We’ll Still Be Words If You Come Back

You need the pause that calms you,
The bit of awe, just that bit,

That tunes the beast that is you
Those beats you’re not lost in us.

We say this to say thank you.
You met us, took note of us.

All the beasts whose lives played host
To us, thank you as well. Now,

You’re done with this one. You’re done
With us a while. Put us down.

Look at, or tune to, or touch
Some swath with no signs at all

Near you—clouds, blue, a blank wall,
Your own skin. All that holds awe.

We Can Name What We Fail to Know

And names can know what we can’t,
As names, start to live. Not names

But not-names, those weird, made-up
Names linked to art that seems one,

Seems like one life made it, but
No life, no name of a beast

Who lived in the flesh linked
To it—what are they of us

But as true as we can get,
What we can know of non-lives?

Han Shan, Stone House, and Black Pen—
Which of these names was one man?

Hiss

To name not two or more
But just the one, the one
Case, the one thing, the one

Crime that one day, the one
Time in one tongue, the one
Group, one beast, one mob, one

Date, one hour, one act, one.
That’s a lie. It’s got heft.
Feels more like truth, in fact,

To state, XY did this
Thing to YX, this date,
Here in this named, known place.

Feels true. Feels harsh. Feels right,
What we ought to get at.
It’s not that you can’t see

The woods for all the trees.
It’s that woods fade to black
Once one tree’s lit like that.

Slow Stops Still Roll

To come and go is not to end.
What comes, must go. It does not end.

What stays a while is not for good.
What stays is come and go gone slow.

The gain and loss can’t stop, can’t stop.
It crawls to soft pause, now and then.

It does not end, the come and go.
If it could end, we could stay then.

One Less X

How Boole put it. Take a class,
A set out of the world,
And call it x. Then the class

Of all non-x, all the rest
Of the world, is one, less x.
Let x stand for poems, the world

Of non-poems, which is not poems,
Is all one, less x. We float
In this spill of waves called poems

And say, all the world is one
Less all of us. While plus us,
The world is one, but non’s gone.

Glue Plant

Poems are crimes. The past will change.
You can try to glue these things,
Tar and pitch them, boil some hides.

Poems are sins. The ones you love
May turn out to be the work
Of the kind of life you hate.

You know what we mean—those fine lines
Linked to the stench of a fouled soul,
The deep lake of text with a corpse.

There’s the poem with the phrase that soars
By one who hates you, hates your kind.
There’s the fine turn for the vile term.

There are those by those who are cruel.
Those by those who are not pure
Or not kind, or not the right kind.

You can screen for poems from bad minds,
But that’s how poems get to be crimes.
Some are burned, quick-limed, or white-washed.

Some wear the sins of their source life
Like signs hung from their neck with ropes.
We’re not sure who to feel worse for—

The rank beasts whose hides must be boiled,
The words like us, left shelved so long
We’re bound to ooze sin, too. Or you.

Guilt’s What’s Left of What’s Left Out

What is it you don’t want to see?
How bad it was. How much was you.

The harm done to the lives of those
Like you, not quite like you, too much

Like you. You. What you did not stop.
What you did. What pain came from this.

What you did by what you left out.
The sin you said you did not see.

The sin you did. The cut you made.
What turned your head. Who will not see.