Road to Nowhere

Nothing indexes progress like road kill.

Creaking wagon wheels rarely caught

the possum mimicking his own demise.

Even the fleet hoofs of the lawman's

stallion failed to freeze the furred skunk

or his stench on dissolving plates

of Americana, but today my Civic's tires

cradled the indecision of a fleeing squirrel

and I surrendered to speed, the thought

of home, ham on rye at my kitchen counter.

Balance

It’s only a matter of time

before percentages change.

The balance between dark

and light rides a sliding scale

What is unknown today

will be known tomorrow

or tomorrow or tomorrow

or tomorrow or tomorrow

Thinkers reckon the infinite

while darkness rests its head.

Inferred Perceptions

When Copernicus suggested the earth

         revolved around the sun

                  he disturbed the soil

at the base of the tree of understanding,

         nudged the roots interwoven

                  with the doctrines of the church.

Kepler enlarged this heliocentric garden

         while Galileo honed his tools,

                  sharpened the ax

that ground against the darkness

         church fathers thought

                  to be light.

Cider

Small delights in the dark matter

         of perception

                  satisfy our hunger

         for belief.

Small delights keep us

         on the brink

                  of hope,

         substance of faith.

We spoon sugar into teacups

         of anxiety

                  mugs of trauma,

         the thereness of life.

We drink deeply, taste

         the single percent

                  of understanding,

         the juice the apple yields.

Meaning?

Who understands more

         than a single percent

                  of what he believes?

Technology has left us sitting in our Model T Fords

wondering that a car can be started remotely.

We don't understand how our GPS really knows

where we're going or how to get us there.

Most of us are still wondering how the detergent

gets out of those little pods we throw in the washer.

We stroll through the supermarket without an inkling

of the intricacies of packaging, refrigeration, transit.

                  Belief flirts with convenience.

                           Faith beds naiveté

                                    while meaning merely winks.

Morass

Dark matter drifts between

            the yes

                        and the no

conflating the brink on which

            we struggle

                        to discover

                        direction.

Was I inhaling for the first time?

When I sucked the nicotine

from the Kool deep

into my lungs aping the image

of that oh-so-sophisticated

Sigma Theta in her cashmere

cardigan, her Bass weejuns.

Or was it later walking

in the garden among the Rodin

sculptures in Paris, standing

before the actual Thinker

rather than the myriad

plaster fakes, cartoon

parodies of deep thought.

Perhaps, it was snorkeling

near the Hawaiian reef

where fish accept their

yellows, oranges, and blues

as ordinary, and swim on,

mindless of eyes enlarged

by plastic masks, bodies

redundant with excessive cells.

No, it had to be the morning

I woke in Zermatt, opened

my screen-less window

to see the Matterhorn, startlingly

near, startlingly clear

against blue sky and realized

the world held thousands

of places I could go

millions of things to see.

Simplicity

Time before neon,

life before plastic

tossed us on

its conveyor belt,

our world slept

with daisies,

pomegranates,

and angels.