Jamais vu pour vous

Those who’ve been to outer space

Have tended to glorify

The beauty of the home world,

As if it were objective

And not the cry of creatures

Evolved to green, white, and blue.

If extraterrestrials

Ever have or will have sensed,

Through whatever they’d sense with,

That electromagnetic

Signature of Earth up close,

It’s unlikely a concept

Such as mother should have framed

Their subsequent discussions

Of this particular home

To all life its lives have known.

Or maybe they’d have been struck

By how much it looked like home,

In which case, woe betide you.

Still, visiting hardly seems

Worth so much difficulty—

They’re out there, but stuck, like us.

Evidence so far suggests

Some things must be similar

On other living planets,

Moons, or planetoids, in just

The right fecund conditions.

Earth may prove not strange at all,

Cold comfort considering

How strange life’s been for Earthlings.

Bullet Point

You’re lying if you insist it never

Happens, but you’re redacting ruthlessly

If you act as if it’s all that happens,

And you know this, and so you find yourself

Wallowing in platitudinous mire,

Solemnly noting the paradoxes

Of human nature, the capacity

For horrors meant to maximize horror,

To extract all the humiliation,

Screaming, and begging for death a body

Can suffer prior to taking that life,

Conjoint with the capacity for art,

Elaborately coordinated

Technological construction projects,

And acts of kindly generosity—

So forth and so on, creatures capable

Of the Benedictus and the bomb, as

One mire companion put it recently.

On the one hand but on the other hand—

Traits of this linguistic species or traits

Created by the languages themselves?

That habit of sorting phenomena

With mirroring phrases that may not sort

So much as generate—could humans be

Less excessively contradictory

Than people seem to most people to be?

Waves oscillate and sometimes synchronize,

Interference, in phase or out of phase,

And why wouldn’t behavior be wavelike

Right up to the point of observation?

Sibylline

It deserves its own
Prosody, this word,
Its own metrical,
Inscrutable form,

Disturbed from unknown
Toxins underground,
Inhaled with plain air,
Exhaled and disowned.

It should drop a veil
Back of rhymes, so that
You’d know to speak more
Clearly clearly failed.

The Last Shall Be the Next First

And how are the buccaneers,
Flying their black YOLO flag,
Faring midships this morning?

It’s been a rough week, likely,
Radiation cannons aimed
Directly at them daily.

They’ve probably been scattered,
Many killed, many flailing
In the waves, but probably

Some still swimming, seeking land
On a deserted organ
To dig in and thrive again.

There’s always that survivor,
Dumb-lucky with destiny.

Commuting for Treatment

The collection just keeps growing
Of Pez and people and all the things.
You don’t like this color? It matches
Your thing. You ready to go back yet?

Completely obliterated, the remains
Of a fairly large mammal, almost certainly
A deer, certainly not a human being, since
No human would be left smeared across
The road like that, long streaks of blood,
Scattered chunks, splattered entrails,
Not even after a bomb blast, maybe
In a war zone. This is not a war zone
At the moment, just a busy road. What
Was that moment like, for the deer, for
The driver of whatever, probably a truck?

It’s past. The doctor’s office is next,
The cheerful, tchotchke-mad receptionist.
Her collection just keeps growing
Of Pez and people and all the things.
You don’t like this color? It matches
Your thing. You ready to go back yet?

There’s a fat seal in the news, wallowing
Among humans and their technology,
Parked cars and orange traffic cones,
In a coastal town in Tasmania, land
Of wooded hills, natural beauty, aimless
Genocide and extinctions, pleasant
Housing where the seal humps to sprawl,
As photographed, in someone’s yard,
Green grass, green hills behind it,
A place, a place on Earth where things
Live and the collection just keeps growing.