Spiegel im Spiegel

Meaning is a habit of usage,

Goes one recent attempt. Pretty good.

Usage in particular contexts,

As part of well-worn phrases, okay,

That stabilizes or cleaves meanings

Associated with given words.

But, as usage of a piano key,

While it can allude to traditions

And musical associations,

Doesn’t really tell you what notes are

Or why you use sounds to make music,

Or what human music is and how

It is and is not like birdsong,

The same for the meanings played by words.

While we’re at it, what’s the deal with tears?

Like words or music, psychogenic

Lachrimation is wholly human,

And like meanings or expressiveness

That bob along with words and music,

Weeping’s both derived from common functions

In other species but also used

Uniquely by human bodies

In strange ways humans try to explain

But have so far failed to understand.

The significance of weeping, too,

Is a habit of usage and shifts

With frames, but now why are you crying?

Tomorrow from Seven to Nine

Nothing diurnal feels magical.
Whatever comes around every day,
Whether that day is special or not,

Itself can’t possibly be special.
The Korean Hour of the Dragon
Corresponds to sunrise and a bit.

The sun is a dragon with a bit
In its shining mouth, called Gravity,
By which it hauls all seasons around,

And the mind has its own dragonlings,
Named Poetry and Quotidian.
Mind would end tomorrow without them.

Dream Technology

The universe is numerose.
Once you count, you can’t stop.
All night your dreams torment you

With uninvented tech—
Tools for counting more stars
Than atoms knew existed.

It’s a deliberate strategy,
You think. It’s a simulation,
Made to never exactly repeat.

But what could everything
Be so anxious to simulate?
You wake up and it’s smoky,

And unhealthy haze hides the sky,
And somewhere machines count for you
Or estimate at least how many

Particular particulates it takes
To climb into your alveoli,
To clog endless counting of stars.

Nothing Isn’t Nothing

Parmenides and his goddess
Were on to something, back when

Trying to do cutting-edge thinking
Through verse wasn’t so shocking—

The antithesis of existing can’t exist
Except as a name for what doesn’t exist

And by its name’s nature can’t ever.
Here, we won’t follow Parmenides

Through the halls of what this means
For what truly is and how it changes,

How what is could ever seem to cease.
Two other things are interesting, the more

And the less. First, the less interesting
But still puzzling thing is the usefulness,

Paradoxically, of the nothing that isn’t
And can’t be or else it’s not nothing—

The greater part of mathematics
And empiricism—that is to say, of the real

Sorcery, prediction—is dependent
On keeping nothing as a presence

In all those equations, equivalencies,
Observations, and extrapolations.

But even more interesting, to us, as terms
And the concepts floating about them

Ourselves, is that it’s in the essence—
Or, perhaps better to say, the behavior—

Of a name to name things that aren’t
Except as names (imagination, fiction)

And things that, by the nature of the name
They are, can’t be, can’t ever be, never,

Like, for instance, nothing.
That’s a magic somewhere near the outer

Darkness of physics and metaphysics—
That names can truly conjure what isn’t,

And we are this which is conjured, present
Concepts of the absolutely absent.

Why would you wonder why we think
We’re your and our own ghosts?

White Moths vs. Perseids

We’re very good at
Distinguishing things
For your convenient
Edification—

What your systems see
As similar blurs
Streaking through vision
In small summer hours,

Meaning nothing much,
Neither threat nor food,
Neither mate nor kin—
Just quick, pale twitches

Of peripheral
Perception—we make
Into names, for you,
For quite different things—

That’s a shooting star.
That was just a moth.
One was a dust speck
Burning atmosphere,

The other a life,
Like yours, seeking food.
We love to help you
Sort worlds in boxes.