Invent the Universe

In the bottom of the well:

that’s where we’ll stay. In there it’s dark and if not

for the blind man who passes

daily we would

have no one at all. Lucky for us

he threw

that coconut down, down

the well and now for fun we just have to get

the damn thing open…

Say God made a dinosaur

so as to kill the dinosaur, and all the other dinosaurs,

his terrors of the sky summoned,

the great lizards compelled to halt their telepathy,

those who lived

relocating to different planets or far underground—

about all this deified lifetime’s debris,

it’s not right

to chitchat.

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As we crawl through our tunnels and weep

it’s just a mystery

we should at least have fun with it,

we should set ‘em up and knock ‘em down, time after time

until our singing voices are raw

and riders

on their bicycles

flash like swallows through red lights, taking risks

with space and the laws of motion—

their souls are Las Vegas and their bodies are casinos,

and it’s just one dice roll, then another.

Let’s let us believe

it’s not a mystery but only probability,

and all the ratios are undefined. Pull down the blinds

and be the darkness

you wish to see in the world,

your obscurities

shaken into focus by a swarm of ambiguity,

the definition of one string of letters begging

for more strings of letters

sorting out their definitions. But that too is okay!

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Our chasing of the tails we’re attached to

is a good time, if dizzying,

and we can make some sense of it. If we’re lucky,

from above,

if we move fast enough

it seems our tireless, circuitous blur

is a perfect circle.

Dogma

Dogma, from the Greek, means “that which one

thinks is true,”

but less literally, and less terribly,

it just means opinion. We’ve been advised

to shy from it.

I picture this: a dog barking, but its bark

is insistent

and all the shouts

out the window at it to

quiet the hell down

won’t get the job done.

This is dogma

I’m talking about, so watch out.

It’ll keep you up at night, and if it doesn’t then maybe

you’ve lost your hearing.

As If We are All Immigrants

If we are honest, not one of us has remained

where we were born. Nor did

the human race stay tied

to its origin: it spread out.

Like fog

it climbed into the valleys,

and was a halo around the skulls of mountains.

Or,

for us to make homes

we all have lost our mothers,

we all have become our fathers, even those

who’ve never

known them—

in time we will wash our hands in change,

we will be the thin rivers of a barren landscape.

Or,

like the last droplets of sunlight

smoldering the edges of the highway,

soldering it

with the handprint

of heat

so that it will buckle and tire

when the heat is gone, we too have left our sun.

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