This Is the Outside

This is the outside, darling,
All of us and everything
Summing your experience,

On the outside all along.
You won’t go out with dying.
Everything is folded in,

And if this isn’t enough
(And when has it ever been?)
But you still hope for something,

Hope you’re folded so far in
You’re never on the outside
Of being ever again.

Peak Child

Some baby recently
Or soon, by tomorrow,
Will live a quiet life,

Short or long, probably
Unremarkably, as
The peak child, unremarked,

Since it’s impossible—
Would be in retrospect
Even—to say which birth

Marked the exact apex
Of the curve when there were
More children drawing breath

On Earth than at any
Time before or after.
Wouldn’t you like to know,

If only for yourself,
You were that precise child,
You yourself, all your life?

The Timings of Their Changing

Time is ruling the world

Time doesn’t rule the world. The timing does—

Coordination, synchronization,

Aligning the most events that you can,

As tightly as you can. The creation,

Thereby, of more and more complex events—

Not everything happening all at once

But many things happening exactly

As scheduled to happen, as if at once,

Synchronized swimming, if what synchronized

Wasn’t only the swimmers but the waves,

Ideally light shimmering from the waves,

A mind-bogglingly ecstatic display.

That’s what atomic, quantum is for—

Not to rule but to serve your alignments.

And what is an alignment? Exactly

What, really, is simultaneity?

No one knows, but life likes it, always has.

Coordinating simultaneous

Change in sequences, chains of changes,

Is as good definition of life,

Of what distinguishes life from burning

And tumbling, spiraling out of control,

As anything. Timing rules the living,

And complexity scales with life’s timing.

Linear Inscrutably Fusing Executions

Think all in caps and imagine
Every word is a backronym.
TO BE OR NOT TO BE, THAT IS.

Go ahead, try it. Have some fun.
Elected representatives
Do this foolishness all the time.

Temporal Insistence Making
Endings. See? Any word you want
To end with, you start with, then try

To break it down and rebuild it
As an awkward phrase of more words
Crudely reworking the first thought.

Do this with any alphabet,
Any language that uses one.
Consider how you could explode

Literature in that language
Into a continent-sized sprawl
Of ugly, asyntactic mud

That overcoded exactly
For the original canon,
More or less as your genome does.

Thief

Eh, we know. You’re only dark
Because you hog all the light.
You’re so romantic at heart.

Emotions race around you
Like radio waves, the ones
In the back reappearing

In front of you, distorted,
A distortion that reveals
Your personality’s there,

In there somewhere, swallowing
The heartfelt thoughts of others,
Giving nothing in return.

You’re not dark. You’re a warning
Not to get too close to you.

In or Out

Each night’s small verses
Brick up words’ corpse doors
Cut to let the lost

Get out and go on,
Completed to keep
Them coming back in.

Reader, you may go
Around to the front,
Meaning without words,

Where the doors open,
Where you don’t see us
As bricks but as shells

Welcoming your thoughts,
Hollow but homey,
Like any good house.

Mucilage Probing the Deep

You begin on the waves.
They’re not happy with you.
You are too green. Those roots!

Your roots distress the waves.
Not touching bottom, yet,
Can’t reach anything, yet,

But look at them dangling,
Groping for a bottom,
Something to take hold of—

And then what? What happens
To the endless expanse
Then, if your roots tips touch

Anything they can hold
On to, a coral reef,
A shipwreck, the sea floor?

What will become of us?
You are hungry, boring
Through the waves that bore you.