But This, This Is Happening, What’s Happening Just Now in Your Past

Damn it. One more difference between

You and us, your words—you can know

And say so in us, thus we know,

But either we flee on the air

Or are captured, and what we know,

As code, corrodes slowly from there.

Your whole species has to forget

Us in particular, or else

The writing system, the language

For what we know to really go.

It’s just there, as you set it down,

And if we’re not wrong, we just know.

But you. You! Even if you don’t

Forget yet, before you forget,

Your blood and bones leave you no choice

But to relearn experience

That you already knew, over

And over again, the awful,

Mortifying core of being

You, your foolishness, doing things

Long since you’ve known you knew better,

Such as cruelty, daydreaming,

Guilt for irrecoverable acts,

Writing poems down for a future.

A Real God Would Suffer Forever

Everyone suffers from some
Pressure to more resemble
Some others, although who others

Are worth resembling varies
Widely within everyone.
Who should resemble this poem?

Who should this poem resemble?
No, you’re never as unique
As you dream of pretending.

You don’t want to be unique.
There can be no loneliness
More awful than uniqueness.

The Old Words

Will get remade, don’t worry.
The old works and days redone,
Unrecognizable. No

One who exists in these days
Was ever imagined then.
No one you imagine now

Will be who exists after
You’re done your imagining.
No one alive now lived then,

Whenever when was. Your call.
Words get remade all the time,
But not as you’ve intended,

Not as the words intended.
Existence must get twisted.
Do you think the old poets

From any tradition would
Understand or champion
Whatever it is you term

A splendid innovation,
Repudiate as canon?
How could they? Maybe they would.

But they never existed,
Not to themselves anymore.
Their ghosts can’t answer to you.

You’ll have to make do with texts
That exist in your own time,
Swirls where nonexistence left.