The Data Dregs

When you share, you share

More information

Than you care to share

Nowadays, given

Your information

Codes your breathing flesh,

Your social self, your

Cash identity,

And all your secrets.

The definition

Of sharing has changed,

Observes Ainissa

Ramirez. True, that,

But it always was

A mix of scrounging,

Half-tolerated,

And compulsory

Giving, wasn’t it?

The spontaneous

Offers of sharing,

As between toddlers,

Always were shadowed

By thefts, demands, shrieks

Of accusation,

And then some complex

Negotiations

And skepticism.

Plus, no one wants it,

Not all that you might

Care to overshare.

It’s loss of control

You fear when you share,

Not loss of it all,

Just what you wanted

To keep of you—you,

Not the dregs of you.

Childhood Under the Hill

It’s very swirly, you know,
This business of a cosmos,
Lots of spinning vortices

And floaty scarves of dust,
Lots of cloudy masses,
Clusters of pointy lights.

Someone quoted Baudelaire
As saying genius was childhood
Recovered at will, but

The magician has first
To make the object disappear
Before the showy reveal.

Patterns in Then

A digitized recording of the chaconne
From Bach’s second violin partita
Played on a Steinway grand played

Through a public-service streaming service
From a four-year old smartphone, notes
Floating over the nightstand

Beside the borrowed single bed, while the sky
Kept clear but hinted at wildfires, and tomorrow
You knew you had to move to another place.

Riff on Rift

Zero is the secret sauce
That lubricates the universe,
Never wholly anywhere,

Only ever conditional
Absence of something versus
Other things, never zero

Solus, absolute, nothing
In everything at once, but
Always everywhere in everything,

The churning of zero gears,
The slippage into which
Behavior keeps vanishing.

The Heart Red Vase

It’s not holding
Anything now—
Maybe some dust
Off the shoulder—

But its red glaze
And tulip shape
In a gold dawn
Make it the one

Decorating
The green window,
Cornelian
Cherry red glow,

Elytron-shelled,
Impervious
To emptiness,
Blooming itself.

Big Fish, Little Fish, Swimming in the Water

Take a day in which you spoke
To no one beyond hello
To a stranger here or there.

Depending on who you are,
This could have been a triumph.
This could have been disaster.

A whole day alone is hard
To find, if you’re free to move,
Not confined to some small space.

Let’s say you started out small,
A fish in your plastic bowl.
Not fun, but you learned something.

Now you’ve been dumped in a pond
Twenty thousand times as large,
And larger, linking to streams.

You’re a giant goldfish now,
After a few years of this,
Big as a carp or catfish.

Now you crave being alone,
And in still bays of your pond
You sometimes wonder whether,

If your mind grew big enough,
Would your thoughts feel caught again,
Or would they feel snug at home?

Cait Sith Shadow in a Mouse-Plagued House

You used to have your own,
Black and long, one white patch
At the throat, dangerous.

Bit like a Kellas cat,
Hunted like death itself,
Attracted to hearthlight,

Fit all the traits just right—
But could your cait sith steal
Souls from corpses for real?

It simply disappeared
One day, which made you think,
The lore had it reversed.

The cait sith are the souls,
And the Late Wakes performed
To keep the sith away

Only curse souls to stay
In the bodies they hate.
Sith cross to run away.