I spotted a crack in the logic of law
but said nothing. I am not enough
to accuse, I am not enough to dissent,
but I am enough to break.
But said nothing, but did something.
It is enough, though it is not enough.
Perhaps there is no such thing as
“enough” but instead a constant
turning away from the wheel.
It is quite possible to love the moon,
because the moon is so far away,
illusive, a perfect sphere,
a Form that flies at night.
It deifies description.
Throw away the telescopes,
the moon whispers.
And especially the rockets,
it whispers.
Throw them all away.
It is also possible to love the earth,
though the earth is a close,
rough-hewn marble,
a set of dull knives that kill
on purpose or accident.
It does not speak except to say,
Build the telescope,
and build the rocket,
and you will see how
difficult it is not to die.
He has nothing to say
but that he has nothing to say.
That is enough.
He stares in a mirror
and sees himself
in his meat,
the frailty of it,
and imagines himself
made of stainless steel,
polished and gleaming,
unable to move except
via continuous explosions.
He leaves and can’t remember
quite what he looks like.
His attempts to describe
himself fall short.
Except when he says,
I am unable to move except
via continuous explosions.
He lies in bed
and the house is
an unearthly quiet.
Yesterday, a thousand
rumbling axles per minute,
but today he lies in bed
and the house is
an unearthly quiet.
Planes one quarter whistled
and three quarters roared overhead,
loosening drywall screws bit by bit,
making the walls crooked,
but today he lies in bed
and the house is
an unearthly quiet.
The microwave door clicked shut,
a child cried, two dogs barked,
a man tossed bags of recyclable
into a truck and drove off,
neighbour children went single-file
into the short yellow bus,
but today he lies in bed
and the house is
an unearthly quiet.
He imagines all the disasters,
the probably, the fanciful,
the disease, the war,
the zombie apocalypse,
the police state,
the terrorist attack,
and he finally settles on
the most horrible of all:
He has grown used to the unceasing
grumble of the gears of the world
and that what he hears as nothing
is in fact the absence of something
long-missing and the thought slips away
as he lies in bed
and the house is
an unearthly quiet.
The gifts of God for the people of God.
The long winter’s night passes and we feel
the air beginning to warm.
Passersby smile for the first time.
A dog who is too young to know better
barks at returning foliage.
The nights are still cold though,
but not bitterly so.
Our skin which is unused to brightness
begins to glow and then burn.
Thanks be to God.
The creek nearby overflows its banks,
engorged with meltwater.
The kayaks are swept away,
but not the dog,
not the daughter,
not the son.
At some point the curve of the earth
meets the straight line of your perspective.
If you choose a higher horse, that line
is simply farther away.
This is a strange geometry.
You stand on the shore
of an infinity that resembles
other, smaller infinities.
This intuition was beaten out of you
by petty schoolmasters,
those Euclidean rulers.
But the world is not a smooth ball
suspended in space waiting
for a grid, a lattice
to be installed.
Rigidity insists upon its
own failure. Inability
to conform to what
is
instead of what
could or should be.
i have forgotten how
to speak them
so I tear
open my throat
and the words
come pumping out
then when your
horrified efforts
have failed to
stem the flood
your delinquent
fingers cannot
hold on to
even a few
When, in our limitless optimism,
we built monuments to a future
that must surely be beyond…
No-one imagined that our greatest minds
would be building context-aware
advertising and trying to
deliver it to a watch.
I drive a car to work every morning
just like my father and his father
and his father’s father.
I will die.
The promise of the future has been
transmuted into a banality so banal
it defies a metaphor.
I’ll just come out and say it:
This is not what we imagined.
There is no great now.
Instead, a singularity of lack,
where imagination involves
remixing past with past.
Instead, I imagine a future
where I can communicate with
my half-friends without
lifting a finger,
and a half a continent
or block away a starving
man dies
in the street.
I built this thing:
I call it a “clue”.
It’s not beautiful
but it will do.
I thought it up
half-off a foggy avenue
while walking aimlessly,
and cutting through
a neighbour’s yard
(he’d be livid if he knew).
I turned it over
like a Rubik’s cube
and re-arranged things,
those essential few
that needed it.
It felt true.
I drew the string,
bent the yew,
and sent it flying.
Oh, how it flew!
Still – I find my metaphors
are mixing, upon review.
It’s like a building
made of glue.
It holds together
badly, bent, askew,
and it’s not terribly clever.
But it will do.