A Priori
The first time I saw St. Peter's
magnificent marble and lack of time-
pieces, I dismayed my travel
partner with an obvious observation;
a trifling truism: that it reminded me of a casino
welcoming the hopeful riff-raff
with the promise of an opulent eternity
starting now, with a small investment,
or a bank rank with hidden treasure:
stalwart, forbidding, secure.
They say the good borrow, the great steal,
and what good are institutions if not great
at admonishing members to transactional rewards
(that which might be called stealing if the righteous
can indeed be cheated), couched, or not, in morality,
transcendent, or not, of human mortality?
And archetypes, those cosmic eggs,
(pre-)exist for the taking: timeless
equal opportunists.
Back in college I regaled my boyfriend
with a proud Freudian interpretation
of Hamlet and he winced and grimaced
to explain that was impossible, sweetie,
because Shakespeare
came first, long dead
before he’d have had a chance
to study (future) Freud
as if they weren’t both sons of Eve
that pagan who lived outside,
until the paradisical world
split between casino
and cathedral
left us to buy
our way back
Signs of Something
Stop telling us
how lovely
you used to be,
your long hair
in the moonlight
like a beacon
seeking its own
becoming.
We need to hear
about gravity's
magnetic charm
pulling you
to the center
as another dawn
is rising and you
with it. There is no end
to such expansiveness.
This morning
you are the brightest
thing in the universe
and all of us will remember
the long forever shadows
of your aubade.
After Strand
Zero Sum
Rank's a smell we can't escape
as we set off to cancel Lincoln
due to retrospective legacy issues.
Awareness is relative. Your lesbian
daughter's skeptical in-laws whose ancestors
landed here to escape religious persecution:
villains and/or victims? We are proud to be a nation
of immigration as if that New-(to us) World were empty and begging
for our most particular animation. (It was neither-nor.) Consider
this: no one (i.e., hardly anyone) is (voluntarily) leaving here
anytime soon, like the job we all love to hate, but we owe
the company store, the only one in town, so off to work
we go, grudgingly. It's hard to keep up on a moving planet,
despite and because of social media. Whose fault
this is we know we know. It lies between
as much as within us, amongst us, a web
of broken links, scattered like fossils
waiting for us to knit ourselves whole.