The Scenic Route

From phrase to phrase, the daily
Commute through sprawled words and lines,
Sometimes innocent enough,

More often stealing flowers
And fruits from gardens others
Planted for their use, not yours.

Fox or rabbit can’t pretend
To be as useful as the bees,
Ornamental as the birds,

Although all of those are thieves,
And all of life is thieving
From Earth’s local entropy,

And you can set down to work
Chewing over daily perks.

Metaphors Are Contranyms

Primitive, elusive, bridgers
Of borders, osmotic organs

Of knowledge and education,
Metaphors have been called all these

And by one mathematician.
You can find library shelves full

Of tomes on metaphor. You could
Spend your life cataloging them.

Your life itself you understand
Mostly in terms of metaphors,

Maybe only so. Every word,
Every number, every symbol

May be in some form metaphor.
Topics like time and nothingness

Can only be sidled up to
Metaphorically, if at all.

Essential, core technology
That they are, however, do you

Ever understand metaphors
Any better than the hardware

And software that structures your world?
Even that well? Prometheus

Didn’t steal fire for you. He stole
Metaphor. Soma was never

Potent beverage. Soma was
A metaphor, was metaphor.

Metaphor is the fire, the drug
Itself you’ve never understood,

Only used, your magic weapon
Cleaving all truth it can cleave to.

The Fortune Teller’s Globe

You can’t help yourself. You want
Good things to happen to you.
You fret bad things will happen.

Most of your life is just that,
Most of what you’re aware of.
If you’re especially good

And anxious to be useful,
You’ll want good things to happen
To certain other people,

Maybe large groups of people.
If you’re typical, you will
Only rarely wish evil.

You’ll want good things to happen.
Although you’re not always sure
Which things that happened were good.

You’re often confused, often
Disappointed, and sometimes
You’re alarmed, but you plow through.

What’s good for you keeps changing.
What used to be good is gone.
While you want, you carry on.

You’ll Trip If You Look Up

Old folks get cautious,

Not because they’re frail

But as a function

Of the brain’s habits,

The way memory

Preferentially

Encodes its alarms,

The startling events

That didn’t go well—

Accumulate years,

Memory’s bias

Accumulates scares,

And, to make things worse,

Yawning holes where you

Don’t know what occurred.

Long life’s like the night—

Burning reminders

In oceans of dark.