A Bid for Your Attention

Listen to how the music starts
In your own favorite genres,
How it usually begins
Pianissimo then builds, or

Bang! and then settles in its groove.
It’s rare for any piece to start
Exactly in a middle range.
It needs to get your attention.

This is not the standard wisdom
Of much artistic theory
Explaining the goals of artists,
The teleology of art.

But beyond the Revolution,
The need to draw nearer to God
To express terrible heartbreak,
To cry out against injustice,

Reaffirm ties to ancestors,
Unpack the events of a life,
Of lives, of all of life itself,
To demonstrate beauty, passion,

Friendship, craftwork for craftwork’s sake,
Ideological triumph,
An impossible catalogue,
Lies the craving for attention

And the sense it’s hard to get.
In every human creation
Feel for that little giveaway,
Begging your human attention.

Until People Aren’t Part of It Anymore

Every Armageddon since Megiddo,
If not since much earlier butchery,
Has involved some recent technology

Handsomely amplifying violence,
And it’s not that the individual
Warriors and grunts have gotten more brutal

Nor any less. The people destroying
Each other remain as capable now
Of surplus cruelty as people then.

But whether composite bows or cannons,
Horses and chariots, satellites and drones,
Sooner or later, the new devices

Get pulled together for some massive clash
Demarcating boundaries of eras,
Which always feels like the end of the world

And never is anything close to it.
Human life-ways, shall we say, may implode,
But Armageddon’s just the next worst war.