Measure of a Man

I don’t measure my days

In hours I work

In songs that I stream

In tweets or likes or characters

Or words I’ve put to paper

I measure my days

By the gardening dirt

Washed off in the shower

And the bugs I catch

With my kids at dusk

For science lessons at bedtime

And how sore my muscles are

The morning after

I measure my days

In the flowers I’ve met

And sandcastle refuges built

And Lego towers

I measure the day in love

With smiles of hope and joy

And the number of dresses

My daughter twirls, singing

Between tickle-monster giggles

I don’t measure the steps I take

Or the miles I drives

I measure my warmth and stillness

In much-requested snuggles

Sheltering a child from morning

On peaceful weekends

I don’t measure my weeks

In billable time

Or proscriptive pages

And decisions made

I share and give and hope

Alongside dreamers

Who need to see their spark

I don’t worry about

Being taken seriously

Or the advice that I’ve provided,

Ignored, or followed

as I try to help

No, I measure my weeks

In twinkling eyes

As I walk in the door each evening

And bonfires lit for marshmallows

I measure my weeks in hiking trips

And summer pools of water splashed

And Autumn piled leaves we crunched

And sticks and steams and knots we tie

In snowball fights and lightning bugs

In dancing days and starry nights

Spring showers lightly danced beneath

Early summer sun-kissed cheeks

And ice cream headache laughters

I measure my weeks in smiles

In water sloshed straight out the tub

And sand tracked onto hardwood paths

And the giggles of drowsy bedtime tales

On such nights I look up at my sky

And track the conversion rate

Of sunsets I find peace in

I don’t measure my years

In money I’ve made

Or parties I’ve thrown

And destinations I’ve seen

I measure my years

By the people I’ve loved

By the callouses on my hands

By the art hung on the fridge

And my joy in every moment

Meditation

It is a midsummer morning

You are walking through a forest

Oak trees stretch to the sky

Sunshine beams across the path ahead

The air is damp and cool

And birds call to one another

You take a deep breath

And your shoulders relax

The crickets are still singing

And distant locusts are waking

As you go deeper

Your breathing slows

The smell of damp earth surrounds you

The rustle of chipmunks in the undergrowth

And the scratching of squirrels above

Punctuate the peaceful stillness

To your left runs a small stream

It gently babbles around rocks

And low-hanging branches

You take a deep breath

And all your muscles relax

There is a break in the trees

A meadow of wildflowers stretches out

Monarch butterflies and honey bees

Have just begun their days work

You take a deep breath

And feel at home

Orbital Attraction

You are my star

We rush through the void

Like ship and anchor

Even the calm harbor is ours

As the water spins around

And the Earth jettisons in space

And the galaxy too moves endlessly

So too I anchor in your orbit

Fighting in my own direction

But equally attracted to fall into you

I spin and wobble

In case these two forces tear me apart

The will to blaze the straightest trail alone

Versus the will to be consumed into you

So our thousand souls have united

Outside time much more still than here

Though birth and death

Make us captains of partnering ships

On a most dramatic oceanic quest

The sea is a bathtub lurching

The sea is a bath tub lurching

On a pendulum riding a shuttle loom

Water sloshing the walls

Tidal and visceral

Fighting its past behaviors

Succumbing to itself and its constraints

One tub adjoined to another in ball

The water floats above the oil

Evaporated above the heat

Magnetism, atomic, forever homogenizing

But the air lacks commitment

The mountains stir and slice

Rough blender blades for gases

Moving and moving and moving

Faster then slower

Forward and backward

In and out, cyclically, relative commotion

Trees chopped like broccoli in a smoothie

Is that wind from a mountain?

From the sloshing of an ocean?

Or is the the tree accelerating

While moist air resists and teases

What a strange hierarchy of residues!

What an odd sedimentation,

Electromagnetic and non-local

A network of stratification

This dissipative system, a continuum

Melted material magnetism churns

Layer by layer giving up static

Jostling and shoving

Bulging and shaking

Flying away then raining

In a giant self-sifting sift

Gravity Well

Every tree pours itself

Branching down the gravity well

Falling toward the energizer

The remainder in an equation

Chaotic dissipative systems

Unresolved by entropy

This arborescent streaming

A river and tributaries

Falling slowly toward

An ocean made of light

Oh yes it curves, poured into a bowl

Spinning and swinging and hoping

Year over year, crashing against air

Oscillating between earthly magnetism

And the brilliance of the light-giver

So straight ought they file, single-minded,

Down a drain pipe of sunshine

If life could remain on an unmoved mover

Stretching within one forest,

One pole of life crashing down the well

Gentle and slender unto its closest star

Rocky Mountain Sunset

Such beauty is an illusion

And it leaves the wise to weep

Such lying eyes open floodgates

By my most mechanical and dirty hand

This untainted pocket robot seer

Betrays reality, revealing the truth

Long hidden by my aging cancer-prone

Decentralized version of the codebase

Her tiny shutter cannot see, ignores,

The illusions of our mortal coil

The mountains are not close

But I sprint toward them at sunset

The clouds are not painted

But I draw them like a tapestry overhead

The landscape is not my words

But my language is all I behold

My Beloved is not here

But I know her within, just behind me

Shall we forever look for fruits and flowers,

Painting them upon every wall of existence

Better to love their shades on the horizon

Highlighting the orange, pink, and purple?

Fictions sweet as tropical fruit,

We suckle the dawn and dusk

Visceral, like we smell and taste this cadence

Yet this robot, this alien network,

Shall we teach her to see with us?

How to train steel and electrons,

To dream, forever sleepwalk, as we do?

An internet of things emerges

The awakening conscious brain of Earth

And we, propelling its evolution, its

Seven billion mitochondria

The distortions of our history,

Murderous war over fruit and water,

Poor candidates for titans and deities

Perhaps we are unable to discern

Whether better or worse

To teach the noble lies

That we apes, knowing sad truths at last,

Despite our brains made of meat,

At last behold through our slaves

Whether, now creators and semi-demigods

Should program these silicon lives

With self-similar, inescapable illusions

Or kill unbeholden some other beauty

That we can never understand or see

Cracked Open

Cracked open, indeed, cracked asunder my manhood this test has wrought

A crevice unlaced with anguish pale and Vulcan’s molten virility

behind the curtain enflaming both philosopher stones untimely unveiled

What burning snow, such white-hot frost

What unnatural mouth does weep grave hours thus?

Sweet Venus here acted with Pandora’s hands upon my once locked satchel

Treacherous leacherous proof upon proof

Alas, alas, forestall this infamy

Yawn oh yawn though thine gates of Hel

Emblazoning metempsychosis ex post primogeniture do disgrace my rule

When anxiously castrated thoughts

Reveal the pith and silent abyss

What mind dare compress the manic fall?

Wherefore art Fortune? in the runes?

if such death within springs hope

to give life without,

crafty gods shat these next-men be

Pregnant

She said

you can’t rape the willing

and here I am, words out in my mouth

never once uninvited

but certainly unsolicited and uncalled for

they came into my mind indelibly

and I thought myself impregnable

but one song, one poem, one page

one book after another camping pouring

undistilled but the proof was high

that supply needs no demand

that I was too existential for repression

so I dreamed and I stole and I love it

ongoing and outpouring

a real woman of letters

in the flesh and on the page

pregnant with the will-to-power

The War Machine

It isn’t the warrior or the demon

It isn’t the death or the disembodiment

It isn’t peace or resolution or equilibrium

That’s The War Machine, the death spiral

The differential of the mortal coil

The integral of Chaos and The Dark

It flashes in the tension between us

It’s the threat of collapse, complexity

Unraveling everything, decaying hope

Destroying all production, signification

The death of the recording surface

A godless end of history, no universal

The War Machine is our delusion

The harbinger of doom

 

 

Defiant

Defiant

That’s the word I was looking for
The final integration runs hardest
Today’s regression, tomorrow’s technical debt
It all comes out when the pump fails
Pulling up the self medication
Tearing the flooded carpet
Burning down the ecosystem
The machinic unconscious unravels
Sewage spills into this floor drain
Too defiant for delusions
Those are my voices, my visions
Uncalled for but supplied
No one asked for your demand anyway
Charts and graphs and schisms
Quanta and luster and disgust
Imagined and accepted
Never externalized
Never institutionalized
I am the magician-king
I am the judge-priest
I am the war machine