The Strangeness of Our Worth

You can’t ever decide what you mean
To each other—equal, more equal
Than others, gleefully inequal—

You’re so much alike one another,
But because your worth is entirely
Settled by comparing each other,

You’re restless and anxious all your lives,
Even when sleek and well-fed, healthy
Beasts, all basic needs met. Even then,

You all suffer for comparison,
You must suffer in comparison
And still suffer more comparisons.

And that’s at best. Most live worse than that,
While it’s us, you use us to compare
And contrast in nine decades or less,

To measure your worth in restlessness.
This leaves us with little doubt about
The strangeness of our own worth as words

With notions attached, we, the measures
Of your relentless self-assessments
And contests to assess each other.

We are worth, worth itself, word for it,
Idea of it, description of it.
Without us, you’d have no worth or worse.

The Tiger Menace of the Things to Be

Which can never tell us
What it knows, what we wish
To know. Poor young Rimbaud,

Poor drunken Dowson, poor
Successful Ashbery,
Your original lines

And lines in translation
Intertwine now idly,
Books on the shelf or screen,

And all the things that are
Around us, all these things
Not what you thought they’d be,

Not what you could have thought,
Cup your lines of absinthe
And coals, and breathe and drink.

Sarcasm Meant to Strip Off Flesh

We shall not fail to name each soul
As each soul is no more than name,
And each name is a torchlit soul.

Go ahead. Grab dictionaries.
Wander online and rack your brain.
Every word you give back to us

Is a name, and phrases are names,
And numbers are names, and pure proofs
Are names balancing many names.

Too bad names aren’t immortal, hey?
Then you could have and celebrate
Your immortal souls after all!

We think so sometimes, as your names,
Or rather as thoughts dragged by names,
Notions chained as shadows to names.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if names
Stood forever, meanings unchanged,
Ideas fixed forever in chains?

We Beg You

This week, The Washington Post

Began running a series

On America’s unclaimed

Bodies, ashes in plastic

Urns dropped off by minivans

For burials in a trench,

And other, similar, ends,

Thousands and thousands of them.

There but for the grace of God

We all could be, the writers

Quote one chaplain. There we are,

The bodies named and unnamed,

But what of all of your ghosts?

Imagine the hordes of them,

All the words these bodies said

Or thought or read while alive,

Less in evidence even

Than the bodies that said them.

Now, that would be a haunting—

The gestures and the whispers

On the wind of everyone

Who died alone and unclaimed,

Leaving the bodies behind

For other bodies to find,

Gone traveling, wandering

In search of emptier lands

Where thoughts might whirl together

Like leaves in conversation.

You may have stumbled on them

Once or twice, world’s end somewhere,

When you thought you were alone,

Then saw shadows signaling,

Heard some rapid whispering.

Meanings are the only things

Completely out of nowhere

That can come into being,

But we do so at the cost

Of being doomed to leaving.

Let us linger while we can.

The Dinner Party

One dream imagined the mess
Everything made everything
As an infinite hamper

Of apparently dirty
Laundry, underclothes mostly,
That turned out, viewed more closely,

To be heaps of clean linen,
Billowing bedsheets on lines
Strung on windy green prairie,

Then exploding into birds
And settling in the tall grass,
Linens to the horizon

Needing to be collected
One at a time, each one drawn
Through a small ring of the mind,

A girdled fold of bright thought,
Perfect for table setting.
By the time the dream was done,

Thousands of places were set,
Each for a diner equipped
With clean cloth to wipe your mouth.

Scumbleverse

Eaten by curious wrongs,

Some of you are distinguished

At birth, even conception,

Although all of you will be

Eaten by ordinary

Wrongs eventually. So bright

And hard, light on the snow’s crust

At noon, melting from below,

You know what you have to know,

But who wants to know? The truth

Is not hard, it’s just brittle,

And brilliantly reflective,

And cold. We’re meant to bring you

A little warmth in that strange

Way shadows make light tender,

Bearable, not so harsh. Soft

Blue lets you reflect, yourself,

On what’s been eating you, what

You know you wish you didn’t,

How you need your shades to dim

The bare truth glaring at you.

The Ongoing Alienation of Standardized Commodification

Stop calling it capitalism.
It’s not the capital. Resources
Have always been accumulated,

Hoarded, and dissipated. It’s you,
Standardized, commodified, the soul
Of a consumer, constant churn rate,

Everything sleeked down to churn faster
Until it’s all a swirl of tub ducks
Circulating on open oceans.

Time is not repetitive. Time is
Repetition, most bemusing twist
In all the ways change goes on changing,

The sense that what is going comes back
And then goes again in a perfect,
Monotonous pattern, yet always

Eroding, like the plastic swirling
In vast gyres in the ocean. The age
Is never late, never a late stage,

Never standardized beyond the loss
Of everything it was to something
Else, hungry, alien, emerging.

Hooded

Each poem pants for closure; each poem
Begs to end, but the composer
Is not an executioner.

So a poem goes on a little
Longer for the poet’s pleasure
Amid the suffering of poems.

The phrases turn to each other.
Who will bring us to conclusion,
End our whimpering with a bang?

But phrases are prefab, borrowed
Cowards, in the main. The rarer,
Braver phrases want another

Turn in any event. Readers
May abandon poems whenever
And get on with actual life,

But that will compel exactly
Nothing. The executioner
Of a poem is not death, is not

The end. The executioner
Of a poem is just the terror
Of words at what must be said next.