At hospital

Bones are unlike other
Bones, less rigid, perhaps.

I watched the others unfold
their vacation stiffness through the
tram station gates.

It only occurred to a
grasshopper (i thought)
to fly through
that brittle crowd,
checking each point
for mass and temperature.

Some anxieties about evolution

This morning, while showering, I noticed a single scale on my leg. It was iridescent, primarily on the green end of the spectrum, and pulled at my skin as I inserted a fingernail under its edge. I bent over, water forced my eyes shut; I could still make out the flashing scale behind my closed lids. A little breathless, I reached to turn the water off, blinking at the sudden brightness.

Psychological State

"There are no psychological states." Her voice drifted out over the crowd, her eyes edged with red effort. "What can you assume from language gifts? Our electrons are charged - that has to be enough." Her arm raised for emphasis, she noticed the frayed end of her suit jacket. Funny to have not noticed this before, she thought, her lips suddenly dry. At that moment in Oklahoma, two young girls were shot in the head, and left at the side of the road, their hair laced with dust. Early the next morning, the sun showed no signs of accelerating its pace, as if acknowledging an impossibility. Thinking - that sounds too much like a poem - her old worries returned, and she erased the line.

Quality of Life Czar

b:
how is it?


a:
quality of life index: magenta
happiness index: attachment to existence
banana index: several
sunglasses index: grey gradient
science fiction index: stalker
secondary science fiction index: solaris
name of g_d index: eight
parasite index: vigorous protozoa

Political pictorialism

Cats' looks are often
in the direction of mice,
it's said.
This transposition -
some brain-stem hope for blood -
fails as a measure of desire,
as cats are equally moved by the sudden
slope or the still pulse of grass,
simply put, for rolling,
or licking underneath a tail.

Why argue for slaughter, then;
there is no ancient marble of,
say, Democritus or some other
molecular heir,
that has not given way to
gentle haemorrhage,
rapid or not.

Civilizations 2

Civilization

Those are the people who do complicated things.

they'll grab us by the thousands
and put us to work.

World's going to hell, with all these
villages and trails.
Wild duck flocks aren't
what they used to be.
Aurochs grow rare.

Fetch me my feathers and amber

*

A small cricket
on the typescript page of
"Kyoto born in spring song"
grooms himself
in time with The Well-Tempered Clavier.
I quit typing and watch him through a glass.
How well articulated! How neat!

Nobody understands the ANIMAL KINGDOM.

*

When creeks are full
The poems flow
When creeks are down
We heap stones.

-Gary Snyder

Things occur naturally

Today
Water spouted
Out a water spout.
I was going to
write something about
how it happened,

but decided
against it.

Civilizations 1

To account for Life is one thing: to explain Life another. In the first we are supposed to state something prior (if not in time, yet in the order of Nature) to the thing accounted for, as the ground or cause of that thing, or as its suffient cause....To account for a thing is to see into the principle of its possibility, and from that principle to evolve its being. Thus the mathematician demonstrates the truths of geometry by constructing them....

To explain a power, on the other hand, is (the power itself being assumed, though not comprehended) to unfold or spread it out.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from Theory of Life.