Tarnished Mirrors

The fairies were just strangers
After all. Unfamiliar
Folks always look suspicious,

And if they’re common enough
In open-air encounters,
At a distance, in markets,

But never socialized with,
Their costumes, speech, and home life
Remaining mysterious,

They’re bound to be magical
Or underworld types, edging
Close to inhuman, no good,

In any case no telling.
Honestly, the whole species
Of humans is haunted, mad,

Prone to imagining things,
Seeing each other double,
And others are dangerous,

Often, that’s true, but it’s not
Merely wariness spooks you.
You barely can see yourselves

As fully ensouled beings,
And any slight difference
Hints at uncanny to you.

If Games, Then What

As Roeder points out, in the short run,
Luck’s everything, but in the long run,

Luck is nothing. That’s not paradox.
Press down on the meaning of nothing.

Yes, now you see it. That’s where all chance
Would have to be heading, to nothing,

If chance starts out ruling everything.
Games are water. Molecularly

Unusual perhaps, in the ways
They behave, expanding when frozen,

Transitioning abruptly to air,
The vapors, random cloud formations

That land again as torrents or blizzards.
Don’t let the fogs of chancing fool you.

There’s no resisting gravity long.
If water, then life. If life, then games.

Meaning All Edges, No Grip

No one seems capable
Of loving the monster
Without also naming

The monster’s opponents
And enemies the real
Monsters. Monstrosity,

As a moral meaning,
Must somehow be preserved.
If the tiger is not

The monster, the hunter
Is, and if the dragon,
The alien, the night

Are not monstrous, saints are.
It’s rare the enforcers
Of order are monsters,

Except to outsiders,
But the real, true monsters
Know they are, know we are,

And no one beyond us
Ever was or will be
Monstrous. Only monsters.

That’s the Spirit

If you’ve never
Violated
What the highly
Esteemed poets

Of your era
Would consider
The real spirit
Of poetry,

If you’ve never
Composed something
The best couldn’t
Spot as dreck, as

Not poetry,
Then you’ve never
Composed something
That’s poetry.

Stars or Stories

The trouble with perspective—
Not only is it wobbly,
Sliding around like a loose
Ring on an old curtain rod,

But it’s the whole contraption
Falling on your head at once,
The velvety drapes of night
And the choking dust of day.

Your life is little and huge
All at once, barely a blink,
A glimpse, and voluminous
Memories that consume you,

Too many, too repeated,
All the nights piling on you
Stitched with your pinpoint stories
Planted in them as moth eggs

To hatch and gnaw away cloth
Until you don’t and can’t know
What was the you you dreamed lived,
What was stitching, what torn holes.

Feel It?

What is it, what really is

It that can never be tamed,

Never domesticated?

No, darlings, not violence.

The raging mob is among

The most domesticated

Activities known, only

Exceeded perhaps by war.

What’s more social than a mob,

More tame than well-trained soldiers?

Stampeding cattle aren’t wild.

Leviathan alone was

As monster, as something else,

An excuse for violence,

Accused of inciting it,

But only ever vicious

When wild with desperation.

And ah, that’s it, isn’t it?

To be wildly desperate

And otherwise uncaring,

To not be obedient,

Disobedient, or thrilled

By righteous anger, screaming

Strike, it is permitted us!

You can’t tame desperation

In the solitary beast,

Can’t tame an indifference

To your civilization.

There’s a little wildness left

In every domesticate,

A longing for emptiness

Which brings the wild peacefulness.

There’s a little left in you,

Yet. Pray you don’t much feel it.