Voyager Spun

At home in your exposome,
Autonoetic genome—
What did the writer call it,

Mistaking those curlicues
And flourishes for a poem?
Awareness tied to a cord,

Astronaut on a spacewalk,
Buffeted by cosmic rays
And breath in captivity,

How can you even be sure
Which ill-health effects
Are down to low gravity?

You’re light-headed. You’re half dead.
Time to float off to descend.

Dingo Diogenes

Can you balance the feral,
The half-domesticated
Familiar, commensalist,

With the genuinely wild,
Play the cosmopolitan
Synanthrope among the pets

While your cousins go extinct,
Inbred in the tattered woods?
Could you keep this up for years,

For life, for generations,
Your little-changed descendants
Running alongside in packs,

Scavenging the marketplace,
Sleeping in bins and culverts
As a species of habit,

Still lolling those wagging tongues,
Still swaggering, carrying
Stolen lanterns in strong jaws?

An Unknown Practice

Someone tries to gloss

Spiritual for

Materialists—

You can think of it

As what is unknown.

That won’t really work,

That god of the gaps,

That certainty there’s

Worth in mystery.

For one, those who say

Spiritual things

Never mean unknown

Material things

But antonyms to

Material things.

Be that as it may,

Let’s take it as read

And apply unknown

Where spiritual

Is found—an unknown

Practice, an unknown

Advisor, unknown

Harmony, deeply

Unknown tradition.

Beach Head

No castle’s ever proved secure.
You can’t invent technology
The next technology can’t break.
It’s like piling sea-salt ramparts
To shield yourselves from sea-salt waves.
And yet you try it anyway,
Since you are the salt of the waves
Piling up to evaporate.

Pterobranchs

The corpse is yours, or will be,
At the bottom of the sea,
Your bones providing the homes.

Those aren’t pearls that were your eyes.
Those are little, branching lives
That sprout where you used to be,

Hungry outline, feathery
Extensions of your remains,
Growing on you once you’re gone,

Housing until they move on,
Or until some undersea
Silt slides and buries them, too.

And So End by Beginning Again

People keep trying to do things
To undo the things people did.

The impulse is noble, it seems
To people with such impulses,

To replace the bad with the good,
At least until good goes to bad,

And then it’s time to undo things
In the name of good things again.

If most of the consequences
Turn out to be unintended,

Maybe give up intending them.
But people need ends to begin.

Humble I

There’s a great modesty
To egocentrism.
When a pop lyricist

Or MFA poet
Keeps confined to ego,
That suggests this is all

I know—ego in love,
Ego all out of love,
Ego’s experience,

Ego’s faith and trauma.
Nothing about the world
Without ego in it,

No eagerness to claim
Something hasn’t been said,
Not so much as to try

To say better what has.
You sing, I’m all I know.
You’re humble in this world.