MINDFULNESS AS HAMARTIA

What will nourish
day-to-day versus

punish, who can say?

What luck:
this over-
abundance of nature’s

great flavor for 

beauty in the cup 

of just one flower—

but still, I bet 

you’d end up crazy 

with hunger

if you were to pluck
one to have
as your dinner.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF LYRICISM

From a fast windmill 

joust to the

Zapruder film—

from a doomed ship 

with too few rafts

to the madeleines of Proust:

we think it's Fate conspiring 

with our truths 

to make such songs—

we assume we're

inspired—but what

are the odds

it's been you

and me all along breathing 

out the gods?

PURITANICAL FANTASY

Had a dream last night

that I could separate

the beautiful 

from the ugly

parts of my body—

and unlike

in the compos mentis bait-

and-switch of daylight,

doing so didn’t
immediately kill me.

INVOCATION FOR LIBERAL ARTS MAJORS

Just as pearls 

are less delicate, yet 

more rarified than facts,

so the artist, although
terrified, is patient 

as the windblown grit.

Call it a symbol,
a metaphor, or a lie—but 

let the statesmen

deal in worlds;
you shall traffic
in the skies.

IDEALIST HEPCAT HAS ENTERED THE CHAT

He scats
that there are no such things as 

separate events—

that he who
circulates his own blood
is the one who shines the sun.

Then he riffs that you must
see the golden
goose of life whole,

or else risk the temptation
of cutting it open.
You counterattack

that omnipotence
doesn’t have to know
how things get done

in order to transmute our
“freedom to”
to “freedom from,”

but you have to admit that,
even for a materialist, the jazz
is close enough

to say we see
independent identity
only through relation,

and that impenetrability
is just a jive word 

for drastic isolation.

GUI

The analytics
were wrong about this
evanescent present:

even though it’s 

see-through,

it’s not so plain a thing.

In fact, it’s less
of an empty glass case

than a state-of-the-art paddock
in goal attainment’s zoo;
for it acts

as the first
and the last user interface—

the only place on Earth
you can have
what it brings.

BEST BET

Sounds scary, but death 

is pure absence—

if we’re lucky.

If we’re not,
it could be
literally everything—

good and bad, all
rushing past
at full-blast, from first

to last, with
no reprieve and
no contrast.

Picture the mammoth
who went huffing
toward a tar pit—

only to get
trapped there and
gruesomely preserved.

What’s worse
than being forced 

to sleep where you shit?

A permanent habitat
made of nothing
but memory.