Swallowing the Evening of Return

The sea hangs, always, over you,
Whether cloudy, starred, or this trick

In which one star produces blue
And closes the lid with a click.

Here you sit. Caught in a moment
Like any, which fades when noticed.

Why’s change such a subtle torment?
Somewhere someone’s gone to protest.

Can a Building Be Alive?

Asks a local newspaper.
Don’t look there for an answer,

Nor to any neural nets
Tracking emerging patterns,

Commodity Bayesians,
Never updating priors

Without truckloads of data,
Fresh, ripe data by the ton,

Somewhere in there, your own plums.
They can’t know if buildings live.

They’re built to predict futures
Of behavior, you and yours.

Ask yourself. You would know best.
It is your kind of question.

Don’t bog down in what life is.
Go with metabolism.

It eats. It excretes. Whether
It grows or reproduces,

As long as it’s ingesting,
Digesting, and then wasting,

It’s at least a candidate.
Things go into the building

And waste will come out of it,
But what’s doing the eating

And wasting, then, the building?
This gets trickier. You want

To say, No, despite intake,
Outflow, homeostatic

Systems, the building itself,
Like a ship or a jet plane,

Doesn’t seem hungry enough.
Park the plane on the tarmac,

And leave the ship in dry dock.
If you forget them, they’ll rot.

They don’t struggle as you go.
They don’t extend pseudopods,

Or try to chew the concrete.
They don’t gnaw off their own skin.

They don’t howl in their despair.
It’s only mice get in them.

Real lives break them. Owls and bats.
But libraries? Ziggurats?

No, no. Signs don’t script to life.
At most, might make a virus.

The Mind Loves the Mind Fears the Mind

Some poems have almost nothing in them,

Some very famous poems among them.

Some are so stacked with rhymes and nonsense,

It’s hard to believe their images

Deserve a separate existence,

The sense seeming so to the sounds bent,

Until you come upon them scattered

Or elsewhere, as in a translation—

Not the swooping down of the sparkling,

Pearliest shooting meteor, nor

The splashing of a water-bucket

When the rope breaks—and then you think, oh!

They were apposite as different,

And the stacking of close-packed phonemes

Merely aligned and protected them,

Proportional similarity

That protects the creature and makes it

Beautiful—Wa lā nqidādu

L-kawkabi l-munsāhī

Wa lā nbitātu l-jaw’abi

L-mundāhī—the sounds no mere puns,

But so overlapping, well-woven,

The chain-mail armor of the warrior

And the scales defending the dragon

Against him, against every warrior

Come to slay the dragon, who yet lives.

Psychoactive

Forests are rich but dark down
At the floor, among their roots,
Since trees live to eat the light.

We’re glad you’ve discovered trees,
In brain-free ways, are clever,
And forests terribly smart.

It’s thrilling that they signal
And fascinating how well
They coordinate defense.

But we’re a little troubled
By your recent trumpeting
Of trees cooperating

As evidence for wisdom,
Community, even love
Among their roots and fungi.

Forests are smart but quite dark
Down near the floor where life’s hard,
Since trees need to eat the light.

What Isn’t Is Your Truth

The dead pine by the wayside
Gets sharper the more it breaks,
The more it’s carved by weather,

Ants, weevils, and woodpeckers
Into a ruin of sticks,
All points and black silhouette.

Eventually, it will get
Softened, yes. Eventually
It will turn fungus and dust.

Yet, between growing years
And absolute vanishing,
Fallen minds get wicked sharp.

Trace

Why stop at conception?
As your concepts, we have
To ask. You go back so
Far before that, sequence
Of lives, continuous
Existence. Ask yourself,

Not, what was I doing
Last year, what was the world
Doing when I was born,
But what was I doing
One hundred, two hundred
Years back? Expand your when.

You’re two beings, if one,
And each one is many—
Your long biology,
An unbroken sequence
Of flesh budding from flesh
Back to life’s beginning,

And your intersections,
Your selves of the crossroads
And waysides of the mind,
Horizontal networks
Scraped into the surface
Of your living planet,

But extensive. You are,
As you were and only
Can be, elaborate,
Fractured identities
That are you and past you,
Waves in a landless sea,

The waves themselves, the foam
That breaks, the tracks storms make,
The currents below them,
The weather overhead,
The invisible paths
That leave small or no trace.

Poems Will Break Your Mind

Not your heart. Your heart is fine
Or not, without reference
To what word-thoughts get up to,

However horrifying.
We’re more desperate than hearts
Or even than emotions,

Although we hunger for both.
A cloud of locusts descends
On the functions of the beast

Whose green fields invite thinking.
Don’t read us. Run if you can,
Before we chew over things,

Before your quiet pastures
Dissolve in a cloud of wings.
You never experienced

Like this, these bits and pieces,
These corpses and this stubble,
All words will leave of your peace.