One Dark Ruin Hurled

When poets aren’t composing
For lovers, wished-for lovers,
Or friends they won’t see again,

When they aren’t remembering
Childhood mistakes or abuse,
Or the cruel things said to them,

When they aren’t taking notice
Of the landscape around them,
Its creatures or its seasons,

They tend to swivel the lens
Toward more general things,
Surveying whole histories,

The past as single pattern
Repeated to abstraction.

In Favor of Crimes Against Nature

Nature invented
Criminality,
Indirectly, sure,
But definitely.

Nature invented
Humanity and
Then humanity

Invented nature
And crimes, and contrasts
Between your nature

And nature’s nature,
And if you just can’t
Escape your nature,
Your crimes are nature’s.

Liquid Nonlinearity

You’re the sweet spot—
Complex enough
To fascinate,

Not so complex
That chaotic
Oscillations

Lead to collapse.
Here’s the question—
Are we, too, sweet,

Not too sweet but
Sweet enough that
We’ll get through this?

The human world
In many spots
Aches in its joints,

Teeters, crumbles,
Injures itself,
Close to collapse.

Some behaviors
Are chaotic
And violent,

But will it burst?
Will it remain
Interesting

Enough without
Spiraling off?
Are you still sweet?

Ginormously Fantabulous Grundles of Words

Some words are so wonderfully clumsy
And ugly that despite their concrete lack
Of specific suggestion they can be

Memorable in themselves. You recall
The school friend overfond of ginormous,
That time a writer acquaintance dismissed

Another author by grumbling, I don’t
Think her writing’s all that fantabulous,
The professor who made sweeping gestures

While frequently deploying the odd phrase,
There are grundles and grundles of data!
There’s a Klein bottle quality to these

Clunkers with built-in intensifiers.
Gigantic is gagging on enormous.
Fantastic’s half swallowed by fabulous.

Great bundles collapse into each other,
Too massive to keep discrete. Fusion words,
Overstuffed portmanteaus of abstraction,

Hideous really, without referents,
Turning into more of themselves, until
They actually stand free from reference

And become vivid in their garish way,
Excess words of excessive insistence,
Bleak slag heaps of insect ecosystems.