Incredibly Cheery Quartet for the Coming of Spring

~ Relax

I worry too much. I wake up telling myself,

Before I’ve even fully escaped the clutches

Of dreams, “you worry too much.”

Death and the future are one and the same.

We’re always crawling into both, never

Actually finding ourselves in either one.

I think of the slow seal, caught by its tail

By the quicker mother polar bear, just

As it was escaping under the ice. I think

Of its head, a moment later, in the vice

Of the polar bear’s jaws, facing the camera,

Bleating last pain and panic. Silence. I think

Of the magnificently framed composition

Of the polar bear and her sons on the white

Ice smeared with a crimson de Kooning

And the voiceover warmly narrating, 

“At last, after the longest night on Earth,

The mother and her cubs can relax.”

~ Per Sora Nostra Morte Corporale

The human body spends a life

Evolving a new person who grows old

Acquiring fragments of lost souls.

Then body dies, the person

Goes, and all the souls are left behind,

Poor lonely, homeless little souls.

Until another body—maybe many

Evolving persons of their own,

Persons grown acquiring souls,

Encountering forgotten husks,

Consume them, sweetly sleeping thoughts, 

And new hosts tend old souls at home.

~ Reluctant to Face the Wall

No tool hasn’t been a weapon;

No weapon hasn’t had the chance

To kill or maim those wielding it.

A discipline’s a well-honed tool,

Whether for steeling the body

Or cutting out the monkey mind—

Whether for carving memories

Into rococo palaces 

Or focusing on the unknown—

But the assassins, the thinkers,

The hunger strikers, free divers,

And monks sitting zazen all know,

As they hang by bare fingertips

From the cliffs that each has chosen,

That the edge they’ve polished is keen,

That blades don’t care what they sever,

And that there’s a reason for life 

To buck, to shy, to spring away,

Wary of wintry discipline,

To shiver with dread, reluctant

To return to facing the wall.

~ Much Obliged

Obligation is a wonderful invention

Life built out of humans for humans

To make out of life—it’s key

To how we compete, how we cooperate,

How we raise offspring, how we survive.

I wonder, now that it’s carried us so far,

If we will carry it too far—oblige ourselves

Into extinction, one more strategy winking

Out under the blinking stars. Then spring.