No One Is Ever in Charge

We’re not the first to tell you this,
But still, we know you have to ask.
When the bee stings, when the bomb bursts,

When the woods burn black, there’s no scheme
Even the schemers control then,
No matter how perfectly planned,

No matter if they wanted this
Or something like this to happen,
In lust as they were with the end.

You’ve all got a crush on the end,
But usually it’s a secret
To everyone else and yourself.

You want it but you want to watch.
You want to be there for the end,
For tragedy to promote you.

Not everyone wants it as much,
Not everyone fancies the thought.
But you crave it some. You all do.

And then it comes, and you find out,
If not already lost yourself,
That no one is ever in charge,

No one was ever in charge, and
Now who do you turn to, and now
What do you do? Oh, God, not that.

Have You No Shame?

Would you like some? How much

Do you think you might need

To go over it all

Evenly, to cover

The ground? Shame is fertile,

Always has been, always

Rich in bones and pink worms,

Night soil and nitrogen.

It’s tough to grow humans

From stony, shameless earth,

But spread a little dread

Of stocks and pillories,

Hisses, index fingers—

Of being stripped and loathed

As wicked nastiness—

And you can raise your own

Armies of shamed humans

Rooted in righteousness.

This is not ironic.

This is a farming fact.

Shame is necessary

For regeneration

Of cooperators.

Now, how much would you like?

A Hairless Universe

Sooner or later, gravity
Will swallow up quantum physics.

Sooner or later, gravity
Will swallow and keep everything.

Sooner or later means nothing
Wherever gravity’s concerned.

What falls under the horizon
Only returns as something else.

What falls beyond the horizon,
Said the figures, never returns.

What enters never comes back out.
What exits never re-enters.

Inside, many wave-compressing
Little mouths gobble everything,

But all the mouths and all they eat
Are holes inside a bigger mouth.

Our whole universe hides inside
Its horizon all around it.

We eat inside the mouth that ate,
And while we eat we can still waste,

But in the mouth, the waste, too, goes,
Ships and whales in open ocean,

The ocean absorbed into space,
Space absorbed into spaceless waves.

In the event, a hairless night,
A sphere of bone, no thoughts, no light.

Rain Positive

Night like an old photo negative,
The dark mountain pale,
The cloud-darkened skies—

Dreaming’s just something
A brain does, and if you’re aware
Dreaming, you’re witness

To your brain entertaining
Itself, freed from the world to be
Wholly brain. It’s not pretty.

From even the best dream it’s better
To wake up, even to a dreary
Room, a narrowing existence,

And this is not dreamy, not now,
This is fine, as the meme goes,
But still—the clouds carry wet,

The town waits for the rest
Of the humans and daylight,
And the dark mountain glows white.

Idealious

It’s nice to have short lines to read.
It’s nice when the poem is compact.
Wouldn’t you like a collection
Of poems where every word’s exact,

Each lyric fit snug to its page,
The whole book packed, pocket-sized,
Crammed with honest observations
Whose wisdom combines with surprise?

What a museum that would be,
Each specimen within a lens
Beveled by diamond suffering,
And every lens a specimen.

To Live Where No One Can Read Us

We believe obscurity

Will rescue us. In the end,

The neglected, buried hoard,

The enduring treasure wins.

Obscurity has a knack

For self perpetuation.

It’s like life, like that. Eels in.

The lineage carries on

Sometimes for being rarer

Than more widespread variants

Sunk together in the sands.

Narrow but continuous,

Serpents have survived the end

Of long-legged dinosaurs,

Of rapacious, flightless birds,

Of your gardens and your shame.