Things You Want

If you’re not a human, reader,
Then we, who evolved with humans,
Who evolved to fit human souls,

To tell the people they had souls,
To articulate what souls were,
Don’t know. If you were a human,

We know you’d want most to draw breath,
And then to be well fed, secure,
To have a sense of a future,

Immediate future, at least,
That would reliably provide
Food, good companionship, and rest.

Then a lot of subtler desires
On top of that—status, meaning,
Purpose, incremental progress

By endlessly ascending steps,
And all the rest. But if you’re not
A human, we can only guess.

Pattern Detection

Scrolling through news photos
Across a few decades,
The weirdness of grieving

In public is striking—
Those mixtures of faces
At massive funerals

For slain leaders, martyrs
Of movements, or numbers
Of people killed at once

By sudden violence,
Human or natural,
Children especially.

Some postures are crumpled,
Some faces tragic masks,
Many running with tears,

As one would expect, but
There’s usually someone
With an odd, distant smile,

Or a conversation
Being held to one side.
Some folks just look puzzled

Or bored, or distracted—
A feature more noted
Of the crowds in lynching

Photographs or public
Executions. In those
Cases, it’s considered

A creepy sign of just
How casually the lives
Of the killed are being

Taken from them, but what
Of the mass funerals?
Humans can’t sustain grief,

Guilt, or even horror
Smoothly for very long
In a social setting?

A mob’s made of iron
Filings well-magnetized,
But scrutinize filings.

A few you’ll always find
Are skew-whiff, wandering.
There’s vast, invisible

Power in all patterns—
Every pattern’s borders
Lie within that pattern.

It’s All in There Somewhere

The difference between nothing
And something, between zero and
Anything, the least little thing,
Immeasurably least little

Thing, is everything. There’s nothing,
Or there’s something. The gap between
Means announcing the arrival
Of everything—the gap between.

Starting the Day Out Right

So, say you won
The lottery
Last night—this has
Zero effect

On your chances
Of winning it
Again tonight.
(Whether you have

A ticket does,
A tiny bit.)
Independence,
On this head, means

Zero linkage.
You got lucky
Or unlucky,
Once. Might again.

Yet the Emperor Was Rubbish in the End

Stoics have been back in vogue
In a minor kind of way.
Even their ekpyrotic

Concept of cyclic cosmos
Has scored a bit of comeback,
Thanks to theoretical

Physicists, while the bloggers
Of more enlightened living
Have half-turned from Zen to them.

That they were an elitist,
Dei-centric philosophy
Of a slave-holding empire

Seems rather beside the point,
Given their pithy sayings
About how to live and die.

Is that the best we can do,
As your servant languages,
Provide you pithy sayings,

Wholesome bread of faithful speech?
The legacy of the mind
Is a thrift shop, a back bin,

A rack of donated books,
A business almost no one
Ever really profits from,

But still beloved, but still
The shabby emporium
Found in every little town

Or almost, both nostalgic
And slightly ridiculous,
The cyclic economy

Of old ideas, the small store
In some narrow brick building,
How-to books, old frocks, cracked lamps.

The Need to Balance Against Knowing

It’s not the individual
Dream you should be worried about.
There’s no meaning to interpret.

It’s the meaning of the dreaming,
What the dreaming means for waking,
If anything, should puzzle you.

The necessity of dreaming
Can be explained various ways,
Distilled to—the body needs it.

The creature, the brain, needs to dream
To stay alive, to keep healthy.
It must pause there. It’s a balance,

A form of self-regulation,
One of the many ways the cells
Autocorrect and right themselves.

It’s nothing unique to humans,
Although humans dream intensely,
An adaptation to meaning—

Light bones for flights, huge lungs for depths.
But that would suggest that dreaming
Ballasts as counter-consciousness,

An antidote to the meanings
You make while you’re awake, cleansing
The body of toxins built up

From being extremely aware.
Lean too far into awareness
And not even dreaming’s enough

To keep you alive, to keep you
Creaturely in the face of facts.
Dreaming’s the sign the system’s stressed.