Brief Crack of Light Got In

If you break
Easily,
You’re not sure

What to make
Of lyrics
That sing breaks

Are for light
Between dark
Eras or

To let light
In the dark.
Why not write

Cracks are breaks
In changing,
Fragile things,

Rocks, bones, glass,
Shells, forts, walls?
And the light

And the dark
Just make shades
Of them all.

Pity the Tale

Do you want to know a few
Facts about what’s happening
In this moment, your moment?

What are you really thinking?
The story will never know.
Knowing isn’t for stories

But knowers of stories,
Whether human or machine.
A person can take pity

On a life that’s becoming
A non-living thing again,
A wave of non-living things,

And yet never take pity
On simply non-living things,
That stretch of wire fence, that stone,

That story caught in a book,
Words coiled up like barbed-wire fence
Bales leaned up against a stone,

A story that will never
Know, even if you read it,
What’s happening this moment.

Shelter

One of Gregg’s poems suggested,

Maybe morality does

Change . . . but suffering does not.

While that seems not strictly fact,

Suffering having many

Juddering variations,

Point taken. Morality

Is rule-bound, norm-bound, changeling.

Suffering is suffering,

And when in doubt about rules

And how they’re being enforced

Within your vicinity,

Minimizing suffering

In that same vicinity

Seems like the best, kindest guide.

Suffering’s mercurial,

Unfortunately. Toxic,

Quicksilver, easily split,

Easily slid through the skin.

Don’t ask too many questions

About suffering. That road

Returns to morality.

If you can ease it, ease it

Within your vicinity.

You Can Only Be Who’s Left

A woman who’s dead,

Who cared how she looked,

Who wanted to look

Like a thin rich bitch,

Used to soothe herself

By reminding you,

Whoever was there,

In a hundred years

Who’ll remember this?

In a hundred years

Who’s going to care?

It’s been fifteen years

That she hasn’t cared.

Fifteen years so far.

So far you still care.

Quondam Pond

What counts as quiet
Is whatever’s not
Screaming violence—

Here, a dog barking,
AC compressing,
Jet plane overhead,

None of them in sight—
But no harsh voices.
No people In sight.

And where are you now?
At the pond of past
Hours you never met,

Taking us on trust
To describe these things,
A bat, lavender

Skies growing darker,
A moon neither half,
Full, crescent, gibbous,

But in that brief phase
When the cut’s straight-edged
To the left of half.

Too much? The air’s warm
For this time of year,
So now crickets.

Any Bright or Drunk

You and your visual
Mondegreens, words you see
On the page or the screen
That never were words there.

When you were young, mistakes
Attended ignorance.
When you were young adult,
They seemed like cleverness.

Later, you claimed your brain
Was permanently bent
By software’s bad habits,
Tics, and autocorrect.

It’s been years since you could
Blame anything on drink.
Drunk’s not what you thought when
It’s dark. Drunk’s what you think.

Fact Is

Bubbles in skulls,
Caught and released
By aliens

Who like to see
The rising speech.
To them it’s sweet.

The bubbles merge
Or, better, burst
For skulls to fill

With guess again.
There goes one now.
Got it? Let go.