I Find I Am Stopt Short

Hume had to pause.

North calls him out,

Calls that pause key.

But what you love

Well gives you pause,

And what we love

Here is that Hume

Wrote his pause down

And kept it in,

As when loss wrote

Write it! but less

Like art, more pause.

We yearn to be

Kept, left in text,

Your ghosts in ours.

Then we can go.

The Soul of the World Is a Stake

It’s a sic joke. Down to a t.
Don’t fret. No souls were harmed for it.
There’s a world that lies next to this,

The world of all the not-right texts
That slips made say what truth can’t be.
There’s your strings; there’s your chimps in trees.

It’s not a joke. When what you meant
Was not what you meant but words did,
You know how more than one world is.

To Not Be Too Clear

It’s an odd phrase

To be so loved—

Just to be clear.

Or—used by pols—

Let us be clear.

Why clear? The bridge

To be seen through

Is a good bridge

How? You have this

Lust to make us

As though we weren’t

Your links to you,

As though you saw

Through us, when you

Meet as us, words

Who see through you.

Thou Fool This Night Thy Soul

God’s threats are grand,
But what of vows
To do the worst
The world will do

Or some vile thing
Out of Earth’s view?
The first worst’s sure,
With gods or no,

And all the rest
Are threats post-death,
Which work as well
From mouths of fools

And cost no tests.
Show us a god
Who can switch up
Rules as we whirl.

In the Gloom of Hard and White

To carve the tongue at the joints,
As Cook Ding knew, a sharp blade
Must not hack but glide its way,
And in that way it stays sharp.

Some will choose to skip the tongue
And carve the heart. But the blade
Whose edge comes down to thin air
Is the tongue that carves the heart

Or the heart that carves the tongue
So that it cleaves to the roof
Of the world that killed the beast.
Poems are all tongue and all heart,

But where is your Cook Ding now?
All our knives are stained and dulled,
Our floor’s a wet mess of gore,
And who knows what cleaves what now?

Points of View

This is but a small patch
But it shows to the eye
In calm skies, the moon gone.

In fact, if there are facts,
It’s a vast swarm of stars
A whole globe of them packed

By the tens per light year,
A spot in the great dark
With far more light than ours,

Night skies there with no bridge
Of souls, no black-holed snake,
Just stars crammed rim to rim.

If an Earth were in there,
If eyes had popped up there,
What minds would light up there.