Joe Six-Pack and Heidegger Walk into a Bar

It is the universal failing
Of smarter than average humans
To feel they see the future better
Than the average humans around them,
Although randomly sampled genius
Graphs out the same supreme unreason
Spanning unlikely scenarios
From millennial Utopias
To an imminent apocalypse

As can be found in an average pub
Just before happy hour, when the sots
Who have survived evening and morning
Plumb their depths for nostalgic treasures
And urgent, grim prognostications.
Times have changed. Greater change is looming.
Brilliant, drunk, and average, the future
Remains our monster about to pounce.
Not even a god can save us now.

The Broken Weir

For some reason we're always asking
Each other the names of everything,

Including the names of each other,
And we'll make up the names we don't know.

No one asked Adam to name the world.
Certainly the world didn't ask him,

But with every letter, I'm itching
To render this moment as catalogue--

Wind, hemlocks, firs, birches, and birdsong,
Creek roar, dandelions, bumblebees,

Blue-grey navies of rain-dragging clouds,
Snowy fogs rising off the glacier,

A straight shot of sun through the canyon,
A logging truck pounding down the road,

A toddler upstairs, taking her nap,
A mother downstairs meditating,

This bench, my shapeless old green sweater,
Cold ears, aching knees, moss on the trees--

Nothing that answers the question, what
Sort of purpose is there in naming

That could deserve such desperation
As fills up our lives and libraries?

What is it a well-made net captures
Half-rotted knots of my lines cannot?

Fish. Prey. Enemies. Nuggets of gold.
Words catch things by letting others go,

The rush of experience itself,
The stream that hurls life down through the world.

His Dragon World

The real secret of the merfolk
Has nothing to do with the deep.
Merfolk don't live underwater,
Only the selkies can do that.

The real secret of the merfolk
Is that they never shed those tails.
They're almost helpless, once ashore,
But life without air would kill them.

They rarely hazard the ocean,
Preferring remote mountain lakes.
Mostly they swim in the shallows
And haul out on secluded rocks.

You may have talked to one for hours
One summer swimming in a lake,
And wondered why, when you went in,
Your new friend swam away from you.

I recognized a merman once,
By the way he swayed beside me,
Lower torso underwater,
Neither quite floating nor standing.

It was early on a clear day
In spring, no one else at the lake.
To be polite, I looked away 
From his odd shape as we conversed.

To be polite, he pretended
Not to feel my feigned disinterest.
I asked him about the water,
If he liked it even this cold.

He shivered a little, then stared
Out to the middle of the lake,
Where cloud shadows darkened the waves.
"I would love to get under it,

And be at peace in the gold jails
Bars of sunlight made around me.
Here, now, I feel like I am it,
Although to be it would kill me."

Breathing from the Lake

I have an unslakeable thirst
For etymological puns,
As if the histories of words
Could disclose the architecture
Of the lost minds that nourished them
The way dark grass outlines ruins
In the bright fields of poor farmers
Whose crops root down to buried towns.

Consider how one word for breath
Could mean life, eternal essence,
Imaginary deities,
Hobgoblins, ghosts, and strong liquor--
Water of fire, water of life,
Spirited, spiritus, spirits--
The cold thought that scorches the tongue,
The danger that glows in the skull.

Box of Light

Something or other wakes up,
Falls back into dreams, wakes up,
Almost dreams, counts breath, wakes up,

Finally fully wakes up,
Begs its eyelids to wake up,
Begs its legs, wake up, wake up,

To this home, this box of light.

Somewhere Not Very Near Vana

It amazes me how many miracles
I imagine without believing in them,
Without believing myself susceptible
To any kind of miraculous thinking.

I browse a book on Buddhism's history
And feel sad that so many gods and ogres
Got involved in marketing enlightenment,
Engulfing any truth with wish fulfillment,

While I squat here, ogre on a cabin porch,
Embodying all the vices of craving--
Lazy, slovenly, crooked little creature--

And imagine myself an enlightened soul,
A being radiating wisdom and truth,
Admired by all, wealthy by mysterious means,

Me, not anyone worth writing home about,
Nor actually suffering for wickedness,
Certainly not enough. I can hear the wind
And waters rushing down the wooded canyon

To the lake where I worship something like life,
Something like fullness, something like emptiness.
I am not. I am small. I am ravenous.
As such, if I fail, I belong to this world.

Oh Mosquito

Why do we hate being animals?
Why do we loathe being beasts?
What sick, twisted thing has culture done
To hoist us above ourselves?

It's true we're not bodies but language
About bodies, dissembling
And thieving as it works through our brains,
But words only live in flesh,

Confused and confounded by themselves,
Leaving behind petroglyphs,
Standing stones, museums, libraries,
And more lost, stumbling bodies,

Unable to understand desire.
Dreams become technologies
About technologies, the caverns
Containing charcoal paintings

Of long-gone, hungry, humped-up creatures
Piled on top of each other,
Gifts of gone painters fascinating
The cameras of today.

Nothing's evil for being mortal,
Accidental memory.
The immortality of culture
Provides twilight for our lives.

My bones lean on the corpse of this tree.
A mosquito bothers near
Who wants to borrow blood as I waste
Time as a self, wondering.