Nothing Intentional

You want to forget
What fellow humans
Are up to, don’t you,
Although you need them.

You don’t want to read
Any further news
About who did what
Cruelty, what snide

Power play, what fierce
Self-righteous assault,
What calculated
Grift, then got away.

Sit here on the rocks
In dry wash with us
While a small wind walks
Around the mesa.

Yes, the ground could move
Under you, kill you.
That has happened here.
Also flash floods, snows,

Also volcanic,
Churning lava flows,
Which produced these stones,
These black, quiet stones.

You know. You know, but
But for now it feels
Better doesn’t it,
To turn to the world?

Iron over Waxed Paper

This is what language can do

When language is playing nice—

Say you remember a book

You made for a class project

When you were small, only eight,

And your family had just moved

Into a house in the woods.

The book was a book of leaves

You collected with mom’s help

And checked against a guidebook.

You remember how it felt

Strange to learn oaks came in kinds—

Black oak, pin oak, and white oak—

You can still see the careful

Lettering under each one.

But your memory cluster

Left out a complex detail,

A sensory memory

You didn’t know was in there,

Until you read someone else

Who recalled gathering leaves

And putting them in a book—

Pushed the hot iron over

The waxed paper so they’d stick—

And those few words jolt your thoughts.

The smell of the waxed paper,

The feel of leaves glued to it,

The menace of that iron,

The whole awkward procedure,

The entire sensorium

Surfaces out of the depths,

Like some bog-body mummy

With its eyelashes intact,

Lifted straight out of lost past.

That. Language can do like that,

Like scents can, but more exact.

When you were younger, you read

To mangle your memories,

Try to imagine some world

Through them that you’d never sensed.

But now you’re old and happy

For a small excavation

Of what’s buried in your brain,

Worm-lit by faint synapses,

Salvage archaeology,

One meter square of one day.

Madness Is Desire

The pet obsesses
Over a button
It drools to chew on.

Push it away, pull
It off, shove it down,
It comes right back up

To chew that button,
That plain shirt button,
Just that one button.

Even for a pet,
A sedentary,
Overfed housepet,

There are other things
To worry about
Besides chewing off

One particular
Button on a shirt.
It craves that button.

For a Bit

Why are you still alive and here
To encounter these words again,
These words that you already know,
Albeit from different patterns?

Who leaves the world a better place?
Is it better now than it was?
Was that better than before that?
Was that better than earlier?

And who leaves for a better place?
What happy postcards get sent back?
Maybe what makes everything worse
Is insisting that there’s better,

Better back then, better future,
Better over here, over there.
There’s a lot of shifting, for sure,
Even tossing on your pillow,

Squirming where you sit. There’s a lot
Of that’s better or no that’s worse,
But the adjustments never quit.
Accept that; you might feel better.

You Start by Haunting Yourself

The grave architecture
Of a room in moonlight,
A white room with blinds drawn

In moonlight you don’t own,
In the dark you don’t own,
Seen with eyes that aren’t yours—

It’s an installation.
It’s a mausoleum
A configuration

Of carefully straight lines,
Scalloped curves, and pooling
Waves coming from the moon.

The skin that isn’t yours
Feels a slight chill. Machines
In the walls hum and turn

On and off, off and on.
The world that isn’t yours
Lies outside of the blinds.

There are lives, so many
Other lives, no more yours
Than your own, not tonight.

Poem on the Heath

The numbers keep changing,
So long as they’re tethered
To something that’s changing.

Strew numbers in the dirt,
And they’ll only change as
Much as their substrate does,

Digital rot, or just
Wooden blocks in the mud
With fading numerals.

It would be fun to hook
Words to random clockworks,
Tether them to changes

The words neither measure
Nor have much to do with.
Well, but that’s just a poem.