I signed the checks & credit cards

Went quite a long way but was not moving nearly fast enough to actually notice

Did not make a bazillion on the next financial fad like those Masters Of The Universe

Passing on my accumulated eco-debt thru to whatever dispossessed generations might follow

Did not file any patents or copyrights and no inventions are held in my name

Was unable to attain spiritual enlightenment or even enjoy any lasting peace of mind

Won’t find my name credited on any scientific research papers

Found it difficult to obey every order given by the great generals of the consumer field

Did not uncover any new and beautiful mathematical relations

Lost my senses and grew weak just like all those great ones from every field

Was not a member of the all-star team for many years in a row

But, I no longer remember their names just as well as they never heard of mine

Could not find it in me to produce even a single page of deathless prose

Signed the checks & credit cards and was OK always spending more than I earned

Held the spoonfed opinions of others quite strongly but never learned to think for myself

Walked with a proud independence as I navigated by the bobbing tails of the herd

Did not have a pop hit and then grow fat and doped up out in dusty-neon Las Vegas

Pretty sure I almost won the lotto at least once or twice

Was not ever elected to any office since I never had enough vanity to run

Had a couple surgeries that I would be happy to talk with you about for hours

Got a son who lives up by Portland and a daughter out in Phoenix

Did not save the bug-filled rainforest or protect whatever greasy salmon

Let the quiet lakes and rivers grow filthy, passing by them daily, on my way to work

Could not draw too much sustenance from my predigested holiday experiences

Wound up growing morally thin and drawn out on my half-baked and spoon-fed beliefs

Did not finish my masterpiece because I thought I kept on starting over

Never saw any great circle or felt some spirit in the sky from outside our modular

Once I took time to roll down the windows and smell the roses as we were driving by

Could not notice how, when I thought I paused, that I was still being swept right along

Appear to be finishing up now but I cannot step back far enough to really tell

That is, think I might be just awfully close to that Happily-Ever-After once again

Going to sum it all up and make my peace here in just a little while

Did not volunteer my time but I still like to think I most likely would have

Got no wisdom for my kids but they come sit by me sometimes, just the same

There’s that ex-wife out in Fresno and a brother in Denver who still hates my guts

They laid me off and defaulted on my pension so then I also pissed away all my 401K

But I’m making my peace and seeking forgiveness and just maybe I’ll get buried green

Privately Punctuated Equilibrium

Punctuated equilibrium states that evolution proceeds in relative stability for long periods of time interspersed with much shorter periods during which many species become extinct and new species emerge

My brief and fragile peace is randomly shattered by an empty confusion filled with a brittle noise

The entropy of 1000 ads unwinds the cocoon I have spun to try to take on another form from within

Unbidden, implanted thoughts quickly separate me from meditative contemplation

Staccato power tools and snorting bulldozers thoroughly dissolve my peaceful illusion

This sense of inner calm morphs instantaneously into a raging and blind emotion – Over a parking spot

My clear sphere of equilibrium is punctuated by such random and very sharp sharp exclamation points

Jarred abruptly into pointless marketeers’ daydreams from eternal contemplation

Strong gusts of chaos churn my laminar Wa into choppy waves of turbulent tension

Unbidden facts thrust themselves upon me, piercing my most comforting curtain of self-delusion

Hoarse laughter, bright lights and loud engines trample me awake from peaceful dreams

Slick, dead-end merchandising schemes wrestle away my precious attention

Meaningless corporatized sports events quickly destroy my fragile focus

Bright colors and hypnotizing music morph me once again into a consumerist droid

Politicians smilingly coat my little wisdom with clouds of warm, quickly-evaporating pixie dust

A blind, teat-seeking greed is said to guide our progress, much to my confounded consternation

My inner peace evaporates from the light, heat and noise of our wondrous endeavors

This passive resistance of mine is as some hapless plant is to our progress-bearing earthmovers

Senseless morning cacophony twists a search for meaning into a suicidal longing for the void

In the furor of the sound and light my thoughts are changed as quickly as a chameleon’s colors

I fear the holy cause of our inalienable progress leads us all into this chaotic regression

So the next loud man on the airwaves all too easily punctures the shallowness of my self-deception

Swirling

I must be swirling through a blur

Staggering sideways after all the spinning

Things must be roiling all around me

Maybe I saw heaven from every side

Swimming strongly or is it the current?

Going crazy just making sense

Standing upright, floating upside down

Falling softly from all directions

Fading off in those cool shadows

Turning upwards with the school of fishes

I think I twirl as I am gliding

There is no real sense that I am falling

My mind is clear though we are whirling

Remaining focused on the past unfurling

Through it all in this gentle swirling

In eddy resting and vortex yearning

Bobbing calmly in their wakes

Building with the clouds to rain

Sliding down this swell that’s curling

Achieving much through simple swarming

I might be part of something bigger

But quite alone when at last it’s over

My thoughts merge with this cat’s purring

In snowfall patterns there can be no hurry

I no longer fear this constant blurring

Losing focus need not bring on hurting

I go on swirling through things moving

Holding on? Who can I be fooling?

Detritus

I piece together unrelated parts of different fallen objects which I find upon the ground

Things from far above land all around me in the total darkness in which I abide

And I cannot sense the gentle rain falling on that calm surface miles above

My experiences compress each other into a mental sedimentary record

I grope for the importance of things which I stumble upon but cannot see

I filter a rich gruel of detritus well-mixed during its long descent to me

I can never escape the constant threat of heavy objects crashing down like meteors

I make a comfortable home inside large carcasses for years at a time

Prevailing winds deposit a rich sample of their contents upon my leeward side

I am washed into an eddy I circle as my thoughts are sorted into their proper levels

Our randomly-incessant noisemaking smears my musings from all directions

I wash up on the clean wet sand with the waves of yet another incoming tide

Briefly streaking through the atmosphere, I drift with a few starry molecules

I fall to earth with the thunder’s ozone in the soft shower beneath a rainbow

We descend at different speeds each wondering at the others whizzing by

We are adrift in a graceful Brownian Motion far removed from our own control

Falling at one of a thousand angles with a million silent snowflakes

Drying out where the storm deposited me far above the peaceful water line

Found where dark flood waters left me laying quietly in an impossible position

Dried to fine dust after a short journey across unquenchable desert sands

I am pocked like the moon with repeated random impacts by unidentified objects

Turned over as I lay with alluvial soil to receive the good seed of the farmer

Sticking with the wax that drips from their faithful candles flickering in dank chapels

Listening as unknown liquids trickle down to me in the depths of our great landfills

Fluttering with falling leaves so that I can be buried by them year after peaceful year

Compressed into a single blue layer deep within the vastness of an ice sheet

Dated absolutely by position in the growth rings of an ancient bristlecone pine

Orbiting based on my density in a planet’s ring after an interstellar collision

Tumbled to odd resting places with the giant boulders left by those retreating glaciers

Spreading out in graceful whorls in the jet contrails headed to vacation destinations

Diluted in pure air after escaping, only partially combusted, with your exhaust

Settling out peacefully in quiet sewage lagoons along with your contributions

Sorting into the dust that came before me even as new dust softly entombs me

Exposed once more after millennia to be covered again for another billion years

Gracefully piling up in that small hourglass that drains but once, for all of us

Staring Off

Caught myself in a meeting with my eyes unfocused on any events outside my thoughts

Gazing emptily at a butt-littered curb someone honked at me as traffic moved on at last

Suddenly I realized I read each word but that I was comprehending something else

I saw the manicure, fine clothes and pampered face but I did not hear her spiel

Riffing out on a tangent from one thing he had said, I never even heard the rest

Lost in contemplation, an image I would not remember was burned into my past

As I dropped into that private space their monitors showed my brain waves changing

Staring off to unseen distances, the light in my eyes shown towards the inside

I lost myself somewhere between a dream and the foolishness surrounding me

Things were making more and better sense but then, someone called my name

I heard only the birds outside the classroom thanks to her endless droning

Plotting out the might-have-beens and maybe-could-haves often led me far afield

Walking in such reveries I commonly tripped on the most obvious of obstacles

As I stared off, some perhaps thought I pondered deeply but…I was simply somewhere else

My blank fixation perhaps the visible sign of an innocuous and dreamy epilepsy

But then again my quiet abstraction might have been simply a way to get attention

Sometimes I would relive many years in the space of but several minutes

Every so often as I returned I would confusedly try to rouse myself, as if from a sleep

There was no payoff in the real world for all my semi-comatose peregrinations

I did, however, wonder if this was where I spent all that time that I was always saving

I Left All These Tiny Ripples

Everything I do ripples outward, far beyond what I will ever see
Nowhere I have gone merely to look upon was unchanged by my coming

All the things I touch are altered in ways that I can never even notice

In turn, no one I have so much as spoken to did not change me just a bit

All the ways I tried to fix things keep changing other things as well

All the stuff you do interacts in unseen ways with all the things that I once did

Every time I replace one item I displace something else

When these two parts fit together that other one over there turns out to be a little short

Like a spaceman, stuff gets away from me and starts an existence all of its own

No one walks without their footprints changing the ocean even as it erases them

Anything I handle manipulates me with forces that I cannot see or feel

Tiny life I crushed unconsciously in my passing allowed other forms to prosper

Nothing that I toss aside has not left its ongoing trace before it more or less disappears

Every step I take turns the earth beneath my feet just the smallest fraction

A wake spreads out around me as I move through the infinite chop of others

Whenever I feel like I’m thinking for myself, it always comes from what they taught me

All their unseen co-operation make possible my rugged independence and self-reliance

Asking nothing from anyone, I still depend entirely upon others to simply live and breathe

I leave a little bit from everywhere I’ve ever been everywhere I go

Turns out my voice is but one little peep in a small frog chorus on a tiny pond

Influences my actions set in motion are continually reduced but never completely reach nothing

The sum of all my actions declines forever but only marginally reaches zero

Things others said so long ago that I never quite heard still guide me along this road

No one that has ever lived has not affected me in many ways

There is this melody in my head that is all the songs that they are ever singing

My happiness and contentment is somehow based in part upon their sadness and their suffering

Although I have no past before this life, it seems it has always lead up to this

Nothing I can imagine can ever come from outside what any of us has known

You can see me in one instant’s snapshot of the vast family tree formed by the life force

Every moment of the present I exchange a bit of my future into my disappearing past

Everything I do is very small yet so much more than what I can remember

I would be traveling in circles but time has converted them to rippling spirals

Though we make identical journeys, I cross your footprints heading the other way

I can even calculate the proportion of the sun’s energy that is falling upon my fingertip

Setting this thing in place I turn around and bump another which falls, out-of-reach, once again

Circling My Drain

I lay struggling and kicking on my mother’s breast unable to tolerate her good milk

even as they rolled my wrinkled, speckled body over to change the soiled sheets once again

I waited in a red jacket for the yellow bus on that first sunny day of kindergarten

simultaneously, at last I could no longer grasp the wriggling glyphs on any printed page

The older generations slipped away continuously in front of my children’s eyes

but, they too touched bottom at last, stood up and began slowly to emerge

I asked him of his plans and he recounted some of his more vivid memories

they were, as it turned out, actually willing to sacrifice for a future they would never see

Voices on the airwaves mingled with the live stream inside my head

in the land of dreams at least, I accepted these things without their having to make sense

I always felt I was growing nearer the happily that came just before the ever after

putting him in the ground I watched from a huge leafless oak as others lowered me as well

The times tables were like rhymes to me so I learned to sing them all quite well

he asked me how many fingers he held up but I could not really be too sure

I spent a lot more time with the people who had left me behind, the older that I got

no, I never returned to the homeland where they still walk me in the medieval courtyard

Later on I found it much more difficult when I tried to learn how to crawl once again

my chubby bow legs did not yet effectively support me so I waddled with uncertainty

I know that I am totally invisible in the purple lilac bushes of that sunny garden

as a starched nurse approaches I pull the stiff, rough sheets up and think that I am hiding

I have a recurring nightmare where I wake from a good dream that I can’t quite remember

awakened again that night, for the first time I understand when Mom tells me it’s not real

My life seemed as short as the years now seem after now having seen so many

in third grade I was sure that June would never come but that summer would last forever

For many years I returned with worms I had dug for the trout flashing under the old bridge

my uncle showed me how to bait the hook and told me I must intently watch the bobber

When I was 4, one day I thought back as far as I could and finally came to nothing

the older I got the more I saw how fast the void rushed at me, from all directions

I finally realized that things whirled around me much more quickly than I ran

holding my thoughts, I can take a long cool dive down into the dim, green past

After breakfast, we just stayed out by the lake for long summer days on end

I should apologize to many I no longer remember and thank the many more I never noticed

Sometimes my father disappoints me with an unexpected glance from an unseen mirror

I remember her dirty flip-flops and how she cried when she could not see the eye chart

I keep crossing my own tracks but it looks like they all lead off to nowhere

They got me cleaned up and just well enough to go and spend the night at grandma’s

All things were possible as I set off with my dad early on those Saturday mornings

often I hope we have enough time for the sun and snow to bleach our bones together

We wrestled savagely for what seemed like an hour in the side yard by his house

looking back now there is no way to recover that path I took to get here

I gave thanks that god had made me a boy and not an old lady or even an adult

groping in the darkness for direction, we did not describe straight lines

Staying below the superheated smoke we dragged the heavy firehose

the doctors found it difficult to treat the burns on an infant as small as myself

They could understand my words but we could no longer have a real conversation

I kept on trying as they helped me to evolve my first attempts at language

They performed an elaborate Christmas ritual which I have completely forgotten

they carefully placed the birthday cake on my chest after managing to sit me up

I floated like an astronaut with a lifeline plugged into my belly button

as my consciousness slipped away I felt myself rising at last, far up into the stars