A Short Poem about a Vast Topic

Less imposing
Than a long poem
On something small
(Pope, Lock, cough, cough)—

The universe
Means images
From prosthetic
Devices, and

An evolving
Concept of what
Might sum up what
Might be out there.

Maybe those match—
The stars, your thoughts.
Probably not,
But who gets out?

Though Young in This Work I Have Seen a Few Trends

Wrote the palliative care
Hospice physician. Why read
Any further to find out

What those trends might be? Why not
Contemplate how young all are
As organisms, as words,

As one species on this Earth
Of a few billion turns now
Around a medium star?

We’ll stop at the universe.
If you wish, the multiverse
We’ll leave all yours to explore.

Though young in this poetry
Business, this verse is aware
Of a few trends. Poems repeat

The topics other poems tried.
Poets imitate the poems
Those poets liked. Languages,

Religions, and upheavals
Such as colonization
Or the collapse of kingdoms

Start, shape, or reshape great, long
Traditions. Then they’re erased,
Banned or burned by accident.

Leaves, pollen, seeds—things shed things.
Other things store and eat them.
Other things grow out of them.

Dying’s written into them.
Though young in this work, this verse
Has started to notice trends.

Noncompliant

It’s nothing to be proud of.
In most cases it’s stupid.
In many cases it hurts

Other people needlessly,
In which case, it’s simply mean,
Selfish, even hard-hearted.

Still, the urge is fierce sometimes
To indulge in refusal,
Defiance, noncompliance,

To feel you have asserted
Your personal existence
Can resist the collective,

Can insist on remaining
Its own, unique existence,
Which is you, and you alone,

Your personal myth of you,
Maybe not independent
But distinct. No. Don’t. Won’t. No.

Amberat

It’s a grim thing people do,
Pissing on other people
To cement them together,

The way a packrat pisses
On the seeds, stems, and baubles
It’s collected to cement

Its midden in amberat.
You’ve done it and been pissed on
Yourself some, or your group has—

Whenever someone sums up
Some other class of someones
As wholly homogenous

Based on trivial shared traits—
And we do mean whenever,
Although it’s more or less cruel,

Punching up or punching down—
Some small amberhuman’s glued.
What makes it truly human

Is that people can be both
The packrat and the midden—
Industrious behavior,

Unfortunate collections,
And that crystallized urine—
At one time or another.

But then, that’s not surprising.
Everything about humans,
Beginning with language—speech,

Signs, symbols, gossip, all tech
For socializing—can loop
Recursively, byproducts

Being every paradox
Of self-reflection, mortal
Salience, and pissing yourself.

Salty Biochemicals in Ambush

When your chemistry reconfigures
For conflict or for love, chemicals
Don’t first call time out to consider

What kind of social status, what kind
Of mind or career they’re altering.
They course through your blood. They do their job.

The fact that your biochemistry
Doesn’t conform and doesn’t confirm
Your enculturated self doesn’t

Mean chemicals can’t be meaningful,
Carrying out their twenty million
Interactions per second in each

Cell of each body that calls you me.
Chemicals configure attention,
As on the sudden beloved, as

On the sudden enemy. Meaning
Flares like a match, illuminating
The shadowed face that had been unknown

But now matters, passionately,
As your chemistry races your pulse.
How this plays out, given you’re human,

May have everything to do with you,
With social status, career, and mind,
With beliefs, ideas, and local rules.

But when the estuarine crocodile
Whose ancestors ate small dinosaurs
And later ambushed marsupials

Encounters invasive feral pigs
Come down to Mary River to drink,
Opportunity presents itself

In the novel elaboration.
Crocodiles do as crocodiles do,
Even if circumstances are new.

Behavior Searches for an End

After going for a swim,
A man was doing push-ups
On the rocks along the shore.

He was tall, long-armed, and strong.
Briskly bobbing up and down
A couple of hundred times,

He hardly slowed. Then he stood.
He looked around at no one
And started off down the trail,

But he paused, turned, and walked back
To the same spot on the rocks,
Dropped and did a dozen more.

You’re a human, we presume.
You know he’d give you reasons,
If you asked him, why he turned

To do those extra push-ups,
And for why he sat awhile
On his haunches, shook his head,

Turned in place, and did some more.
You know you could guess your own
Reasons, make up a story.

But you know, right now, you don’t
Really know why that creature
Did that much and then no more.

The Front Face of the Comet Is the Counterfactual Creation

There was an era when one way,
Scholars thought, to preserve your fame
As a preeminent scholar

Was to burn all your books at death.
Burn your sources, cover your tracks.
No one could use your library

To catch up to and surpass you,
Greatest scholar ever was, you.
Later it was more the fashion

To coyly invite scholars in
To trace your every allusion,
But the intention was the same—

To create and preserve the sense
Of awe, a nimbus of glory
Around your formidable name.

What would literature look like
If literally no one cared
Whether name or fame was preserved,

Whether the books one read, one wrote,
Did or did not outlast one’s life?
Could you do it? Could you not care

In the slightest for endurance
Of your culture or your writing?
Not aiming to save or destroy,

Not sprinkling careful mandalas
Manifesting impermanence,
Simply writing since you’re writing?