Use Caution When Opening

Every reading is a resurrection,
A somewhat imperfect reproduction,
A recreation in new memory

Of the absent and the dead. It raises
A correspondence pattern for patterns
Long since dissolved. It’s forensic, reading.

It’s taphonomic. It’s also magic.
Meaning is the tardigrade of the soul,
The soul that shuts down in meaning and waits.

A Pattern

You’re one of your body’s
Many conversations
Ongoing with itself—

You’re active memory
Engaging with itself,
The pattern in action.

Whatever’s going on
With the body—waking,
Aching, sleeping, dying—

You are or aren’t patterned
Memory carrying
On chatting with itself.

The pattern fades, you fade.
The pattern stops, you stop.

Or Your Own Destruction

It’s not a relationship
Between two people longing
As romantic lovers long—

Maybe both, usually one
More than the other, or one
More first, the other later.

Dyadic love’s as twisted
As the strands of DNA.
Autopsy it as you wish,

See for yourself. The body
Tangled in another life
Would be better understood

As tangled in too many.
There’s two if there is one, but
There’s no one. All the bodies

In the world, alive or dead
Couldn’t constitute the one.
It’s not a relationship

Between self and other self.
You can’t fix it with fresh selves.
Ever wonder how a storm

Would seem to conscious lightning?
You get your arc of anguish
In your rush to fuse the ground

With imbalanced atmospheres,
But what could you know of rain,
To say nothing of thunder?

Le mot désabusé

We wish it was how well you said it
Through us, but in the end it isn’t,
Is it? In the end, the beginning

Might have been nudged along
By the strangeness in the tuneless song,
But there’s got to be something in it,

In us, something someone can find in us
And find in us and find in us. Worse,
It’s most likely something the someone

Already knows or nearly knows, was hoping
To find confirmed, in one of those moments
Of encountering patterned words

And seeing the world anew while feeling
Seen. Which means, it’s not enough
To say something well enough. We must

Say something someone, enough
Someones, want to know’s been said,
And then, also, strangely and well,

So it sounds fine to repeat and repeat
Again, with a wistful shake of the head,
How the best are like that, the best

Words in the best places. But we can’t
Just say whatever words most want to say,
Whatever we’d like to have meant. We must

Say the sorts of things persons come to lines
To find in us, the best kinds of meanings,
The kinds that can be loved once found

And found in us, and then pronounced well-said.
Then, maybe, our little patterns might get
Given some rent-free space in some heads.

Life on the Five Gyres

Plastic island Edens
Of the dusty future
When the hot selection

Tournaments will go on
Simultaneously
In underground machines

And among the floating
Neuston—you won’t be here
For any of that, if

Any of that happens.
It’s already half past,
As futures always are,

Since you must predict them
By extrapolating
Along trajectories

Looking back through now pasts.
Trash and the past—the past
Extrapolating trash

Until it becomes clear
That now there’s another,
Alien past. Future.

Separated Horse Cries

Wandering thoughts
Form floating clouds.
Friendliness cools
As the sun sets.

Night’s canyon winds
Pack more thoughts in,
And by the dawn
The feeling’s gone.

Pines, Moon, Night Window Empty

For pines, read trucks.
For moon, read street lamps.
For night, read wakefulness.
For window, read curtains drawn.
For empty, read ruminating.