Convalescence

Drinking more than six men
And talking more than twelve,
The man with a seer of a monkey
Goes about from inn to inn

Inquiring of the number of customers
Within, just as a happy coincidence.
I'm with him. What will become
Of me, I hope he answers nicely.

This is the ancient meaning of invalid
In several antique tongues. The head
Hangs heavily as unloved fruit
On the narrowing neck of the saint

Whose future is the answer
A madman elicits from a con artist
And his prognosticating monkey.
You see? said Don Quixote,

Displeased with his own prognosis.
Read a lot, ride a lot, see a lot,
Fall off your scrawny horse plenty,
You'll die saintly. Me, I feel better already

Plum Lucky

How reprehensible the fellow enamored
Of the flowers growing weedily by the roadside.
Sure do appreciate you, sing the nodding heads.

Does anyone dark of heart as any starred, dark
Night bedewed with dark matter and invisible,
Habitable planets know of a way to rise

Above those nodding charms? Why are they so polite?
Humbly they attract the hungry bee, secretly
Designing ways to withhold protein-rich pollen.

They didn't count on me, wastrel down on his knees,
Down on his pluck, ready to scrutinize petals
And behead the best among them. That's why I'm pleased

But dubious, bedazzled, unlike worker bees,
Those genetically enchained pollen predators
Who harbor no illusions of sweet fruits from flowers.

We Are Tourists

The peacock blue sky without eyes
Fans its feathers over drab rocks.
One variant of the many
Worlds hypothesis holds our world

Is likely a simulation,
Given that, if any one world
Perfected the technology
And art of pretense well enough,

Simulators would get busy
On so many simulations
Of worlds that any given world
Would be statistically likely

To be an artificial one.
Plus, there's the mysterious point
That mathematics fits this world
A little suspiciously well.

Digitized acoustic music
And digital music alike
Unscroll smoothly with faint birdsong
And the whispering of breezes

In my ears, rowing into me
Or into what I think is me
From over that open blue sky,
Being simultaneously

Distinct, indistinguishable.
It's getting late. The moon will rise
Soon to the music of the spheres.
Time for me to be getting home.

But first, what I would like to know
Is how can we use this world's math
To ascertain the likelihood
That this world's mathematically

Unlikely to be and likely
To be unreal, mathematics
Seeming to work too perfectly?
If we are in a universe

That's itself a simulation,
Just as our brains simulate it,
By God, what's it simulating?
Who or what within this are we?

The Sound of the Drum That Signaled the Night Watches

Beginning with the seemingly simple
Task of defining the risk of dying,
The founders of the state of insurance
Worked their way backward in contrapuntal,

Crablike elegance, mincing and waving
Their pincers at the hissing sands of time.
Inside each crab, a tiny, monk-like flame
Lit the dim lamp of absurd awareness

Of the absurdity of awareness.
Why would it ever matter to matter

What happened to matter on conversion
Into one more energetic gesture

Of an over-sized claw on the long shore
That defines the edge of this enigma?

Risk Homeostasis

Everything we do to be safe
Entices some new recklessness.
The successful rehab provides
An excuse to start back smoking.

The lack of need for a rehab
Is a good reason for gorging,
The diet triumph yields shopping,
The windfall from frugal saving

A reason for paragliding,
Airbags an excuse for driving
Too fast down country roads at night
When the moon is up and shining,

Even the escape from marriage
To some lunatic derelict
Is all the more reason to date
Or to join the ladies who lunch

In narrow dresses believing
They can't get too rich or too thin.
Gregor Mendel, celibate monk,
Indulged in feasts, cigars, and peas.

Prince Hal sobered up for warfare.
Mother Theresa found herself
Strangely attracted to lepers.
The healthy young tempt everything.

And if we defeat our killers
And leap into longevity,
There are strange diseases of age
We still die from rarely but will.

Sur la belle étoile

Is there any ugly star?
Our sun in our eyes comes close,
But we love it and need it
And know not to look at it.
The ones at night break our hearts,
One by one and heart by heart,
Although the whole panoply

Visible desert camping
On a bedroll, by the car,
Proves alien heartlessness
In a language neither math
Nor profound faith comprehends.
That one there's the loveliest
Cries the brain, the lonesomnist.

The Idiocy

Cut the bullshit. Never mind
If your goddammed gods are mine.
Worship whomever you like,
But vote without violence.

"While I'm inside this darkness
I can see no difference
Between death" and what I see.
Your anonymous masks me.

Here I am. Wo bist du? Hier
Bin ich. Love lives in the end,
I believe, even as lives
Led in the Teutenkreuz dance

Jerk and gibber to the end
Of their Owl Creek Bridge gibbets.
The bonfires on Maidan Square
May rise, may confuse us all,

As the streets of Homs confuse,
As the packed squares of Cairo,
As Red Square, as singing throngs
Of the free Rus confused

Us, but god and godless, each
And every one, I will trust
In universal suffrage
Before I trust any one.