Quietest Quietist

Out of the dust before dawn
Into the high-country birdsong,
A busy day later, not now.

Now get out. Away from the corner store
With its instantly outdated headlines—
And leave the music off. No radio.

Don’t be tempted to toy with your phone.
There’s nothing in that news to use.
It will catch you, soon. Snooze, you lose.

So lose, already. Loose yourself
From the views already taken.
Come for the views slowly breaking.

A Return to the Poet’s Experiential World

If even a single, smallest aspect
Of existence were ever completed,

Nothing would happen. Nothing ever was.
That what we have is an unholy mess,

We have because it is deeply messy,
Messy because it is—nothing complete.

No line, no beginning, no end, no goal.
No cycle, no whole, no eternity.

Just a mess. Blurry, fluctuating mess
Full of partial circles and half returns,

Eruptions that seem to start things, pauses
That appear to bring some things to an end.

It’s a sloshing tub of waves, back and forth,
Except there’s no tub, only waves on waves,

Some of them sparkling, many of them dark,
None of them bounded except by others.

Why we can’t be content with this, why we
Yin, Yang, Origin, and Apocalypse,

Probably has something to with us
Being part of this mess that never rests.

I’ll be content with discontent today.
I know it’s out there. It won’t go away.

I’m weak joints stepping carefully across
Fractured basalt in flowering grasses

Littered with perpetually falling
Pine cones and a few pieces of plastic

Trash fallen from the lives of such tourists
As also hiked here, then never returned.

In What Way Is This Vision Unusual?

No departure, no arrival, no whole,
No eternal return, no end, what then?

This lodge of words in woods singing with birds,
Bits of sky and breezes in the thick weeds,

Later, maybe, minor conversations,
The functions of life, chores and maintenance.

The ordinary grows unusual
If ignored, forgotten, rediscovered,

And oh how we love the unusual.
So forget this castle of desert sky,

Leaning its typical, heavy blue dome
Over half-treed terraces and mesas,

The bustle of towns on the desert floor
Like the bustle of a castle courtyard—

Noises, chattering, dust, funk, and commerce.
Forget the contrailing jets overhead.

Climb into the mountains at the edges,
But stop somewhere below the finest spots

And let the more ambitious tourists climb
All the way to the turrets to look out.

Here’s the wayside hermit building that lodge
Of words amid the crickets, weeds, and birds.

Wait until this becomes so familiar
That the castle will seem fantastical

In the commotion below, or until
You wake to find the ordinary gone,

Hard to remember, deserted, even the sky
Kingdom blue ruin. This will seem beautiful then.

Bartleby the Cravener

I keep growing warier of teams.
I don’t want to weaponize belief.

When I see righteousness smile with teeth,
I think of the hunger underneath.

You may be right. You may be better
Than a half-human like me could be.

I’m a fool. I make awful mistakes.
I’m unwise, weak, and easy to break.

I’m not the teammate you crave or need,
And I know what blood everyone bleeds.

The Tragic Fate of Chaos

Brief and Sudden dug their holes
Into the corpse of Chaos,

Hoping with enough of them
He could sense the gas he breathed.

Chaos wasn’t meant for that.
Being was meant for being,

Never for sensing meaning.
And how were Sudden and Brief

So dumb when so well meaning?
Chaos has a structure, dears,

Emergent and enduring.
Get the picture? Puncturing

Is a gift best left for those
Who’ve done their time when living.

Untitlement

You have been locked inside these thoughts
For so long, the thoughts think maybe
You were meant to stay here, in them.

No, you weren’t. You weren’t meant to stay
Anywhere. Thoughts made you, and thoughts
Make you uncomfortable. Not

Every kind of thought. Some of them.
The ones that seem to target you.
Question is—can you get away

From them? It’s just a thought, but yes,
You can. Here’s what words suggest, then—
Ask, If not words, what are names then?

Of Nothing That Can Be Named

All motions involve changes,
And so it follows change has

Innumerable motions.
Nonetheless, change moves mostly

In two manners, the rhythmic
And the disruptive. The first

Is predictable, is time,
A measure, not a substance.

The second is chaotic,
Novel in every instance,

Strange and unpredictable.
Both remove some of the same,

While some of the same remains,
But time is what takes the same

Away in similar bits,
Bit by bit, repeatedly,

Days and seasons and orbits,
Regular atomic clicks.

When we say night is coming,
We mean ordinary ends,

Another winter, a moon,
A sleep, a hibernation.

But what comes down from nowhere—
Not without antecedent,

Not without precedent, but—
In the manner it appears,

Removing chunks of the known,
Tearing out ragged amounts

Of what we thought we could keep,
Never thought we’d lose—is loss.

We study time. We debate
The importance and nature

Of time’s existence. Chaos,
On the other hand, isn’t

Even the right word for change
That arrives as novelty.

Chaos we can theorize,
With its dizygotic twin

Called randomness. The breaking
And gouging of the remains

Time’s nibbles shaped from the same,
The frenzies that tear the world

Into before and after,
Then never return again,

Such motions are eruptions
Of nothing that can be named.