Honor

Somewhere it will start again. 

The problem, the blessing, the curse

of man

everywhere and everywhen,

with fidelity to stubbornness

and hardly a plan,

no poor idea left unturned

no criticism left

unearned,

all error and conflicts

to be picked over

as if new

though at the site of

old scars--

we will find new wars.

Or old ones.

And we will start again

and ever with such women,

ever with such men,

the backbone,

soft tissue and heart

that in their valor possess the art

of finding courage in terror,

create order from error

and try to save the day

if they cannot

save this human race.

Observing a Red Shift

 There are changes and then there are changes

in the effect of our chosen poles

as we have pulled away

and the sway of the constants have

become an equinox processing

out of time--

o cursed spite. Some

out of the box logic

muscles in to set things

orderly

but not right. 

To be is inevitable, to act

a tactical flex of volition in 

a potential less pre-determined world?

I am tired of mourning

a future I did not invent

nor had the power to circumvent, a course 

still unborn yet believed

conceived under an ill-fated star.

Perhaps we are better than

we think we are

not bodies in some static field 

but inertial forces that will not yield

to a temporary flux. 

Me and Isaac and Eve splitting an apple

while others are splitting atoms and hairs. 

I feel like Schrodinger's fox

I care and I don't care--

running the feline software problem on

loyal canine

hardware. 

Dead Reckoning

 To understand the movement

of anything

you must have some sense

if what is fixed--

we lost this quality somewhere.

We are moving quickly 

in a complicated world,

everyone relative to some

memory or maxim

grasping at a unified reality,

but now what we know together

or what we knew? 

These are strangely distorted,

and some brand-new fixed points

are nothing that ever were

and people flock to a transient glow

in a light-soaked blur

like moths to 

a porch light or

a bug zapper and 

mistaken sights that equal doom. 

Eye of the Beholder

 Now that I am older

I know more and know

that I know less than

I thought I did--

knowledge in the eye

of the beholder reckons

with my awkward sight.

My lenses curve and

my mind flotsams and jetsams

driftwood memories of things

eroded by time

or by fashion outmoded

to the surface in answer

to questions I only

have begun to ask

as if I've always been working

 at the task.

I have not the confidence of 

a callow youth to say

I know for sure all that I know

nor even the sense to go with the flow. 

I am eddying in

the current of time but have 

picked up some things;

I know it's 

only what my current brings. 

There are other depths to be explored

beyond what I have known

I'm sure. 

Still with this eye

I would like 

to see more. 

You Wouldn't Believe

 They can tell you the tale

of Priam's daughter, but 

no one asked if she saw further

with her damned eyes,

doomed and doom-saying

with her words treated

as an ass' braying.

If she wrote, it was on gossamer

even if it meant the world to her;

on water, colors of the paint brush

blur, and 

the point becomes a non sequitur. 

Nostradamus gets good credit for

things only hinted at

in metaphor,

yet she was just a woman talking

as it were.

You know, as they are wont to do,

and sometimes what they say comes true. 

I do not know if it was a curse

that she was disbelieved 

or worse, that listeners are deceived 

of the course

of the story when they have

misperceived the source. 

Stars

 It is dark and I'm seeing stars--

of course I am!

I've been hit in the face,

my jaw awry and the taste

of blood in my mouth,

but when things go south

crouch low,

and aim for the middle,

then straight the fuck up.

The only way out

is through and fast,

and that's really all

I know.

Democracy is a Verb

 I remember hearing "God is a verb" and 

it paused me--doing, being. 

Righteousness is acts,

and faith without works is dead. 

"You will know them

by their fruits"--

some exceptional, without blemish,

beautiful to the eye

and honey on the tongue. 

We can see a whited sepulcher

and know what lies therein,

because you know a grave from a buffet. 

Anyway--

the heart of democracy is a verb--

to be aware and free.

We vote with our hearts

our hands, and our feet. 

It is a doing. And the work

must always be done,

or what gets done is

WE.