People Love These Maps

Having the hack artist’s capacity

For variety and speed, he learned

To avoid any town too specific,

But to deploy more colors than needed,

Repeating much the same relationships.

He could sketch the rooms of recent marriage

In forty-five or fifty seconds flat.

He assumed clear scale unnecessary.

He never left out a single closet.

Customers could grab the maps, inks still wet,

To find themselves in the caricatures.

They always did. It was illusory,

But it felt better than satellite maps—

Looking at one of his drawings was like

Finding your childhood address, your front door,

Your parents and earliest, fiercest loves

Sketched as a web of static narratives

And, at the same time, there at the front door,

Or whimsically in the old home’s mailbox,

The results of your personality

Survey and your compatibility

Evaluation as friends and partners

And usually an Easter egg detail,

With the flourish of a stage mentalist,

Something you would have thought only you knew,

The suggestion of a favorite toy

Or first gift between you, in the corner.

Trimming the Fat off the Future

There’s a miniature knife to watch for.
If you’re in a fantasy mood, you could
Aver that it’s a baby dragon’s tooth.

Thanks to more advanced offensive weapons
And tools for devastating explosions,
Rulers and scientists don’t use the tooth

For carving into the world anymore,
Although it’s sometimes used in rituals
Of inaugurals, prize ceremonies,

Formal investitures, those sorts of things.
Like a quill pen or a porcelain pestle,
The knife has reached the unnecessary

Without losing its functionality.
You could still write with a quill, mash your own
Pill prescriptions with a small pestle, carve

Apart the delicate flesh of the world
With your baby dragon’s tooth—how precious.
The only way to bring technology

Back to living, dangerous relevance
Is to restore to it the critical,
Essential trait of a human machine—

The capacity for novel uses.
Take your miniature, pretty dagger
And apply it in some unforeseen way,

Make it the solution to a challenge
That hadn’t been dreamed when the weapon—
Knife, quill, pestle, what-have-you—was first made.

Repurpose the thing, as the cliche goes.
Have you not even noticed this moment
A serpent’s tooth carves your forecast from you?

Shoah and Naqba

Stringy phrases circle

Within the living thoughts

Of an organism

Definitely human,

Despite a mutation,

Just as definitely

Not belonging and not

A member by any

Definition of Jew

Or Palestinian—

Not genetic and not

Political and not

Sectarian and not

In terms of any shared

Experience unique

In those populations.

That organism’s thoughts,

Therefore, don’t qualify

To enter the debates

About moral justice

Concerning these peoples,

Are irrelevant, and

Should not be privileged.

Still, there’s the human thing,

Despite the mutation,

And the organism

Is troubled by the dark

Rhyme, Nagba and Shoah.

It’s just that they’re so close,

Calendrically,

And seem to overlap

Horror and loss of lives

And of community,

Forcible removals,

Seizure of resources—

However specific

To those peoples involved,

They also feel human,

Feel like they are human,

Like the worst truth they share

Isn’t in or in between

The named populations,

But shared with the species,

Horror on horror, with

Or without mutation.

Epic

Don’t be seduced by admiration
Into giving in to ambition—
You’ll end like the guys who worked on cars

In your neighborhood, including friends,
Who invariably filled up their yards
With impossible works in progress,

The Caddy or the Jag up on blocks,
Engines forever being rebuilt.
What they really admired was the beast

As it had left the factory floor,
Gleaming, elegant, and beyond them.
Now they dreamed of wild restorations,

The Caddy as hot-rod enveloped
In painted flames, faster, more awesome
Than ever, a machine transcendent

Over factory original,
But they’d been infected by their love
Of industrial art no backyard

Mechanic could actually have built,
And, gifted as they were with engines,
They never finished their dream mobiles.