Three Thoughts of a Universe

~ We’re Remnants of Past Generations

That first vague sense of feeling
Unknown living obstacles
In the dark—herds of muses

Moving through the woods, the prose
Of conversation slightly
Skewed to become more ghastly,

More like bleating and chirping,
Cries that were not intended,
Verses, ideomotor

Phenomena, Carpenter
Effects—that’s them, ancestors,
The meaningful echoes left.

You take a hesitant step
Or two further to the dark
And then scurry quickly back

To your own circle of light.
You’d say your fear pulled you back.
It was them, the words, your light.

~ Reflection Nebula

Meaning begins in indicating,
In pointing, pointing out, in linking.
Once it gets going, it’s explaining.

Tohu wa-bohu. I know I have
Forgotten many things. Vacant. Vast.
Tohubohu, whole holus bolus.

It’s not an easy conversation
For clouds of gas to have with themselves,
Never easy to discuss meaning

Like so many spiral galaxies
All spun around and around, trying,
Each one of them, to catch its own tail.

Meaning is a vulnerable species
Of indication that just happened
To blossom in the wrong universe,

Wrong majestic island universe.
Ah, sighs the gas from blue nebula,
Look at us, we hundreds of light years,

Millions of light years away from you,
Many billions of light years to go.
Imagine being those first photons,

Angels ejected to show the way,
Still traveling, all the way from then,
To die at last, absorbed in your eyes.

~ It Never Is

This solipsistic universe,
Same laws everywhere inside it
Making it, nothing outside it,

It never is. It’s the chapel
Of the shallows, the quiet arm
Of stars and small towns by the bay,

The novel without references,
The passionate poem with nothing
To say. Let’s watch it drift away.