No Unique Conclusion

Cancer is almost the most
Ordinary death there is,
Proof bodies will eat themselves

If predators, parasites,
Violence, and accidents
Are kept from shredding them first.

The body will eat itself,
If broken cells turn selfish,
Multicellularity

And devotion to the whole
Community of the beast
Betrayed for a brief huzzah,

Runaway evolution
By natural selection
Favoring the buccaneers.

The failure of maintenance,
Of policing, of local
Submission to global rules

Produces, briefly, new life,
New worlds of cancer chaos,
And this is ordinary,

This is the state of nature
In the struggle of all cells.
Life hungry for life itself.

Meaningfully Uncommunicative

Accepting that language evolved
For communication, not thought,

One shouldn’t be surprised thought’s hard
To parse, abstraction’s awkward,

And philosophers are often
Horrible writers. But it may

Also be why poetry tends
To inscrutably meaningful,

As meaning is orthogonal
To messaging—information

Isn’t maxed by the same process
Maximizing meaning making.

Meaning doesn’t communicate
As the first order of business.

Final Sleep After Too Many

When the surgeons say
To have a nice nap,
They know well you’ll wake

Up miserable—
They’re teasing, really,
As you are, saying

Goodbye world, drifting
Off to sleep, knowing
You’ll be back in just

A few hours. That’s been
Both life’s long joke and
Life’s small punishment,

Wakey, wakey, rise
And shine, awareness
As obligation.

But now, you’re almost
Done with all of that.
Sleep that’s not joking

Is a last mercy,
You don’t have to give
A chance to come back.

On Barely Being

None of your strategies matter,
Close to your vanishing—it’s not

That they couldn’t possibly work.
Just that there’s no time to test them,

And what are they strategies for,
Really, anymore? Not long life.

This was always the thing about
Hospitals, jails, classrooms, childhood

In general—the more you were
Restricted, the freer you were

In some way difficult to say.
Not free from care and emotion

But from the trap of causation,
Perhaps. Those who can, feel they must.

Those who can’t may lecture the dust
On being less industrious.

Speravi

Things that you will never do
Stand equal to each other,
The grand goals and the humble.

You don’t ever have to choose
Between the things you can’t,
But you never really chose,

So why not keep pretending
You’re selecting, or at least
Dreaming, among your futures?

Your motto may no longer
Be supra spem spero, but
You had always liked to hope.

Pretend to pretend until
Unfulfilled future’s fulfilled.

Looks Like You Won’t Die Any Other Way

Alone in the shadowy room,
Hot sun on the desert outside,

You picked at an old piece of tape
On your arm and contemplated

Whether you were or weren’t learning
Something that amounted to fate.

Dying’s an old fashioned darkroom,
Like the one you used in high school,

Where you bathe the film of frames past,
And develop your negatives,

And scrutinize the contact sheets.
You’ve got nothing but what’s on them.

The end result’s not determined,
But the selection’s limited,

So limited it feels fated
How death is going to look for you.

You flicked the tape in the trash can,
Squinting out the window at the heat.

Fresh Note to Old Fred

This can be right—Poetry

Doesn’t matter in the least—

And this be wrong—Poetry

Is meaningless. It’s habit

To assume meaningfulness

And mattering are tightly

Linked, if not synonymous.

What’s meaningful matters, and

What matters is meaningful,

But that’s not always the case,

At least when mattering means,

As it seems to in your poem,

Something akin to import,

Impact, being the cause of

Real, material effects.

Poetry doesn’t stop war

(You name-checked the nightmare feast

Of Putin as example,

Which I first read as Pushkin),

Doesn’t prevent invention,

Doesn’t pass legislation,

Is at most inspiration

For such actions, even if

You believe in causation.

But meaningless? Anything

Can be gifted with meaning

In the orbit of humans,

And language is expected

To have meaning anyway,

And poetry is language

Distilled—straight up or cocktails—

So it’s especially prone

To collecting meaning clouds,

But even if weren’t so,

The potential would be there.

Look at what just happened here

To your poem, with this reader.

No, your poem doesn’t matter,

But it’s meaningful. Now what?