Undocumented, Unconfirmed, and Unrecognized

Demon angels of light beat time
Around the steam-train's carriages
Carrying tourists up canyons,
Day-tripping to nowhere and back.

There's the rainbow in the ice mist
Over the midwinter river.
There's the boy's face framed by yellow,
Peering from the next car's window.

There's the cinder-heavy billow
Of the vintage steam engine's blow
Curling in grey-white wings worthy
Of Renaissance realism.

Everybody's been recorded--
Emails, phone-numbers, credit cards
Addresses, tickets collected--
No one will go missing today,

Nothing will go unphotographed
And very little unremarked,
Except those sneaky characters,
Long angels of light, loss, truth, now.

Long Hollow

At first, when everything else stopped,
I thought of course I must be dreaming,

Imagining a bronze enchantment
Resculpted dismembered memories

As unreliable narrators
Of my own ongoing existence.

But I was wrong. I will not wake up.
I am loose in this moment forever.

Cataclysmic Catechism

Can an anemone drink too much?
Can a black hole overeat?
Would you know it if it did?
Would you wear your wonderful life 
Around a medium star, flaunting it on
A life- addicted planet like Earth,
Where even the dead get back 
In the business of reliving themselves
Being consumed and all-consuming?

What have you done wrong
To me? It's alright. 
Don't ask forgiveness,
Even when we're both mad about it.
We're the anemone, we're
The black hole, we're earth
Vanishing into a cloak
Of our lives' making, so 
Dense that nothing escapes
Because nothing went into it
And nothing invented it
And nothing will swallow it whole.

The Words My People Uttered

God borrowed more phrases
Again and again, creating,

But outside, the stolen woods
Offered a spindly, stippled

Erotic paradise, as if
There were any other

Kind in this world where
Thousands of lengths underneath

Vicious antipodean seas
Seven-armed, predatory

Sea stars are eating 
Ghostly yeti crabs

Who harbor gardens
Of bacterial mats

On their hairy chests,
The better to feed themselves with.

One Part Heading Home to Parts Unknown

Huzzah, the Unarmed Man,
Sprawls beneath the fury tree

Lamenting, "Those who can't
Forget the past remain condemned

To repeat it." Memory,
Inventor of every future,

Near and far, he knows, he knows
Has disarmed him, but he won't

Get up without a fight
To dissolve in shade, moldy thought

In a moldy grave. Every knight,
Arms crossed in the Lazarus

Reflex, would wish a great stone
Carved in his bodily likeness

To slide its crushing weight
Over what remains of him,

Every night, dreaming over and 
Over the final instant that memory

Can never teach, the knowing
That nothing guides the beauty

Of the weapon slicing, neatly
Nicking into and between

His thought of being a thinking thing
And him himself, a hymn.

Loop Road

Glory in your ephemeral nature.
Wonder at and celebrate that you are
No more than a fragmentary phantom,
Byproduct of an overheated brain,
Itself produced by a competition
Among multicellular colonies
To see what lineage of madness wins.

Why not glory in being much nothing?
It won't hurt. It might help. Not in the sense
Of gaining an edge in that blasted race
To keep on racing, but in the sense
Of enjoying these moments in this sun.
And if you can't savor them, then go on
Racing. My congratulations; you won.

Ok, Ok

Blackout. Time to forget
Time, to give up pretense
Of keeping track of things,

Machines running on time,
Scheduled TV programs
Waxing sanguine on time,

Physicists explaining
Time to TV viewers
Who missed experiments

Hiding events in time
From physicists who made
Theories to fool themselves

Then made experiments
To prove theories fooled them,
Then made explanations.

Time to find the wormhole
Where experience meets
Pure math in the theory

Of humanity's love
Of explaining the world, 
To put one world to bed.