Barrens

The local Alhambra is gone,
A pseudo-Moroccan rose fort
Planted as tourist attraction
Among some imported date palms
In the American desert.

For years it had been a shell,
Pink stucco flaking off concrete,
Looming over the dying palms,
Not an attraction anymore,
An eyesore and better for it.

The grandeur of abandoned kitsch,
All-American monument,
Was how you preferred to see it,
Cheap abbey of an afternoon,
Ravens perched in evening sun

Side-eyeing traffic for roadkill.
But that’s not all-American,
Really now, is it? No, this is—
The developers have bought it
And swiftly torn it down to build

Brand-new matchstick subdivisions,
Winching water from underground
And near-to-deadpool reservoirs.
They will grow beautiful in turn,
Once they’re roofless and abandoned,

But you will be long gone by then,
One generation of packrat
In ten thousand years of middens.
For now, your short-lived world is new
Again, full of greed and gumption,

With fresh families moving in,
Bland stucco on the face of it,
Each house an unblotched ostrich egg,
All the barrenness on its face,
All the gorgeous ruin hidden.

No Bigger Picture

Like wet snowflakes splattering
On the windshield driving down
A busy highway at night,

Smears and blurs of splotchy light,
Patchy galaxies splatter
The space telescope’s mirror,

And it’s eerie and pretty
And informative as hell,
But it looks as organized

As any condensation
Coalescing and twirling
Through whatever medium.

The biggest picture looks like
The smallest picture looks like
The pictures in the middle,

And there’s a lot of clumping
Together and even more
Sprawling helter-skelter out.

So that’s it, then, is it? Drive
A few billion years through night,
A few billion lives an hour,

Each one awareness or star,
And sometimes you’re looking out
At the wonderful splatter

Swirling at you, coming down,
And sometimes you’re the splatter,
Smeared mess backlit by night’s lights.

Nowhere Somewhere

Most events seem independent.
However superstitiously
You choose to tilt your lucky cap,

Love, stars, and lotteries don’t care.
And yet the physicists model
The universe as quantum fields,

Continuous, vast swarms of waves,
And happily experiment
To prove long-range entanglement.

What gives? Is it all connected
Or isn’t it? Correlation
Drops to zero so frequently,

You’d have to believe instruments
Are simply too crude to catch it,
And if only non-zero links

Exist, it’s as good as a host
Of near infinitely weak ghosts
Faintly clouding your perception.

Maybe that’s it. Maybe it is
All as good as one, connected.
Still there’s nothing somewhere in it.

How Well You Lived

All those little things you do
Not so much to make someone

Notice, not so much in hope
Of someone noticing you,

But on the off-chance someone might
And then evaluate you,

All those ten thousand small things,
Those little rearrangements

Just in case, and here you are,
Awaiting diagnosis

As it slowly dawns on you,
You’ll probably have to go

Before any of those things,
Those myriad careful things

Get noticed by anyone,
Anyone other than you.

Day of Humiliation

That darkest and oldest form

Of snobbishness, a cosmic

Snobbishness, Chesterton wrote

Of attempts to gain favor

From God for military

Victory. Snobbishness seems

An odd word in this context,

But darkest and oldest work.

As for cosmic, it’s funny

To consider the cosmos

Contemplating the outcome

Of a skirmish on one world

To decide which side better

Deserved its rooting interest.

Funny, if you don’t think

How desperate all sides get

For any edge, any means

To put the other to death.