An Autumn Day

Names for bodies that never
Existed may have better
Chances to be remembered

Than names for ordinary
Individuals. Scary,
How the shelves of libraries

Preserve more gods and warriors,
More superheroes, monsters,
And honored mythic horrors

Than books on plain names who lived.
Half the few famous didn’t
Even actually exist.

So long as stories tell tales,
So long will fictions prevail.

Genderless & Savagely Patient

Starkweather’s fine line

Makes it into the New York Times,

From his poem suggesting tenderness

In the relentless attentions

Of collection agencies.

Can’t say those voices

Have ever seemed genderless

To this poetry collection collector.

They’re always distinctively binary, but

Savagely patient? Beautiful, yes.

Every stalker, every predator,

Every being who’s continued living

Depends on hunting’s occasional success,

Develops that combination,

From the house-cat in the long grass

To the spider or the military sniper—

If you can imagine it as tenderness,

Such intensive attention in your direction,

And that helps you stay out of its grasp,

Then yes, but don’t let yourself get

Frozen by a golden, hungry glance.

Attention is tenderness for the intent

On getting something to keep going.

That’s why giving debt collection

Over to the nearly infinite patiences

Of machines ends up collecting less.

Machines don’t starve for lack of success.

Lions can. Humans can. You can

Call it tenderness, since you also sense

That savageness. But do not, ever, rest.

In the Word Was the End, and the Word Was with End

The last sentence, the last word
Must be inevitable.
Will it be spoken or signed?

Maybe it will be whistled.
Will a human produce it
Or a machine or something

Descended from one of those,
And why will it be the last?
Certainty, uncertainty,

The universe gives you both,
But it doesn’t distinguish.
Everything changes, therefore,

Whatever’s around won’t be,
That’s guaranteed. No telling,
However, when that will be,

Or what way. Why do you ask?
There’ll be a last word one day,
However long your words last.

Dissidence

The blankness of the many
Soldiers and police, armed flesh
Enacting obedience,

Carrying out the orders
To seize, thwart, murder, torture
Whoever the state desires—

Often former higher-ups,
Business tycoons, generals,
Politicians fallen out

With others of their own kind—
It’s fascinating. People,
These enforcers are people,

Every single one of them.
Women birthed them. They grew up
From infancy through childhood.

Sometime in young adulthood
They signed up for uniforms
And weaponry, harsh training,

Unswerving obedience,
Who cares what musical chairs
Keep scraping over their heads?

Dissidents are also such
Individual humans
Who sometimes form masses, but

You’ll know why a dissident
Dissents. Dissidents declare
Their reasons, their intentions,

Whereas soldiers and police
Vanish under those helmets—
Shadowed eyes, shadowed faces,

Closed mouths, mute, identical
As their training and outfits
Could make them, identical

As they can manage themselves.
Every time you see a troop
Wading into protestors,

Carting off a dissident,
Squint hard at these embodied
Instruments of state power,

One body each, one brain each,
Each a set of glands, organs,
Bones, same as each dissident,

Same as the persons in charge,
Whoever’s in charge right now—
These are individuals,

Individual humans
Coordinating to crush
Individual humans

With whom they may have, themselves,
No violent history,
No personal arguments.

Is anything different,
Consistently different,
Between human enforcers

And human dissidents? What?
What is it? What if death squads,
Elite guards, secret police

Have no predictable twist
That sets them apart, marks them
Particularly for this?

Every soldier could as well
Have become a dissident,
And yet . . . they’re obedient.