Humanity by Numbers

Never the scale
Always the name

Collective good
Communal good

Corporate bad
Conspiracy

Extremely bad
Coordinate

Good if you’re good
A collective

Community
Bad if you’re bad

A corporate
Entity—where

Are your faces
We want to see

Your eyes when we
Work with you when

We surrender
To your numbers

Surrendering
Since outnumbered

This Means You If You Mean It

It’s the only miracle that remains
A miracle, which means, if one attends
Closely, that it’s the only miracle.

Meaning, that is, that only meaning sings
Itself in and back out of existence,
Wholly gone, unlike all information,

Which translates back and forth between matter
And energy and never goes away.
Meaning goes away. Meaning emerges

From nonexistence as you create it,
The way you created your deities,
Ex nihilo, and meaning falls away.

You know this. You invented this. You know
You mean. You’ll go with meaning when you go.

Mes to Memes

Mes were memes avant-la-lettre,
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,
Avant Dawkins, avant le Web.

Tricked out and armored in her mes,
Inanna dropped in to visit
Her big sister, Ereshkigal,

Ending up stripped of all her mes,
Slaughtered and hanging upside down.
She came back, and that was a myth

For its own particular time,
But, plus ça change, it works for yours.
Here strides global humanity,

Thousands of years, countless wars on,
Tricked out and armored in all its memes,
Trying to take mere being on.

Not Without Honor Except in Its Own Country

If a dancer turns movement

Into poetry, pretty

Clearly that’s a compressed way

Of saying what the dancer

Does with movement is like what

Poetry does with language.

If a face is poetic,

If a note is poetic,

If a scene is poetic,

The same. That face, note, or scene

Is to faces, notes, or scenes

As poetry to language,

And what is that? Elegant

Is implied. More expressive

Is implied. Exceptional,

Exquisite, rare are implied.

A kind of intensity,

A density approaching

Ideal motion, perfection

In symmetry, tune, landscape,

Whatever it is that is

Poetic for the reason

That it compares to its kind

As poetry to language.

It’s not hard to understand,

When reading about a dance,

A portrait, a melody,

What terming it poetry

Intends. What poets intend

Is tougher to comprehend.