Fire in Progress

You build the machine.
It topples over.
You build the engine,
And then you lay siege
With it to starve out

Whoever you’ve trapped.
The engine explodes.
You build a new one
And bombard the coast.
Slaughter indigenes.

The machine explodes.
You build a lot more.
You conquer the world
Or most of the world.
There’s fire in the hold.

The One

Here we are, words in poems
Offered in a market
Of pure monopsony,

Only our composer
Keen on acquiring more
Of our compositions,

A true monopolist,
Wanting every last one
Of us, while no one else

Would want any of this,
Except to break the lines
Down to words for scrap.

We try to be content,
Like teachers insisting
Their careers were worth it

If only they transformed
One student, like preachers
Claiming a single soul

Converted’s worth the toil,
Like speed-dating lovers
Trying to find The One.

We have our composer
Who reads and re-reads us.
What more needs to be done?

Skillful Animals

It may be the way
The world truly works
Can never be put
Into any words,
Stories, or numbers,

In which case these games
Of science and faith
Are truly pure play,
Honing animal
Skills but little else.

Each Soul’s Uniquely Made of Ghosts

A problem with remembering
The dead is that your memories
Function no differently for them

Than for the living. You recall
Who you recall, some vividly,
Some barely at all, but you don’t

Sort them into bins or coffins.
Worse, who you are may be composed
More of memories of the dead

Than of the living, even those
With whom you’re presently living.
Your thoughts are blurs of kinds of ghosts,

Those with embodied avatars
Still updating regularly,
Those alive but long since fading,

And those neither here nor distant,
But nowhere—and you’re all of them
As well as the one soul sees them.

Your Nudes

Do with us, your humble
Language, as you wish, but
Remember that we’re us—

No matter how closely
You’ve forced us to follow
The vivid, physical

World, it’s words you’re turning,
Never dirt. Try sculpture
To really work with earth.

Pick up the Mouse

You wake, dream-flayed,
In genuine
Darkness, but no
One puts matches

Into your hands.
You’re not that poem,
You’re only this
One feeling for

Some kind of switch,
Some kind of match,
Not for the light
But for the flare

Of the engine
Of quick strangeness,
One word’s world changed
In your fingers.

The Night of the Sweet Word Day

Wlaffyng, chytering, harryng,

And garryng grisbittyng—words

Have always been problematic.

We aren’t always all that stable,

In tongues nor in orthographies.

English of course is horrible

For grafting, chewing, and swallowing

Up its terms, amid much grating,

Chattering, and gnashing of teeth,

Among its self-appointed priests.

Change reeks with horror of decline,

Which is secretly the horror

That tomorrow’s living bodies

Won’t understand the living words

You grew up using and writing.

Well, they won’t. Sooner or later,

Even if the species defies

Its own grim prognostications

And continues to reproduce

Billions of viable offspring—

Even if humans prove sturdy

As wasps, or tortoises, or pines—

There will come a day when this sweet

Word, day, like every other word

Prancing along in these dark rows,

Won’t mean a thing to anyone,

As if it never dawned at all.