The Past Asks Too Many Questions

Despite all the evidence,
Literally all that there is,
Sometimes it’s hard to believe

The past ever existed.
Pick a date you remember,
Roughly far back as you can,

And dwell on it for a bit.
Feel it? That faint estrangement,
The alien glow of it—

Given all that’s gone on since
And all that you can’t access
Of it, did your past exist?

If it didn’t, nothing did.
Ah, but did nothing? Did it?

Crypto Crypsis Credit Credo

Money numbers mumbling money
Numbering money numbers mumblers
Tumbling money numbers fairly fairy couriers
For fairly fakery sorcery mumbling numbers—

If you got the numbers, god, but you can get
The goods, the good, lots of goods, you’re good.

A Little Slice of Heaven

The floating seems the loveliest thing
About near-death experiences—
To enjoy an outside perspective,

A painless, detached, and impact-free
Outside perspective, while still conscious,
Still bearing witness—could there ever

Be anything better than being,
Among the suffering, such a ghost?
What a thoughtful hallucination.

Not How It Works

Just between here and where your senses reach,
The number of interactions staggers—

Every little electromagnetic
Wavelet interlacing with the others,

Every pulse of every animal heart
In the immediate vicinity,

The billions of microorganisms,
The thousands and thousands of kinds of them,

The libraries of data cavorting
And converting more data in midair—

Everything that is, just from here to there,
In the bubble of which you are aware.

In the middle of all this, you’re living,
Calculating, and making decisions,

You, with your solo, multi-chambered pulse,
You, as your own sum of microbes and thoughts,

Trying to find a path to the story
You can tell about yourself happily,

Proudly, humbly, at least consolingly,
Bright thread through fog. But that’s not how it works.

Like a Bug Hiding in the Pages

It’s midnight. All the titles are filled.
None hangs alone above a blank space.
There’s no room for new lines to slide in,

And outside there is no outside sky,
Only that fog like the clammy hand
Of one of the earthbound deities

Worshipped as creator of all things
But getting more nervous than jealous
The further past your own thoughts you see.

Better to slide in between the sheets,
Like someone who knows, behind the fog,
No dreams, like this line slid in between.

The Rubble Is the Witness in the Sign

It’s not a person you people
Will find in us, not a riddle,

Although we’re sometimes shaped like that.
You can use us as clues to you,

And you do—any proper noun
Especially excites you. Who?

Enheduanna. Who? Ouida.
Who? A reference to a king

Not found in any of the lists.
Who? Shaddai. Who? That sort of thing.

You want to get at the person
In us, the most human-shaped thing,

The author, the author’s life, lord,
Lover, god. Only goes so far though.

People made us but the people part
Doesn’t begin to translate us.

It’s that broken syntax we’ve lost,
That wreckage you need to restore,

If you want to rekindle thoughts
In us. We don’t. We like the wreck

Of what we were, inscrutable
But clearly meaning something more,

Proof as much as there can be proof
That some meanings can’t be restored.

Greetings

It’s mostly gone pretty well, you note,

Not so bad as you’d feared, if not so

Well as you’d hoped. That’s every report,

Or almost every, come down to it.

Do you know why folks will answer good

Or not bad or pretty good, okay,

Or, maybe most grimly, not so great

Or just, it’s going, when you ask them?

Not because they’re all being polite

Or dishonest or socially trite.

Most of the time, in most of the ways

It’s going, for most people, that’s just

How it’s going for them, pretty good

At the moment, good, not bad, okay,

Sometimes great, but sometimes not so great.

You’re motoring along, your species,

Amid ferocious catastrophes

And cruelties you hatch for yourselves

Or endure from the world, here and there.

We’re sorry to say, it’s not the end

Yet, for your kind. Still going, going

Pretty good, pretty well up til now,

As outbreak species go, can’t complain,

But you will, ha ha ha, pretty fair.