The cliff spills all its worlds
Down one side, from sand grains
To mansion-sized boulders,
From wisps of grass to trunks
Of grand, uprooted pines.
Where did you mean to go
When you first saw the cliff,
And thought, maybe a poem?
Daughter’s getting ready
To spend the afternoon
At the bookstore, meaning
She intends to look good.
Decades have wandered by
Since the last time you browsed
Shelves meaning to look good.
You’ll settle for pain-free,
Your daughter’s company,
New books to browse or read.
You check the time, glance up
At the enormous cliff.
There’s no rush to finish
This or any other thought—
From the base of the cliff
You can witness the mind
Advancing on the world
As clearly as you can
See it crawl through bookshelves.
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Book Cliff
Monday, October 28, 2024
Going Great
Officially dying, there’s still
A wide variance in your days,
Ranging from those when you wake up
Feeling death is, for sure, too close,
To days when you feel all is well—
Days when you feel life’s turned out well,
Which you shouldn’t, since you’re dying.
But those days (and hours and minutes)
Are in there, where you catch yourself
Pleased with your life in general,
And why not? It’s not as if those
Who aren’t officially dying
Won’t ever die. It gets summed up
Sooner or later. You’ve done well!
Sunday, October 27, 2024
Simultaneity
Is that the problem?
Watch the memory.
A second ago
You had an idea
You can still half-feel,
A shape in your brain,
What you were about
To compose—and here
You are, trying hard
To out-race the loss
By typing faster,
Only losing more
By making errors
That require pauses
To stop and fix, but
Better to have fixed
What you have so far
Than to finished it.
Is it? You’re trying
To compose and revise
At once, which becomes
Your subject, given
The first—wait, what first?
Did you mean verse? No,
You meant the first thought
You had to write about
For this—is long gone.
Saturday, October 26, 2024
Although You Do
Friday, October 25, 2024
A Hunch
Thursday, October 24, 2024
Maybe Meaning
You love how life, as a word,
Can unfold so many lives
And then let them drift and sink,
So many paper blossoms,
Soggy within memory,
Getting dimmer in its depths,
None of them alive themselves
For all the definitions
Of themselves they carry on
Into the dark, this is life,
No, this is what life is, no,
Life’s meaning, not a being,
But no one’s sure what meaning
Is, either, maybe living.
Wednesday, October 23, 2024
Empty Day Almost Spent
There’s another moment
When you imagine it,
Whatever it might be,
That a moment ago
You thought you had, slipping,
This next moment, away—
And something in you cries
Out to the rest of you—
Waste! Whatever thing good
Or indifferent you have
Been doing distracted
You from what you have been
Losing while doing it.
And what you had’s going,
Your surplus dissolving,
Its dissolution waste.
You won’t regret it long.
You regret so little
That’s gone, once it’s long gone,
But right now it seems like
Something’s going to waste—
Free day, free afternoon,
What disappears without
Being consciously spent.
So that’s another form
Of it, isn’t it, waste?
But still you don’t know
What the word’s all about
How it functions, connects
To feeling it as waste.
The emptier the hour
Promised to be, the more
You hungered to feel it,
All the way through it all.
The closer to nothing
Nothing much feels, the less
You will jolt to the loss
Of near nothing at all
To near nothing at all.
Tuesday, October 22, 2024
How to Get the Day Talking
The mentor said break,
Break first. Then we’ll think
About what to do
With all your fragments,
How to make something—
The morning wind slipped
Down through the canyons.
Somewhere someone fell,
Wading in a crick,
Picking up pieces,
While someone else searched
For that collection
Meaning the canyon
Would start talking soon.
Monday, October 21, 2024
It Was 1:20 PM Just a Minute Ago
Death can seem to rattle time,
But that’s just since you begin,
Briefly, to pay attention,
And when you pay attention,
You notice clocks can’t agree,
For more than a day, on time.
It’s not death that rattles time.
It’s attentiveness that shows
How deluded counting is.
A weirder question would be,
Why proximity to death
Makes some folks pay attention?
Come on. You’re not escaping.
Humans love to wait too late.
Sunday, October 20, 2024
Now Solve These
You have three
Words to make
A new world,
But you don’t
Know which words
They will be.
Use. That’s one.
Worth. That’s two.
Waste. That’s three.
Saturday, October 19, 2024
A Thought Could Make Life You
Shuffle through the book, the books,
The tales of entertainment,
Of history, math, silence.
The mind may be one but small
Or vast, without cohesion.
In either form it travels
From egg into your stomach,
All thought’s hallucinations,
To find an inn in your skull.
Mind’s thus a thing, a substance,
But not, in itself, a life.
Without living, mind evolves,
And ancestors adapted
Through mind’s lines that led to you.
Friday, October 18, 2024
Rampaging Baboon Nebula in Forever Falling Snow
Once everyone accepted the heat
Was rising, its consequences dire,
There had to be a weird exception—
In this town where it started to snow
Scarcely past the first day of autumn,
The universe decided to snap.
Here it would never not snow again.
Performing chores keeps a ghost alive,
God roaring inside, afraid to be
Alone. No, not afraid. Dreading chores,
The gift of responsibility,
The way they can appear from nowhere,
Just turn up, from nothing to be done
To a list as long as your old arm
And a twist in the belly that says
Even the cancer objects to this.
Well, if it’s going to keep snowing,
At least here in this narrow canyon,
Best to move the wood stove to the top
Of the list of what has to be fixed.
The evening is white all afternoon.
There’s an oversized, glossy journal
Of deep-space photography sitting
On the bookshelf not far from the stove.
This issue’s garish cover photo,
NGC 6727,
The Rampaging Baboon Nebula.
Thursday, October 17, 2024
The Diplomat’s Burial Garden
The words that trigger the soulful
Pictures have been hiding.
Without them, what’s a thought
But a blank from a dummy gun?
The body of the frail contains
A suitcase crammed with folders.
This internal folderol amounts
To paperwork on the scales,
And the scales assess bureaucracy.
So much goes missing near the end,
The funk and the careful threading
Of these fungi more ancient than bone.
Are they? The fungi? Bones are old
Inventions to be sure, but so is rotten.
Wednesday, October 16, 2024
You Can Alter
Natural’s no good,
And the accusation
That someone, by naming
Or portraying
Evil as natural,
Has thereby justified
Evil, even taken
The side of evil
As how things ought to be,
Is false. Natural moves
In cruel ways. More telling
Than nature’s wickedness
Or shiftiness, are thoughts
That pointing out nature
Has been cruel forever
Forgives it. The vicious
Going on the longest
Is the vicious most ripe
For change. Noting something
Has been going on long
Generations needn’t
Be a claim it can’t change.
More ancient regimes
Aren’t less vulnerable.
Nothing natural’s not
Temporal. The longer
It’s been like this, the more
Suitable for ending.
Pain can be natural,
Not inevitable.
Tuesday, October 15, 2024
Bright Apple Sunset
No peanuts from the moon
No results from the living
Room—the road had sufficient
Expanse through hours of desert
Driving home—and there you were
Rolling in the door Hello
To bills and claims on your time
Hello to ordinary
Hassles of getting through life
On days when death isn’t there.
Monday, October 14, 2024
You People Will Have to Leave
Sunday, October 13, 2024
Picking out the Shards You Had in Mind
Saturday, October 12, 2024
Spider Hockey at Sleep
We’re leaving and none too pleased,
So we pause to waste some time
With Eggs Benny at Sleep Is
For Sissies, roadside Winlaw,
Pretending we’re arriving,
Departure some other day,
From some other life, not ours,
Not this one, in the woods
Beside the rural highway.
A jumping spider leaps down
Lightly and skitters across
The two-top. One of us taps
The table just so it leaps
Toward the other. Go! Go!
Friday, October 11, 2024
Five Years After the Last One
The edge of knowledge,
The threshold of death—
Now add this petal—
Last of the polished
And deep-pocketed
Soul’s predilections—
The step against steps,
The rule against rules—
Nothing’s very good
At being nothing.
People stand around
Talking about fires
That scorched the mountains
Just this past summer.
Thursday, October 10, 2024
In Any Medium
Wednesday, October 9, 2024
Weekday
Monday, it was, just
Regular Monday,
No holiday, no
Annual awards,
No events rooted
In church or in state.
You could pile fine dry
Splits to honor cold
Weather on the way,
Still it was Monday,
And seasonable
For early autumn,
Leaves not even down,
A kind of dusty
Gold haze on the green.
There was no one here.
Let it sink through you.
Nearly no one there.
Tuesday, October 8, 2024
Ill Advised
Jolting awake, once again
You frighten your future self,
That is, the self that ponders
Risks and disasters ahead.
That self is never correct
But often nearly correct,
And it’s really all you have
To mitigate, to ward off
All your looming disasters.
If you’re nodding off without
Knowing it until you start
Awake, bewildered, you may
Nod off while driving the car,
So that death or injury,
Financial catastrophe,
Overwhelming guilt and shame,
All the horrors pursue you
Through what little life’s left you,
Who didn’t take your future
Self seriously enough,
Harming your self and others.
Monday, October 7, 2024
See You as a Wave
It’s not always easy,
Although you all are waves,
To seek you in that shape,
To see that shape’s made you.
The continuity
Extends at all edges—
Periodicity
Governs where your wave breaks.
What to do with those chunks,
Quanta, spindrift, churned foam?
They’ll become waves again.
A black hound goes berserk
On the wet, empty street
With one amber streetlight.
Sunday, October 6, 2024
Missing Hunts Itself
As often as sunlight threads through water,
So often soul will thread itself through you.
Nothing about this is meant to be cute.
Snorkel gold shadows through mossy green ponds,
You’ll notice how the sunlight threads and weaves,
And the existence of the soul is moot
If you only ponder what the word means—
The word soul is as real any word.
It’s as a word, numinous as sunlight,
That soul will continue to thread through you—
Glowing, mobile, and slow from side to side,
But good as instantaneous straight on.
The weird, freighted weightlessness of the soul,
That word most like a missing particle.
Saturday, October 5, 2024
You Meant So Much More Than You Knew
Messages and meanings were encoded
Into everything, no matter how
Inert—indeed, the point of encoding
Was to discover how nothing could be
Inert, nothing could avoid meaningful
Interpretation—it’s all meaningful,
And humans had at it, adding meaning
To every insignificant wavelet
They swam across before it was their turn
To turn under and disperse with all their
Carefully articulated meanings.
They all said there were none. They all made more.
Friday, October 4, 2024
Triumphal Old Couch on a Grey Morning
You lose the doctors focused
On your recovery, on
Their potential victory—
You gain the nurses caring
Mostly for your comfort,
But unsure how to get there.
You may spend a grey morning
Wrapped in extra shawls and scarves,
Watching the fire someone built for you,
Hoping mainly for comfort,
Which by now hardly differs
All that much from victory,
But considering the cat
Of the host who naps. Triumph.
Thursday, October 3, 2024
The Plan
You three circled the village
And came to a decision—
All you would need was a spell
Powerful enough to twist
The massive fasces of odds
Against you in your favor.
Then, when you bought a ticket
You would, most likely, win it.
Then, you could pounce on the house
By the lake, buy it in cash,
And move right in before death
Could tap you on the shoulder.
A plan is a simple thing.
You’ll die in that house, in spring.
Wednesday, October 2, 2024
The Swallowed Poem Meant for October 2nd
The words that no one could find,
That everyone talked about,
Weren’t words as you might find them,
Not sounds as wavelengths or waves
As signs. They hid in letters,
The way small lives hide in large.
These were the words of meanings,
The ones that don’t need to be
Accessible or pre-made—
They weren’t really words at all,
More like alchemical tricks
That were barely there, then gone.
For something to mean something
It pays informational toll.
Tuesday, October 1, 2024
Thought Extruding Structure
You live perpetually
Underinformed, and yet you
Are a spinneret of thought—
Not the whole spider, mind you,
And not the gossamer thread—
An extravagant device
That combines the polymers
Produced by a spider’s life,
Then sends those legendary
Skeins of miracle ideas
Into the world to do things
Impossible without you
But so much greater than you,
The weavings, orbs, ambushes,
And world-sailing parachutes,
The irreproducible
Suite of silk adaptations
That undergird spider myths,
Since it seems impossible,
For so much from so little,
Thoughts tapestried of unknowns.
Monday, September 30, 2024
Nothing Left
How do you prefer your emptiness?
What sense or set of phenomena
Do you savor in absentia?
Less sound, less light, fewer personas,
Shorter lists, more barren calendars?
How do you prefer your emptiness?
No mind? Non self? No rumination?
Have you ever tried it neat? The way
A day in, say, a foreign city
Can overwhelm you with everything,
So that only purest emptiness
Can find the secret to slipping in,
In the form of bereft awareness
You’re emptied of emptiness again.
Sunday, September 29, 2024
What Happened
The universe, the everything,
Down to the way these phrases sank
Together in previously
Nonexistent rearrangements—
What’s new? In an organism
That’s really an ecosystem
Of single-celled organisms
Cohabiting in one giant
Of multicellularity,
A little fizzing keeps zipping
Among trillions of synapses
And, would you believe it, creates
In itself, in its tiny buzz
Of busyness, a small model,
A minuscule effervescence,
That believes itself an account
That covers the whole of everything,
More or less. That’s what true faith is—
Not trust in the miraculous,
But the willingness to as-if
The whole as blips of awareness.
Saturday, September 28, 2024
Moving
The pause arrived,
And, as always,
You took a sec
To notice it,
Then a moment
To decide how
You ought to feel
About pausing—
The sun seduced
You in the end,
And you relaxed
To watch and wait,
For what, who knew?
The pause arrived
And you begged, stay,
But pauses move.
Friday, September 27, 2024
Epiphanic
Find the shade to watch the light.
A parking lot with shadows
From buildings on its west side
Will do fine. Study the white,
Full-spectrum sunlight. On tar,
On a white-washed wooden shop,
On otherwise grey cement.
You can still list the colors,
Even the bold marigold
Of the railings and fence posts,
But at all points, you’re seeing
Everything reflecting white.
The brown stucco wall is white.
The dusty green leaves are white.
The blue window trim is white.
This is what happens with light
That can wash but not wash out.
Find the shade to watch the light.
Thursday, September 26, 2024
Handsaw and Shitepoke in a Siege
Wednesday, September 25, 2024
But Isn’t Zero
Tuesday, September 24, 2024
Condensery
Monday, September 23, 2024
A More Lunar Fermenter
The dark broth of the run-off can’t not
Be an acquired taste, appealing
Only to the odder connoisseur,
But it’s a potent distillation
For those ready for a weirder brew,
And meanwhile, clarified contentment
Is a joy to share with those who share
Your space to converse in the same air.
Mornings for chatter; nights for readers—
Save your happiness for companions;
Save your complaints for poems. You’ll gather
Fewer readers but improve your friends.
Sunday, September 22, 2024
Which Is Barely a Poem
Stories that bind are often
Barely narratives at all.
The goal’s not entertainment
In a conventional sense—
It’s about the recounting
Of some shared experience
That’s especially potent
If only one teller can
Remember it at all well,
As when children ask parents
About about what their births were like
Or when children tell parents,
Disappearing into fog,
Some fond memory to lure
Their parents back a moment.
What was it you used to do,
Papa, that chased my bad dreams?
I know you commanded me,
Sort of, like, You won’t have bad dreams
Tonight! And somehow, it worked.
How’d that even get started?
You were eight, in that bunk bed
In the house in Hurricane,
And you’d had a string of nights
With nightmares, and you wanted
To make them stop. I told you
To tell yourself you wouldn’t
Have bad dreams that night, but you
Didn’t believe that would work.
On a whim I raised my hand
And said I was telling you,
You won’t have bad dreams tonight.
The first night we got lucky.
I think since I trusted you.
After the first night, you did.
And basically that was it,
The story of how Papa
Stopped you from having bad dreams.
Not much of a tale is it?
But much more satisfying
Than a plot twist. And who can
Even tell which of us said what
Just now in retelling it?
Like the time my grandmother
Surfaced from her dying bed
To join me in the story
Of the time my sister spilled
A whole milkshake down my shirt.
And just the other day, she,
My sister, your aunt, reached out
To me, since I’m dying now,
Recalling old anecdotes,
And that one came up, which she
Was too young to remember
Well, and that broke the ice.
What’s the point? I guess the point
Is that the arts don’t function
Best as what we think they are.
Stories, like singing, were balm,
Were human kinds of grooming,
Elaborating meaning
As a kind of offering,
Creating intimacy.
The grander social uses
Came later, for all the arts,
And that includes poetry.
Saturday, September 21, 2024
Another Piece Put in Place
Thoughts wander up and down the green
And flowered tapestry of mind,
Just looking for a place to rest
That isn’t imaginary,
That lets thoughts sleep
Without nightmares, to wake refreshed,
A pleasant bit of living done,
As part of getting dying done,
At a steep cost to no one. Yes!
Dying’s part of living and not
Always the hardest part, although
Likely never the easiest.
There’s maybe not so much to dread
From dying, then, and certainly
Nothing at all from being dead.
Its possible for much of it
To be completed peacefully,
Sun on your chest a few moments,
The afternoon accomplishing
What it can’t help but accomplish,
Your thoughts, for now, in sync with it.
See? There, you go—another hour,
Another shift in the shifting
Natural light of the planet,
Tucking away a little bit
Of what you, like the light, can’t stop,
Can’t help, can’t—and yet will—finish.
Friday, September 20, 2024
Stage Four
What’s a prepper to do
When the phone call’s coming
From inside of the house?
The bunker’s bolted down,
Silo’s locked and loaded.
No one’s getting in here,
Ever, to rescue you.
Outside, the world goes on
Taunting apocalypse,
Still foolish and clueless.
Inside, you’ll be preserved
As perfectly prepared,
Save for the visitor
Your insides brought with you.
Thursday, September 19, 2024
The Painkiller’s Singing
Pain is the only real
Reason for real grieving—
It’s how loss makes you feel,
How tortured your breathing,
Worst when there’s no appeal,
No drug that’s relieving,
When you’re tumbling downhill
Still not quite believing,
When you’re crushed by pain’s heel
And angry, and seething,
And the pain makes a meal
Of all you believed in.
Simple pain is all steel.
You’re only the bleeding.
Wednesday, September 18, 2024
The Many, Too Many, The Few
In the same hour’s world-wide news,
A piece on global warming
Coming to get everyone,
And a piece on the losses
When death stalked one family
And two or three members died
Overnight. Now here you are,
Heading home between the news,
Between death for everyone,
Which is what looms, and always,
Locally, death for a few.
And? If you’re one of the few,
What can you do to prepare
The rest joining up with you?
Tuesday, September 17, 2024
Prosodoxy
The night was August,
The summer waning,
The laughter screeching.
The kids were dyeing
Each other’s hair and
Discussing the tracks
Shaking the kitchen,
Deep theologians
Debating scriptures.
You perched in their church,
Where rhymes were sacred
And every verse cursed,
And all the boasts lies
That knew truth lied worse.
Monday, September 16, 2024
Contrarian Reception
Sunday, September 15, 2024
Kindness Is a Kind of Metabolism
How we live within our times,
Largely forgiving of those
Who are close to us, largely
Unforgiving of others
Who are mostly imagined,
Given they’re farther away—
Little clouds of thoughts inside
Small orbits of behavior—
Few of us more than manage
More or less acceptable
Lives within our small contexts.
Lots of people have observed
How life is like a bubble,
Just a bubble, a bubble
Of awareness—it’s also
A sphere of ethical sense,
An enclosed parameter,
Sometimes many such bubbles,
Articulating outsides
Relative to our insides,
Like living cells, like our cells.
Saturday, September 14, 2024
Afternoon Alucinari
You were surprised
No one was there.
You closed your eyes,
And they were back,
The child talking
With the adult
In soft voices
On those chairs,
Those empty chairs,
Which remained there.
Your eyes opened.
Again just chairs.
You tried to hear
What the child said
To the adult
Or the adult
Said to the child—
You could clearly
Understand them
With your eyes shut.
You could see them.
But, eyes opened,
Again just chairs,
And no words left.
You’d never had
This dream before,
This lazy dream
That didn’t change
Backdrops between
The scenes. The same
Setting, the same
Chairs, and you there,
But the talking
Pair blinking in
And out of air.
You closed your eyes,
The room remained
The same as when
You were awake,
Just the adult
And child returned.
Allegory,
You decided,
It had to be
Allegory—
Mysterious
Child stands for what?
And the adult?
You dozed back off.
They were talking
Again. This time
You realized
Neither noticed
You watching them,
Trying to hear.
They must have been
Spirits or gods
You decided,
And always there—
The chairs weren’t dreamed.
Nothing was dreamed.
You were never
Really dreaming,
Even when you
Had your eyes closed.
More like dying,
You heard them talk
And saw them there.
Further from death,
You lost the strength
To conjure them
Conversing there.
Closer, further,
Further, closer,
Time to wander,
Whatever’s there.
Friday, September 13, 2024
Announcer
Thursday, September 12, 2024
Turn In
Wednesday, September 11, 2024
Life Behaves
Tuesday, September 10, 2024
Waking inside a World at War
Dreams couldn’t care less
About the company
Of other dreams they keep.
Even the overall
Emotional tenor
Can swing from dream to dream.
In an hour before dawn
A little restlessness
Can yield romance, terror,
General frustration,
The ghosts of your parents,
A world implausibly
At peace in all corners,
Not even a quarrel,
Inside a world at war.
Monday, September 9, 2024
Some Nights, Death Plays with Its Food
Even dying, the chores of the living
Keep trying to reoccupy your mind
So insistently you start to believe
Your diagnosis was always a lie.
You’re not dying at all. You’re just a wreck—
Unhealthy, sure, and dependent on meds,
But with all the old chores, old work, old dreck
Of deadlines and bills, general busyness.
Here you thought dying meant better living,
Life without effort, not striving to live,
But instead you’ve just extended living
With all its nuisances, into a phase
Of lingering unhealthiness, sped up
Version of the ordinary aging
Everyone not dying has to work with—
Faster than average disintegration,
But nothing like detachment from the world
Of brute maintenance, nothing like the glide
Straight into the wide-open mouth of death,
More like finding yourself speared by the end
Of death’s many-tined eating utensil—
Gobbet vaguely waved around in the air
As death gestures with you to make a point.
How long until you can get swallowed whole?
Sunday, September 8, 2024
Phrases and Fragments of Unusual Language
Too reductive? You fold up
The plaid blanket you had wrapped
Around your waist, rummaging
Memory as you do so.
The best stories had three things—
Characters you found yourself
Deeply emotionally
Invested in, never mind
That they were only phrases
And rehearsed performances—
Plots whose basic outlines served
To provide a scaffolding
For comprehending
This or that schema of life—
And unusual language
At points in the narrative,
Memorable turns of phrase
In the mouths of characters
Or in the surrounding words
Describing scenes and events.
Focusing on the latter
Alone, apart from the plot
Or character, yes, that is
Reductive. You put away
The blanket in the cupboard.
Locally, another day
Had begun, dominated,
Like all the rest, by events
And various characters.
But here, in the quiet room
Where you watch the sun alone,
You find your mind hunting down
The footpaths of memory,
Hungry for just the right phrase,
The remarkable fragment
Of unusual language.
Saturday, September 7, 2024
Never-Ending Genesis
The subject of the art is not
Out there waiting for you, is not
Necessarily in your mind,
Although you will have to dragnet
Your memory to dredge it up,
Or something close enough to it
So that you can begin your sketch
Or elaborate your first scene.
The subject of the art may turn
Out to be so derivative
That no one finds any value
In it past perhaps craftsmanship,
But even then—even stolen,
Lifted from memory, largely
Or entirely imitative,
The exact subject for your art
Doesn’t yet exist. You stare out
Across the lawn of the summer
Park lodge to where several easels
Have been set up facing the cliffs,
As plein-air enthusiasts paint
Just what they see in front of them.
Surely the subjects of their art
Exist, the cliffs, as they’re given?
No, in your skull you disagree,
And draft your disagreement here:
They may paint pre-existing cliffs.
They may rely on memory
Of past plein-air paintings, of craft
They were taught in this or that class,
But the subject each will capture
Will be the subject each has made.
You feel you must insist on this
As the most wonderful aspect
Apparent in this universe.
Things can come into existence,
And with each flick of a paintbrush
A subject of art has been made—
The whole history of the world
Has been increased by that subject,
That painter on the brilliant lawn
Of a public park in the shade.
Friday, September 6, 2024
Departure for an Exciting Trip, Pulled Off Without a Hitch
What did you want today to be like
When you were thinking ahead to now?
You weren’t really thinking about now.
You had no experience of now.
You were thinking about today’s date
As upcoming on the calendar,
And then casting your memory back
Over such pasts as you have retained
And trying to make a shadow box
Of this blank spot on the calendar,
A specimen of assemblage art.
So, asking the question differently,
What memories did you put forward
That you would have liked to discover
Waiting for you today? Glowing health?
A love poem of delight in the world?
Or were your desires for now less bold?
Maybe bills paid, adequate supplies,
And something hopeful about the world
That you could pass on to the next date.
There is this—for all the murdering,
Mere quarreling, and exploitation
Members of your species do know how
To do a couple of things quite well—
Have a raucous good time together;
Coordinate on something complex.
Did you wish for one or both of those
When you were thinking ahead to now?
Thursday, September 5, 2024
How to Tell History from Fiction
Even empires come out of retirement—
Neo-This and Second-That flourish
For a little while in imitation
Of their namesakes. Aftershocks. All they are.
As far back as ancient Sumeria,
Ancient Sumeria made a come-back.
But no one builds epics quite like athletes
Reluctant to let go of glory years.
No one builds sequels like hegemonies,
The first iteration more extensive
Than each shrinking descendant. Yes, the first
Season is generally the finest,
But they don’t return geometrically
Reduced like radioactive half lives.
That’s how it goes with the civilized world—
If a human or something human works
Really well, someone else will run it back
Or try to, New Kingdom, Third Dynasty,
Last campaign to win the presidency.
If trilogies were written in that way,
They’d have a better claim to mimesis.
The closest approximation comes when
Some creator sets off on a prequel
Or a tangential world-building project.
But even a story about failure succeeds
Best as a tale in which story succeeds,
One narrative arch, not hoodoos that shrink.
Wednesday, September 4, 2024
Oneiricism
Frequently, while you’re reading,
Your dreaming mind continues
In the manner of the text
You’ve started dozing over,
So that, for a little while,
You are the author’s other
Self, transplanted to your skull.
If you’ve been reading fiction,
The characters keep talking.
If you’ve been reading science,
Thoughts keep hypothesizing—
No! Says a voice in the back,
Grad student in the shadows—
You keep experimenting!
Whatever. The text goes on
Until you’re fully awake
Or have run out of supplies
To go on in that genre.
For now, you’re still half-asleep.
An early original
Copy of the text folded
In your lap as your eyes drift
And you ask all the words left
To finish this mess at last.
Tuesday, September 3, 2024
You Are if You Care if You Are
People as monsters
(Only in the minds
Of people)—people
As people (only
In the peoples’ minds)—
And people as words
(By people, about
People, for people)—
Can you spot the trend?
What people are is
Something that doesn’t
Ever deeply change,
Something that flickers
When tilted in light,
Something that erodes
To something ghastly,
Or so it can seem
To squinting people,
To something lusty,
Hungry, creaturely,
Or to something said.
There are physical
Phenomena named
People—arguments,
Also about which
Phenomena count
As really people,
But the catch is that
Only people care
Who people are, what
People are, and which
People can decide.
It’s as if, say, God
Was the only one
Arguing about
Who or what is God,
Or if only ghosts
Considered haunting
Taxonomically,
No input outside
Of ectoplasm.
Well, maybe that’s just
People for you, hey?
Whatever they are
That other things aren’t.
Monday, September 2, 2024
Desert Thunderstorm Right Before Bed
No, God is not dead,
A website argues,
Serenely certain
Everyone agrees
What the word God means.
How about, no God
Is dead, all versions
Live? Suspicious stares
Swivel at that claim.
How about, no God
As mostly defined
By your faith leaders
Is dead? No Christian
God is dead, or no
Baptist God is dead,
Or—pick your people,
Your congregation.
Does everyone in
Your congregation
Have the same notion
As to what God means?
That God is not dead.
Other Gods may be.
Little gods should be.
Hard to find a faith
That lets all Gods live,
That lets all Gods be.
Your God is not dead
Since you believe, and
What’s God without faith
In any case? God
Who lives should live when
Nobody believes.
Sunday, September 1, 2024
The Day Is Uncertain
Sleep’s been lurking in the corners
Of your scattered aches all morning,
So that you drift between alert
And dozing some more in your chair.
The nests of texts you wallow in—
News, letters, fiction, and your own
Poems—all feel grubby as unwashed sheets,
Tiresome as being invalid.
Too much cancer, too little sleep
(Real sleep), too many painkillers,
Too many trivial setbacks—
All too much like the show you watched,
Or tried to watch, with your daughter
The other night, when the service
Started glitching just as you were
Both getting into the story,
The scenery, the charming lead.
For a while, you kept watching,
Hoping the stream would sort itself
And quit abruptly seizing up
Mid-word, mid-eyeblink. Finally,
It got too frustrating, and you
Decided to turn off the show.
There’ll be none of that in real life.
If you keep blinking out mid-thought,
If the thought your dreams invaded
Was how mediocre your thoughts
Tend to be, well too bad. You are
Still in the middle of the stream,
And you can either cultivate
Patience with your frequent glitches
Or keep glitching impatiently.
The soft hum of a distant plane
Somewhere over the canyon’s walls
Laps like lake waves against the shore
Of your eroded awareness,
And maybe you’re okay with this.
You can see leaves tossed in the breeze
Outside the windows on your dreams.
You can dislike these lines later.
Saturday, August 31, 2024
Sheer Living Philosophest
The cactus trail leads up the hill
Beside the path the deer prefer
And where, sometimes, a road runner
Or fox will abruptly appear.
From here, they look like green applause,
A string of hands poised for clapping,
Like fans lining up on the route
Of a stage of the Tour de France.
Here come deer now. The prickly pear
Are ready with their paddle palms.
Let the wind stir the juniper.
A mind can play at philosophe
And strain to move by metaphor,
But wordless is philosopher.
Friday, August 30, 2024
But Incomprehensibly Uplifting
Pleasantly odd, the oddly pleasant
Minor moments of a minor life—
The way morning light across the way,
Ordinary light, ordinary
Morning, not flamboyant cloud morning,
Can catch your eye so you catch your breath,
And you don’t know why, you only know
There’s a small surge of joy, a small surge
Of lowly satisfaction. Lowly
Thursday, August 29, 2024
Unoriginal Sin
It keeps happening—often
Enough to merit study
And more comment than it gets—
Those indisputably harmed,
Even to the point of death,
Victims of rape and torture,
Prolonged discrimination,
Caste systems, war, genocide,
Bravely mange to survive,
Become exemplars of faith,
Perseverance, and the best
Of human courageousness.
Then, somehow, sometimes
In a few generations,
Sometimes in a few decades,
Those very same survivors
Or their direct descendants,
Turn to become oppressors,
And prove themselves capable
Of atrocities that stun
Not only for the evil
But for who’s embracing it—
Protesters turned storm troopers,
Peace activists turned tyrants,
The decimated remnant
Of a people becoming
Architects of apartheids—
Never again, people say,
As means of justifying
Starting it over again.
Doesn’t even have to be
Vengeance. Sensed entitlement
Seems to be enough and is
Always near to hand, always
Close to the surface, desired.
Can we look this in the face?
It doesn’t seem like we can.
No amount of suffering
Can permanently render
Persons or populations
Incapable of harming
Persons and populations,
And the last measure of pain
Is suffering as excuse
To cause suffering again.
Wednesday, August 28, 2024
Moses Drives up the Mesa to Collect the Latest Checklist
Up the mountains look for ways
Immoral’s illogical—
Lying’s nine-tenths of the law.
The sound of engines running
Is the sound of your own thefts.
Pause a moment while reading—
No seriously—pause now
And review your life for crimes.
Can you feel the tragedy?
The real tragedy being
That there’s no way you can share,
No way everyone can share,
Simultaneously, all
Their personal lists of sins.
Tuesday, August 27, 2024
Relentless Rhythm Shapes All This
Points on Earth back into day,
And day rises over them
Until they’re backing away
Back into evening and night.
Everything starts in the east,
And the west is for goodbyes,
As far as Earth is concerned.
Of course, some species can rush
Back and forth, some fast enough
To outrun the day or night,
For a short while, a few hours,
But most of the time, most time,
In fact, most of what time is
Amounts to time backing up.
Monday, August 26, 2024
Why Wouldn’t You Want Readers?
Well you would, if you could pick them,
Hand-select them from the masses,
And, shamefully, not for the best,
Most insightful, elite readers,
Just for those most likely to like
Whatever this is that you do.
Are you really that thin-skinned? Yes.
Maybe. You’d love community,
To share your own minority
Nature of your preferences.
You have the feeling you exist
In more than one iteration,
That there, are have been, and will be
Always small numbers of readers
With interests and preferences
Largely overlapping with yours,
And something under your ribs warms
At the thought of being welcomed
As a writer for your people,
If only your people could be
Located, assembled, distilled
Out of the vast demographics
Of a world unlikely to like
Whatever this is that you do.
Sunday, August 25, 2024
Relief
You dream yourself trapped
By minor horrors,
Bad debts, pet vomits,
Fraught obligations,
The general sense
Of unpleasant things
Needing attention
Immediately.
Life, the same old life,
Sisyphean pulse
Against entropy,
An endless series
Of minor panics.
But then you wake up
And recall you are
Dying, and promised
By doctors to be
Dead soon, and you sigh
An enormous sigh
Of relief.
Saturday, August 24, 2024
Nothing in the Forecast
Life’s about to get
Very different,
Says rumination,
Right at the instant
Of your transition
From dreams to waking,
An invitation
In a predawn room
To start composing.
Anticipation
Makes you more aware
Of the deep quiet,
Thoughts just boats bobbing
Ahead of the storm.
Friday, August 23, 2024
Worm-Eaten Prejudices
Thursday, August 22, 2024
Imagist Poetry
Wednesday, August 21, 2024
Dayless
Local light reclaimed the world.
You have to dig in your heels
To feel days end and begin.
The sun and shadow curtains
Are continuous, of course,
And only by not moving
Smoothly with them can you feel
The days arrived, suns risen.
You don’t mean to be stubborn.
You’re just too small to keep up.
But imagine life tracking—
Geosynchronous orbits,
Faster even than on planes—
To hold continuous night
Or save continuous day.
What could you possibly count?
Your first unit could be years.
They’re actually out there now,
Just too well-attuned to see,
Local aliens as clouds,
Part of local light they flee.
Tuesday, August 20, 2024
Mort’s Place
Here’s the immortality you get—
Fixed identification with death.
Causation’s a fiction, but there are
The necessary antecedents—
That is, this will never come again
Unless this or that comes before it.
Death is just such an antecedent
For actual immortality—
Whatever lives on of you, your self,
Traces of your unique awareness,
Can’t emerge until after you die.
Any immortality that’s left
Will inhabit an indefinite
Span of fragmentating existence—
Bardo, Limbo, post-mortem taverns
Where the dead are allowed to mingle,
Will welcome you with open echoes
Of all the other calm immortals.
Outside, it’s flat desert or open
Ocean to the horizon, but here
Crowds of ancient personalities
Mingle with the newest revenants
All just beginning to realize
They’ve been visiting here all their lives.
Monday, August 19, 2024
Writing under the Waves
You turn your head,
Open your eyes,
And everything
Solid is gone.
You were dreaming
Upright again.
You’re dreaming now
As you struggle
To string these words
In short phrases
While attention
Sinks in the waves.
Don’t you dare blink.
You’ll leave again.
Someone’s talking,
But no one’s here.
Sunday, August 18, 2024
The Burial Plot
The core story’s bare
As a western set
In a stark ghost town
Built on location
In remote desert
And then abandoned
As a real ghost town
After the story
Was strip-mined and struck.
A squatter moves in,
Content with shelter,
Windmill well water,
And a hidden cache
Of canned, packaged foods
The cast left behind
Inside the entrance
To a phony mine.
In short, the core
Story’s all phony—
A dream projected
On blank, dusty ground.
To crank up the tale
And get it creaking
Along in the wind,
You need a second
Character to turn
Up making trouble
For your first squatter.
Now you have social
Tension and conflict,
Basic two-hander,
Stripped-down theater.
You see it, don’t you?
Any core story’s
Built on the ruins
Of an earlier
Story’s construction.
Any core story
Is implausible
To really live in,
Severs connections
To outer contexts,
And requires persons,
Plural, to detail
The toll of being
Social, to draw out
Human characters,
To scrutinize them.
For now, this ghost town
Sits empty between
Core phony stories,
No inhabitants,
No interactions,
Only the lizards,
Spiders, jack-rabbits,
Quiet scorpions,
And rustling dry wind.
Saturday, August 17, 2024
Weeding Small Delusions
In all sorts of frightening
And comforting ways, you can
Forget that you’re not alone.
The scratching in the dark hall
In the middle of the night
Can whisper wild animal
Until you recall you have
Been babysitting a cat
That sleeps in the spare bedroom.
The warmth from your sheets at dawn,
When your brain’s still half adrift,
Can let you dream of gone years
When you used to share your bed.
Confusions intensify,
Of course, with illness and age,
And strong pain medications,
And epistemology
Becomes, as you practice it
Now in ordinary hours,
More a rudimentary
Checking of the sensory
Against shuffled memory
To come to an agreement.
This is what truth is these days—
Reminding yourself you are
The source of most of your own
Uncertain experience,
And you should probably check
Shadows so you don’t expect
Too much from their existence.
Friday, August 16, 2024
The Canvas at Twilight
Once it’s official, dying
Feels very like a fresh start,
Which it shouldn’t, but it does.
You’re on a new adventure.
You’re fortunate enough to know.
You’ve been granted the foresight
That narrows the aperture,
No longer open-ended,
And yet not already closed.
You know that once the hot breath
Is on you, you’ll be dismayed.
You know you may get less life
Than even now’s expected,
That you might not be able
To prepare all things fully,
But now that’s the adventure
That you’ve begun to create—
You’re no longer bewildered
By all the ways you could die,
What you should do to survive.
You’re not going to survive
Much longer, no matter what,
And all kinds of death but one
Have been shunted to the side.
The rough scenario’s set.
You’ve entered palliative care.
This adventure’s what you make
Of dying, what you can shape
Out of this amorphous clay,
The splendor the dimming takes.
Thursday, August 15, 2024
Dawn in Hospice Care
In the quiet morning, you
Open your eyes and your thoughts
Acknowledge that this world,
Presenting in your brain
As so much awareness
Of nothing much, is still
Pretty much the same. Good.
Oh, and you’re not in pain.
Even better. So what
Will these waking hours bring
Before you sleep again?
You’ve got no miracles planned.
You haven’t bought any
Lottery tickets. Luck
Will have to operate
In a limited range.
Yet, feeling well, feeling
Well enough alone, yields
A kind of excitement.
When the body is free
From pain or exhaustion,
The most ordinary
Possibilities seem
Bright opportunity.
Wednesday, August 14, 2024
Some More Evening Mist for You
Tuesday, August 13, 2024
Intermission
You wake up rested,
Feeling pretty good,
And think, Really?
This is the body
That’s supposed to be
Dying?
Outside, clouds and moon,
Crickets chorusing
On a warm night breeze—
Pretty much the same
Pretty old nothing much
As ever,
And since you’re not
In pain right now,
Not hunched over
Sick on the toilet,
Not fetal in bed,
Not muzzy-headed
For the moment, it’s almost
Like you never were.
Admonish
Yourself to savor
The interlude,
The quiet pause
In the proceedings
That will resume soon—
Prolonged descent’s
A show in which
The intermission
Is the best part.
Monday, August 12, 2024
Aubade for the Self That Has to Go
You could love life too much,
Worsen the addiction
From which all lives suffer,
If you took sage advice
To savor each moment
And rejoice in each day.
This is speculative,
Obviously. Intense
Lovers of life don’t die
Extra-miserable deaths,
As far as you can see.
Maybe life rewards them.
Loving life is the first
Addiction, and maybe,
Of all cravings, the best.
You wake to fresh sunlight
And small, brightly lit clouds
Ornamenting rose skies
At your bedside window.
Your thoughts leap up, a flare
Of euphoric delight.
It feels good, and you know,
For that reason, you will
Want it again, want more.
Sunday, August 11, 2024
The Life Is Always Richer Than the Record
It’s funny how the phrases often
Turn out darker than the day, how texts,
Shed like isinglass exoskeletons,
Have a sepia tint suggestive
Of more melancholy than you feel,
How the experience of dying,
Which flows gradually, like a river
Fanning out in a shallow delta,
All reflective surfaces and calm,
Mostly calm, even lovely often—
Even where the water grows brackish
With proximity to the ocean—
Contrasts with the detritus of poems
Deposited as future fossils,
Shells and driftwood, occasional trash
Left scattered along the delta’s shores.
Saturday, August 10, 2024
For a Few Years Before You Got Sick
In the desert, your 3am
Used to be good for getting up
Going outside, looking at stars.
There were planets and pinprick streaks
Of shooting stars, occasional
Satellite trains, the running lights
Of a couple of red-eye flights.
You had caffeine and a blanket
Against the katabatic breeze—
Crickets often, some coyotes
Bursting with their high-pitched yipping
Here and there in the steep canyons.
One of the tourist restaurants
Might host a delivery truck.
Otherwise, there was no traffic,
Maybe some mule deer crossing town.
You chanted poems, your own mostly,
And then you listened quietly
Before heading inside to read news,
More poetry, do some writing,
Fix some breakfast, and it was day.
Friday, August 9, 2024
Demon Floaty Whistling in the Dark
It’s amazing how unterrifying
Spooky mental phenomena can be,
If you know what you’re experiencing,
And you know what others see.
Say you see a shadow in the corner
Of your vision, one that sort of flickers
Like a large, black floaty, but foreigner,
An eye drifter, but quicker.
You know it’s a feature of fresh disease,
A new bug in your visual system,
And you know it’s nothing others can see,
An eyespot not a demon.
You don’t worry about its agency,
About whether or not it’s stalking you.
It’s just your own failing machinery,
Nothing that wants to eat you.
Thursday, August 8, 2024
Postponement
Distractions can sometimes
Help prevent emesis—
Sniff of cleaning fluid
Or an alcohol wipe,
A sudden bit of news,
Anything that’s startling—
Although sometimes nothing
Can stop the upheaval—
You’ve personally soiled
A doctor’s polished shoes,
The inside of a car,
Other unfortunate
Embarassments—one time
You threw up on the phone
Without dropping the call.
But distractions can help
And the fact that they can
Puzzles you a little—
Did your body really
Need to lose its lunch, then?
Is nausea mostly
Useful, if unpleasant,
Or a superfluous
Symptom? Could it at least
Be a good source domain
For metaphors of loss
That try to close the gap
Between true helplessness
And misery that could
Be postponed for a while.
Wednesday, August 7, 2024
First Afternoon Out of the Hospital
So the day goes—in context
Better, so far, than the most.
There was sleep. Problems resolved
Almost as if by themselves.
There were companions, laughter,
A patch of funny weather.
And now your child’s drawing pictures,,
Chatting while her music plays,
And you’re not really dying.
Skip your context for today.
Tuesday, August 6, 2024
One Last Check
A look around on the way out,
A snapshot to overexpose
And wash out before you black out—
Be sure to save some energy
For that among the final tasks.
What was the world at that moment?
You have a feeling it’s as good
As it’s going to be a while.
Criminal strong men are worshipped
As lawless demigods or saints.
That can’t end well. Militaries
Are all busy upgrading tech
And building bigger presences.
That won’t soothe things. In some countries
Citizens have stockpiled caches
And grown hostile to each other.
Will those tensions first burst or ease?
The species has grown powerful
And controls the world’s resources.
It’s a time of absolute wealth
But with no sense of shared purpose
Or common goals outside of sects,
Conspiratorial pockets,
The war of all groups against all.
Look around before you get out
And be glad you get to have now,
While the top-heavy world still sways,
The worst extremes stay in forecasts
Only beginning to arrive,
And there’s the probability
That there will be pockets of good—
Good acts, collective achievements,
Kindnesses, companionships, calm—
That will have happened, not only
In your small, dark adventure, but
Through the whole of the stumbling world.
Monday, August 5, 2024
Dying Just Right
Sunday, August 4, 2024
Pascal’s Wager Reconsidered
Every after-life posited
For the supernatural soul
Comes with a caveat emptor—
Some other after-life belief,
Somewhere, carries in its fine print,
Sometimes even in its headlines,
The warning that souls holding faith
In slightly different systems
Will suffer eternal torture—
There is no faith safe to believe
Without fear of some other faith.
So why not wager on nothing?
No pain, no suffering, unless
One of the fiercer faiths is right,
And only one of them can be.
With the way they keep splintering,
Preaching death to one another,
What are the odds any faith’s right?
Saturday, August 3, 2024
Fresh Candidate for Teacher’s Pet
It’s almost a first
Day of school feeling,
This being released
Into home hospice
Following a month
In the hospital.
Collect your supplies.
Prepare your notebooks.
Complete paperwork.
Worry you’ll do well
Enough to handle
The new challenges.
You won’t get to meet
Any new friends, true,
But you’re familiar
With the class bully
Already. Teacher
Death still needs a pet.
Friday, August 2, 2024
Ado About Nothing Much
All the people who are living
Can’t seem to stop themselves bustling,
One great seething stream of living,
Which becomes more astonishing
When you yourself are withdrawing—
Not that you would expect the world
To slow its quotidian flow,
To pause in its daily hustle
Just because one you is dying—
One and many yous are always
Dying, every moment somewhere—
But as you slow and brace yourself
For your gathering conclusion
The contrast becomes visible,
Vivid, between hurtling forward
And settling into quietude
Without so many distractions
Of the forever unfolding
Events and happenings that may
Or might not actually happen.
What was that all about, again?
Thursday, August 1, 2024
Soft Power
There’s a force to peace arriving,
If it’s sudden enough, a whoomf
Of deceleration, horizons
Suddenly shuddering and then still.
Even if it’s noiseless, the world creaks
Like swings in an abandoned playground,
In a weedy part of quiet town
Where the trees stage their comebacks as if
They’d never been defoliated,
Something you feel more than see or hear.
Peace. Calm. The kind you experience.
You’ll be encountering another
Kind soon, the kindest, the kind you don’t
Experience, the peace without you.
Wednesday, July 31, 2024
Centripetal Eddy You’ve Been
Tuesday, July 30, 2024
Dispossession
Nothing should be exotic.
An other is another
Domesticate in context
And in their own awareness.
Set nothing apart. Accept
Difference without amazement.
This is about ownership,
About stripping collectors,
Colonists, imperiums
Of their wonder cabinets
And their plunder museums.
Rightful ownership,
Ownership by primacy
Or creative origin
Is the moral argument.
Belongs to us. Give it back.
But you’re so weary, your eyes
Slide unconsciously to sleep,
And the dream is so vivid,
A country road, you standing
Beside a car you don’t own,
Gold sun through heavy green
With a honeysuckle scent,
And this is not your life. This
Is another world lived through
By a subjectivity
You haven’t, nor ever will
Encounter, inhabited
By an other entity,
Owned by nothing and no one.
Monday, July 29, 2024
Promising but not Promising Anything
Sunday, July 28, 2024
Reviewing the Troops
Battalions roll in battle formation,
Past the Dear Reader’s reviewing station,
Rhetoric rumbling, thunder on the air,
Solid prose blocks on parade through the square.
The arguments pass in orderly ranks,
Clanking in oiled rows of well-armored tanks.
Where are the rest of the forces? Parades
Seem like the optimal time to invade,
To catch the tyrannical Dear Reader
While absorbed in playing at cheerleader
For this metaphysical might marshaled
By deserting poetry’s battlefields.
The columns march on, packed words goose-stepping
And gone, the Dear Reader soon forgetting.
Saturday, July 27, 2024
Home Safe
Guns make poor defensive weapons.
Bunkers lack exit strategies.
So there you are, billionaire boss,
Eccentric inventor, tyrant,
Supplied for the next hundred years,
Militia’s worth of armory,
Artificial full-spectrum lights,
More IP than a library,
And maybe a little needle
Of cancer commencing in you.
Friday, July 26, 2024
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.
Thursday, July 25, 2024
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.
Wednesday, July 24, 2024
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.
Tuesday, July 23, 2024
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.
Monday, July 22, 2024
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.
Sunday, July 21, 2024
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.
Saturday, July 20, 2024
Fresh Note to Old Fred
Friday, July 19, 2024
Bedside
A hospital can be a jovial place,
At least for a week or two.
The staff can be friendly and kind.
You can banter with the crew.
It’s only when you don’t get well,
Just get sicker, start to despair,
Linger, become less inclined to banter,
That it’s heart-sinking to be there.
Yes, it’s mostly self-pity. Yes,
It’s loneliness. You’re estranged
From family, from your own memories,
From any encouraging kinds of change.
You want to be back on the mesa.
You want to be back at the lake.
You want to be with your daughter,
Laughing at how she hacks into birthday cake.
A nurse comes in as you’re shuffling
Through old travel photos on your phone,
And she looks at the pictures, how pretty,
A mercy. To share memory. To not be alone.
Thursday, July 18, 2024
Make Your Peace
Once the miracles have been accepted
As lies, once gods go to ground, it’s assumed
The power of faith to console survives.
Not always. Or not uniquely. Comfort
Can come from physics for some. For others,
Somehow, even evolution consoles.
Consolation, like meaning, doesn’t lie
Where people find it, but in the people
With the gift and the need for finding it.
Self-soothing, sometimes it’s called in infants,
And it’s unevenly distributed,
As ability, as product, as scent
Almost, but it’s your own, and neither faith
Nor facts are necessary to your peace.
Wednesday, July 17, 2024
The Lightest Weight
Tuesday, July 16, 2024
Accessibility
Monday, July 15, 2024
The Magical Materialist Raises a Hand at the Back of the Class
Doubtful that Borges
Thought either that the world
Was changing its appearance
In ways his eyes
Faithfully registered,
Or that his metaphysics
Had disenchanted the world of its light.
But let anyone complain
That we are living in a world
Disenchanted of mystery,
Increasingly bereft of magic,
And they, blind to Borges
And other recent, fine enchanters,
Will surely blame the dimming world
Or materialist philosophies.
It will not occur to them
That, while not their fault,
Not their choice, just who they are,
The disability is theirs.
Sunday, July 14, 2024
Stirring, Not Fishing, Not Even Catch and Release
People get proud and intense
About moment-savoring.
The only problem with that
Is that it fetishsizes
A stretch of continuous
And continuously changed
Experience as a bump,
Quantum in the field of waves—
By the way, is it not sweet
That in the opposition
Of points and waves
Both sides are made of the waves?
The moment is wave in wave.
You can let it slide. You can
Grasp that it’s not your moment,
Savor that you can’t grasp it.
Saturday, July 13, 2024
Washed Up
The coracle’s a wreck
That somehow hasn’t sunk
Or flipped belly-up yet.
Acorn-cap of a boat,
Who thought of such a thing?
Don’t answer that. Let’s not
Let explanation set
Us adrift. The basket
In which awareness sits
Tilts in the grey wavelets
Close to the shore. Questions
Should invite Yes or No.
Can the boat be rescued?
Yes, although it depends
On for how long—Wait. Stop.
Only the question posed.
Is the coracle safe?
No. Is there a paddle?
Yes. A destination?
Once, maybe. What is it?
A wind is coming up.
Friday, July 12, 2024
Dewdrop Inn
They said, We own it.
So there, that’s settled,
And so were they, puns
And all. This would be
Their permanent stay,
Indefinite grant
To occupy part
Of the past as if
Only visiting.
Step out. Look around.
The narrow tarmac
Between the ghost woods,
Everyone murdered
To get here. No one
Left but the owners,
The hosts, the new hosts
On the old, drowned coast,
Their empty hotel
Next to the warning
Sign for tsunami
Evacuations.
Decades ago, when
Poems tried different things,
When both right and wrong
Those tricksters, would come
Down to the glassed-in
Hothouse swimming pool
Behind the inn, join
The deer in sneaking
In, eager, nervous,
Unaware how soon
They would fail to make
The key decision,
And begin to change.
They said, We own it,
But they kept going
And forgot to sign
The precise papers
That would have let them
Stay—Now they’re too old.
The inn is still there,
But they didn’t stay.
Thursday, July 11, 2024
Encoded Content
Could be memory.
Could be digital
Or a printed book.
It feels misleading,
Too general somehow.
You stare at your hands
Of information,
Wriggle the digits
You learned to count on
Taught your child to count
With as well. Nerves, skin,
Capillaries, bone,
Encoded content?
If you mean it, if
You really mean it,
Understand it’s you
Who makes it mean so,
And you ought to know,
What you meant isn’t
Content encoded,
Isn’t encoded
At all—those were wings
That were capable
Of flight without fall.