Reduced by Humans

Find us a horror
Wasn’t a human
On human horror,

A group of humans
Organized to harm
A group of humans,

Some single humans
Complicitous in
Some of this, single

Humans on their own
Murderous recons—
Find us a horror

Nothing to do with
The biology
Of us culture apes,

And we’ll say you’ve shown
Horror that can be
Reduced by humans.

Poured Concrete Twilight

The moment a body wakes, the day
Already has its own character,
Already has its unique events,

How well or poorly that person slept,
What sorts of dreams the person woke from,
What happened in those hours spent in rest,

How does the person feel on waking,
How surprising is the weather now,
With what boredom, dread, or hopefulness

Has the body—uncomfortable
Or feeling fairly well—arisen?
These are all instantly permanent

Features of that day of that person,
Certainly not determinative
Of the rest of the waking hours, but

Forever part of what has happened,
What happened that day for that person
As of the moment of waking up.

You’ve Felt Two Here Since You Moved

You’re cold. You need a coat.
The wind is picking up
Now that the day is gone.

You keep thumbing the books
For wisdom, new or old.
None of them are moving.

You could just watch the haze.
You could pretend you are
The individual

Who twenty years ago
Avoided this desert
For its lack of winter.

If there were real wisdom
In any human texts
From any person’s thoughts,

Real wisdom, everyone
Would probably know it.
No one doubts an earthquake.

Watching a Storm Dispersing

The self does not create the self.
The self is a storm of the flesh
Whipped up by the outer weather
Blown in on language from the mind.

The self is not the body.
The body is not the self,
But neither’s a spinning human
The moment their bond dissipates.

There’s nothing stable to the self,
And self-awareness is nothing
Much brought and returned to nothing,
Not the whirlwind, only the eye

Where the storm makes what’s not a storm,
A kind of a null that depends
On the storm, null that vanishes
As soon as the storm disperses.

Not in the Dream, Maybe, but Now

There’s only nothing hard but everything,
You wrote once in a letter in a dream.

Later, in the same dream, you told a friend
You were embarrassed to have written that,

Since, whenever you wanted to complain
About something particularly hard,

Someone would throw your comment back at you,
There’s only nothing hard but everything.

Smiling dreamily, your dream friend replied,
We only regret something we’ve written

When we know we’ve exposed our true feelings.
Put in writing, they’re harder to take back.

You protested, It’s something more than that,
Like, once I wrote it, I made it a fact.

Drowning Coast

It would break you
If you felt it.
It does break some.

Most feel the hem,
Just finger it
And pick a side

Of it to curse,
A side to love,
To try to love.

It sweeps over,
Grants some distance.
It would break you

If you felt it,
Really felt it,
The waves of it.

When Night Fails

Already in various
Nooks of the electric world,
Maximum security

Prisons and torture chambers,
Deep mining excavations,
Tunnels too long for photons,

Anywhere windowless, lit
Equally brightly all hours,
But still an aberration,

Night fails. Not in cities, yet.
Bright as they are, you still know
It’s night up there, if you’re not

Entombed in a casino.
There’s still difference to hours
In the kinds of people out,

But it’s a creeping breakdown
That could spread around the world,
Until there’s no sleep for you

Or for anyone at all
That isn’t on a slowly
Collapsing schedule. Night fails.