Sarpir-maṇḍa

Some old dude sitting in a farmhouse

Writing rhythmical letters to friends,

As someone recently, jokingly

Described Horace, is not exactly

A recipe for delight. He’s right.

Especially not for the old dude,

If the old dude has no farmhouse, and

The old dude has no friends, just the yen

To write some more rhythmical letters

To no reader in particular,

No reader ever being likely.

Not everyone gets a Maecenas.

And yet, there is some tranquility,

To be found, regardless of device,

For a crumbling old dude before night.

Some. Don’t get yourself too excited.

The mystery isn’t peace of mind;

It’s the addiction to peace of mind.

One sip of simple tranquility,

And you’ll start wanting it all the time.

You can’t have it all the time. You can’t,

No matter how wise, not even if

Someone buys you a farmhouse and gifts

You with numerous devoted friends,

Pen pals whose sole intent when they write

Is to learn what’s on your mind tonight.

There’s no wisdom in tranquility.

Tranquility has made no one wise.

You write to churn your tranquility,

To clarify, give it some shelf life.

Endlessly Expanding Diminuitions

Dimension needs a definition,

And definitions need boundaries—

As soon as you think of dimension,

Thoughts move in myriad directions,

Which must mean traversing dimensions,

Finding boundaries to push around.

Let’s say you can begin with a point—

Could be one or zero dimensions—

You can, from a one-dimensional

Point, find your way to a tesseract.

You just had to begin with a point,

Didn’t you? Corpus Hypercubus.

No matter how many dimensions

You mean by n, by n you must mean

An idea with a definition,

Boundaries, its own n dimensions.

N degrees of freedom, meanwhile n

Coordinates for each location,

But not in Cantor’s intuition.

Then, invariance of dimension

Grew in dimension. Definitions

Grew more necessary, numerous,

Expanding in every direction.

You can break it or intersect it,

But you’ll fit never the problem back

Into n minus one dimensions.

N dimensions keep kinds of prisons

Pinning slaves to dimensions in them.

A prison has many dimensions

And every one of them a prison.

Then We Are

You are more or less successful.
We are not. You are more or less
A failure, a catastrophe.

We are not. You are more or less
Motivated to stay alive.
You guessed it. We’re patterns, objects,

And you are so much more than that,
So much striving, so much eating
And wasting, and then you are not.

Whisk

A cloud of minor irritants
Intersects with the large head
Swelled by otiose ideas.

No, the hard problem is not
Consciousness. The hard problem
Is eudaimonic. Who lives

As an animal body
Who is not an animal,
And what animal is not—

However spiritual,
Metaphysical, saintly,
Scientific, rational,

Enlightened, well-intentioned—
Torn apart by hordes of flies?
Oh, there are legends, stories

Of dead people who did it,
Beasts who lived untroubled lives,
And always some con artists

Very much alive who float
An inch above their cushions.
There are good people, but who

Is beyond irritation
And beyond irritating,
Horse that never flicks its tail?

If Death Is Worse Than Nothing, Is Nothing Better Than Death?

Someone jokes in the car.
Puns are bugs on windshields.
They remind you something

About words is between
You and the world, screening
From the winds, protecting

Even while allowing
You to see through clearly,
Or more clearly, at least,

Than you could at this speed
Barefaced, your eyes streaming
Blurs, dead bugs in your teeth.