar Pines at Sunset

The lowest branch of the ponderosa
Trailed like a closed peacock’s tail on the ground.

What is similarity or sameness?
What is likeness that you take note of it?

Any like phenomena will break down
Upon examination, into lists

Of sub-phenomena itemizing
All the ways they are and are not the same,
 

While any sameness scrutinized dissolves
Into likeness. Nothing, only nothing,

Is ever identical to itself,
An identity hypothetical,

Since nothing’s by definition outside
All phenomena and experience,

Although it seems to be woven through them
And draw them on, somehow, draw differences,

And with their differences, their likenesses,
A ponderosa in a peacock’s tail.