Tetramemeton

The story has been evaded
Often enough to seem at last

To have been told. I have lectured
My classes in storytelling

Both as if I thought no story
Ever worth the telling, never,
And as if the telling made sense
Only becoming forever.

The mind is outside of the mind.
Stop. Stop objecting to the mind
As epiphenomenal mush,
The vapors evaporating,

The too-long deferral of rhyme.
The mush is the stuff behind eyes,
The goop that can be thin-sliced grey.
The mind is out there, dark as day,

A field of heraldry, a tale,
A heart-breakingly perfect sign
Produced in break-neck profusion
As a series of equations:

Story equals chapter and verse,
Verse equals character, the worst
Of passionate immensity,
Immensity delta, dealt mind.

The Whole Universe

Shemhamphorasch. Non rebus,

Sed verbis. There are no things.
Even our thoughts are not things.

Words and their kin clutter air,
Bob along cross-cutting waves,
Carry us back to ourselves.

We belong to them. They don't.
All kinds of trouble in mind

Are orchestrated out there,

Outside of the bone crystals
In which our futures are read,
In which our words make their lairs.

This being of being them,
The business of being us,
Is flesh as flesh is water,

That is, mostly and not much.
This whispering came of flesh,
Can't disturb worlds without it,

But no conjuring from nerves
And breath alone informs it.
Mind's angels drink from skull wells,

And are no more and no less
Real than beastly elements.
But wings aren't water, nor air.

Euhemerism

The brain makes models of the world.
The team makes models of the brain.
Nobody tells the team their brains
Are not the brain, are not the world.

The brain makes models of the gods.
They look like us. They look like them.
They tell us once upon a time
There was one person with one brain.

The brain makes models to deceive
Itself its models are aware.
The self makes models of the brain.
The models lie outside the self.

The models lie upon the shelf.
The shelf was made by someone else,
By all the someones, all the selves
The gods say model us or else.

The gods, the gods. Does the team know
The model of the brain their brains
Have shared came from sharing the same
Strange nowhere that the gods all share?

Me and You

Never went outside. Never were
Me or you. I say this, me, to let you
Know I won't be excluding me
From the not-really-being of you.

Something has been imagining
Me imagining you reading me,
Gentle reader. You are gentle,
Are you not? Binding term, you see.

That kindness and literacy
Should be the property
Of minor nobility, antique
Values, kingdoms of constraint

And expectation, the light
Outside the blinds before dawn,
Striped by the ancient blinds,
My dreams, and passing headlights,

The light by which I compose
My breaths to pass the time,
Closer than usual to being past,
Closer than usual to being free--

Please allow me the opportunity
To put this another way: we
Have both been prisoners
In separate prisons, simultaneously.

Sunflowers, Moonflowers, Wash

A tiny fly that does not sting
And can't be shooed, caught, or slapped
Harasses me with what feel like
Extra sets of brushy feet, feet
That can't be ignored. Even the fruit
On my plate, salty foods, meat,
Even the condensation on my glass
Won't tempt it away from me.
It climbs in my hair and along my skin,
And I feel it so nearly constantly
I can't enjoy my food or my transitory view
Of an extraordinarily fine afternoon
With sunflowers and moon flowers down
In the broken wash, air-brushed clouds
Arising and scurrying through blue in a hurry.

Daily hiraeth, daily saudade, daily poem.

Place is only periodicity
In the experience of the wash,
A similarity arising, time to time,
With the power to fool us into making
Something from nothing, "radical space
Adjacent to history." No such thing,
Except that we can't live without it,
No such thing, except all our metaphors
Belong to it, perform it, keep us
Forever somehow apart from experiencing,
Our trudging, sleuthing, true thing.
Shoo fly, don't bother me.

I'm Fine

The half-scorched aspen's applause
For the evening breezes, like the taffeta
Rustling of angels shuffling in
A scry-stone's stone pin seems startling
And wrong to a human used to distrusting
His own anthropomorphic whims
But not above guessing his senses
Know the surest way into the world.

And what if his first, foolish instincts
Were the closer to correct? The tree,
Lonely clone with no siblings left it,
Really was trying to be reassuring.
I'm fine, it shushed through its leaves,
I'm good at being
Fine, in fact
It's what I'm best at.

Thought to Itself

You are going home, away,
The next time you have to move.
It's not enough, anymore
That you don't stay here. You must
Go home, now, and only home.
The wind around the corner
Eagerly awaits your bones,

And what precious bones they are,
Veal to the wind, softest flesh
To the winter that gnashes
Icicles like incisors
In keen anticipation,
Not real bones at all, not bare,
Not spare, but surplus. Go home.