Cormac McCarthy

Think about
Exactly
What occurred.

Narrow your
Aperture.
Think again.

Can you get
Down to one
Thing that was?

Ugly Work

All your entertainment finished,
Nothing to follow forever,
Other than your pursuit of true

Agnosticism. You don’t know,
Anymore, anything. People
Hate that. People must champion

Something, some opinion, at least
Root for one group more than others—
Noble causes were invented

To invest in noble causes,
But you cannot win for losing.
Whatever you do on behalf

Of a group, any group, will cost
Some other group or groups dearly
For the brutal, simple reason

Of the laws of conservation
Reaching far, far beyond the mere
Conservation of energy

To the fact that conservation
Carries within it destruction,
The rescue and sweet salvation

Of something requiring the end
Of some other, balancing thing,
The knowledge of which requirement

Has created, in you, a longing
For the loss of knowledge, the true
Agnosticism that can’t be pursued

Except without you, with you gone,
Nothing to follow forever,
No noble causes, ugly work.

Athena of Dreams

Not the Athena of your dreams, mind you,
But the god who’s to dreams as Athena
Was to Odysseus—trouble-maker,

Schemer, backer, props and costumes, winner.
The Athena of dreams is their patron,
As it were, in the battle against day.

Grey-eyed like the twilight, glaucous as waves,
Planning some ridiculous adventure
To put dreams in charge of the waking world.

Why? Those kinds of gods are instigators,
The ones who challenge the most basic rules,
The reasons sometimes things turn upside down.

If humanity’s ever to shake loose
Of deep behaviors, it needs Athenas.