Road Gods

~ Warning Signs Design to Be Alarming

Beware contemporaries
Advising you how and why

To do nothing
Because nothing

Is missing
And necessary

In your soul
And in your life—

They’re most often helping you
To do nothing much really

Just a little nothing much
Just a wafer-thin rest

So that then you can power up
To do so much oh so much more!

More important! More relevant!
More oh-my-god significant—

I’m warning you
More will still be nothing much

As less was mostly nothing much
Just more or less nothing much for us—

Look down the road
What do you glimpse?

A city? More cities?
Verdant parks? Apocalypse?

You know that cliché about journeying
You know it so well but you missed it

Keep your eyes on the road
It curves and it’s wicked

If you want to do less well keep looking
Down this hissing road and listen


~ Nothing’s Trickier than Intersections

Look as quickly as you can
The past is always different

That doesn’t make you present
Won’t present you a future

In the morning dirt resorbs
Shadows it grows out at night

Find beauty pause you can’t be
Still but you can pause and look

Both ways for the two-faced gods
That flock to crossing pathways

They have so many names
And every name two faces

One always coming for you
One always fleeing the scene

There’s one that they’re all hiding
They’re meant to obscure the one

The name of the one’s the point
The fiction in a fiction

Go ahead through the crossroads
And maybe you’ll get the point

Evanescent morning dew
Where meadowlarks are singing

Where all that’s left keeps spinning
And waits in the road for you


~ Short Lines Allow Changing Lanes

Could any list exhaust
The ways that change can change?

I looked to see which poets had tried
Something like and found a fine test

Thanks to Dunya Mikhail who summarized
Much remaining nonetheless concise—

“I was born.
I write poetry.
I will die.”

Then I imagined her three short statements
Short lines as a trigram of number lines

And that meant that they had to be dense 
All sorts of enumerable points within them

Internally continuous and infinitely
Abundant of condensed infinitesimals

The point’s not what’s between the lines
My dear it’s everything hiding inside them

Linked mountains
Returning to be stored and hidden
The changes