IKR

No need to crave what you can’t escape.
Death chases life until life
Catches it. Enough. Shut up

About dying already.
You’ll do it. You’ll get it done.
And only survivors wish

Loved ones had done better jobs
With their lives or their sad ends.
No one ever saved a life

Except as tales about it.
Now, what shall we do today?
Watch three dozen wild turkeys

Wander through scrub oaks in snow?
Read you some atrocious poems
Someone has tried to translate

From Petronius without
Spoiling all the ancient jokes?
Let’s just sit a spell. Life, right?

But Never Found the Book

Ideal continuity—
Let it die and then come back.
Sleep has its words, but not so

Many as in waking life
And never so organized—
At best, dancing around sense

Like a poem, like a surreal,
Surreally realistic
Construction of wonder tales

Collaged from mnemonics, like
Verses by Kathleen Ossip.
Sometimes, you wake up with us

Left on the pillow, under
Your tongue, trying to finish
What we’d begun, whatever

Sleep wrung from memories, but
The same ones die and come back
And die and come back, never

Reaching the end of the poem,
Much less completing the book.
Oh, look! More words! Continue.

Wishes Overgrow Dogma

Superstition is religion
As the instinctive expression
Of longing and anxiety,

Between the world as it has been
Experienced and the same world
As it might be, strangely altered.

Big religions are instructions,
Machines that stride across the world
Like awkward puppet elephants,

Impressive and scary to watch,
A little flimsy in the joints,
Stepping on the superstitions

That will sprout back like weeds between their toes
And climb, like vines, the legs of their machines.

Please Solve the Following Problem

The book won’t open.
You have the title
And the author’s name,

But it won’t open.
You try to calm down.
This is not a dream.

This is a problem.
You have the right book,
But it won’t open.

We’ll have to pretend.
If you could read this,
What you’d discover

Would not be stories
Or a new science
Or any self help.

If you could read this,
You’d see a figure
On a white sand beach

On a moonless night.
The surf’s low. The wind
Blows sand in the waves.

The figure sits there,
As if dunes were chairs,
A book in the lap.

The book won’t open.
It has to stay closed.
The wind is too strong.

Thank You for Your Contribution

It’s not all illusion.
None of it is. It’s real,
As far as you can know,

Since, obsessed as you are
With what’s real and what’s not,
You sense the obsession

Has to do with the fact
You don’t know what is real.
You don’t know what real is.

Illusion’s invented.
It’s a concept that helps
You set up boundaries

Between other concepts,
Between world and game,
But it unsettles you

To know that the concept
Itself is in the game,
And you get so dizzy

And wonder if you can
Ever tell world from game.
If you can’t, it must mean

It’s all game, illusion.
But you see, if you can’t,
It could mean it’s all real.

Believing there’s a game
And a world, or could be,
Believing it matters

What’s real and what isn’t
Is your contribution
To everything that is.

Systemic Hydra

Unless you try to kill it
Or, you know, starve it to death,
The system’s one of those beasts

That won’t age and die itself.
It’s spooky that way. Monstrous.
No one likes it. No one likes

A beast that won’t fall apart.
No one’s gets called heroic
For supporting the system,

Staying within the system,
Except when playing the spy
Who destroys it from within.

The system’s always system.
God is never a system
Except as part of systems,

Those false gods that must be fought.
Only coaches love systems—
Coaches, gamblers, and grifters.

So let’s bring down the system.
It’s always the damn system,
Never the people in it,

Except in that they’re systems
Of words like that word, system,
Created by life’s systems.

In Winter’s Nick

Ferocious imitator
Everyone is, humans are

More inclined to consensus
Than to conflict. The conflicts

Flare between imitators
Of divergent conventions,

And conventions will diverge
Since, one, you can’t metaphrase

The world, thus each paraphrase
Is bound to differ, and, two,

All things evolve over time,
Including each consensus,

Which is just a stricter way
To say, everything changes,

And, three, the species competes
By coordinating groups,

So you can’t have unity
Globally unless you change

Bodies or circumstances
Drastically, which you haven’t,

Yet. For now you can complain
About how the other groups

Conflict with your consensus,
And complaining about this

Is the closest to global
Consensus you’ll likely get.

Meanwhile, Earth turns, winds bring storms,
And weird stars burn through their nights.