…He does not throw dice”

He Does Not Throw Dice

Imagine the lawlessness

of the subatomic world, but larger.

Then imagine that the lawlessness present there

is in fact lawful, that there is no such thing

as lawlessness, that even

the apparently most random event

is wholly predictable

by a system that takes into account

variables we cannot take into account, so short

is our attention span

in regards to the unseen, or the unseeable.

Like Wright, you could say

that something has been wasted, been washed away,

that the night is a cell

from which you compose your last notes

with the pen a sympathetic guard

passed to you through the bars, that when they take

his head

it’ll be yours in the basket

he thinks of second to last. Last,

that’d be his own head in the basket, because regret

and maybe even vengeance surely

could not be the last thought,

because the way you lived is the way

you end, and that is, alive.

Right?

…Make a pale blue map of your day in the grass,

when you are just

the drink the drunks have awaited.

* * *

Memory

History could end,

it could be replaced

with myth. It could be revised by pamphlets fallen

from the sky, or Adobe Photoshop.

Maybe history was never there at all

and in the telling

we feigned objectivity or honesty. Or it wasn’t feigning

necessarily

but a lack of insight

into the impossibility of telling

a story the way the story happened:

we couldn’t count all the faces in the subway station,

for example,

all of them

destined to be just a bit shy of exact, in the lie of text.

Regret

To call a fire alive, to call a ghost awake,

to call a ghost asleep, or to call it on the phone,

pressing redial one two three

four twelve twenty-one times

and always being sent to voicemail. It’s your first love

again, and it lives.

At what point does the fire die,

does the ghost pick up the phone and whisper

I knew you’d keep calling

until I answered, so now I’ve answered, what is it you

have to say to me?

What I Have to Say to You

We are bound to this earth, and no matter how

we try to leave

we still are bound.

No rocketship spiraling into the thin openness of time

changes that, no bootstrap shenanigans

hightailing their rubberpeeling

path into history

where the future rests on an old desk

like an apple.

One apple who is just that,

core, seeds, stem, meat, skin, in many ways the apple

is us

causing the fall of us

from the ideal and into this:

day, night, awake, asleep, dead, alive, alive, alive, alive.

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