Antiquarian Gnomic Pathos Traps in a Mode of Cartouched Enclosures

What? No bed of arugula?
Some words are too pretty to eat.
They gesture gently from themselves.
They seem to name, but it’s weak.

It’s easy to mock such language,
The verbiage of scholiasts,
But by turning mostly inwards,
All goggle-eyed for distant pasts,

They maintain their own small gardens,
Sunken oases within them,
Where stagnant, mossy meanings green
And dim scenes play out behind scrims.

Persistently Vanishing Remainders

Late afternoon poetry’s a kind
Of congruence, nothing modulo
Nothing much, solutions whenever

Remainders of nothing divided
By a multiple of nothing much
Are nothing—nothing plus nothing much,

Twice nothing much plus a remainder
Of nothing, infinite nothings much,
And again, remainder of nothing,

Or, put another way, all the ways
Nothing much can spill into nothing
Leaving only nothing leftover.

Each such poem is another of such
Modular solutions. Each such poem
Folds nothing much neatly in nothing,

But, no matter how neatly, nothing
Is always leftover and ready
To swallow more late afternoon poems.

The Phantasmagorical Savagery of Milkweed Kleptopharmacophagy

Do you recall your fascination
With monarch butterflies as a child?
Do you remember the first time you saw

Footage of dogs hanging from lampposts,
Inscrutable signs around their necks?
Have you ever linked them in your thoughts?

Now you have. Certain species carry
Toxins essential to survival,
For which they then prey on each other

To concentrate supplies in themselves.
Milkweed butterflies will go after
Milkweed caterpillars for the juice,

A rare form of cannibalism
Christened kleptopharmacophagy,
Recently, and making a small splash

In the news. Also of note, the death
In custody at a ripe old age
Of Abimael Guzman, who sought

To drain the toxins of government
To cannibalize a government
And immunize a revolution

That would raise another government
Presupplied with toxins of its own.
But his revolution was gobbled

Before it could complete its gobbling.
This cannibalism has no name
Yet from the species practicing it.

Carrington vs Miyake

All things. It’s not a phrase many
People use often, but maybe
More people should. You’re all all things,

Things you come from, things you consume,
Things you become. It’s all all things,
And as there’s nothing wrong with things,

It feels like something’s wrong with things,
There should be something wrong with things,
Surely there must be more than things?

Here’s a thing. People who study
These sorts of things, counting ice cores
And tree rings, and those sorts of things,

Say you’ve got Carringtons coming.
Solar flares make a mess of things.
Maybe you’ll get a Miyake

That will tumble everything back
To the ways you used to do things
Before you knew to count the rings.

And that’s the thing. The more you know,
The more ways you record and plan things,
The more we scream, All things, All things!

Planet-Free Sky

Unpeopled conversations
In nonsocial languages
Would make proper poetry,

Would never fool you with lights
That outshine all the others
Only because they’re so close

And blinking vigorously
As they roar over your house—
Lights you learn are pathetic,

Actually filled with pathos—
While the wandering planets
Offer local reflections,

Other kinds of deceptions,
Quieter but still too close.
Honesty is so far off.

Leaky Timing Belt

It’s a wonder anyone survives long at all,
Even considering it’s never all that long.

Your future is meaningful, made from pure meaning,
Humming confection spun from implication,

And the implication is always that you must
Fix something, attend to something, before it breaks,

Before you break it, before it all breaks, before
You break. You spin your breaking waves between more breaks.

One hour spent out in the dark—crickets, wind, and stars,
Bare soles on the courtyard stones—quotes quite different poems.