Internalizing the Mad Scientist

A software filter might change appearances, but
even with a mad scientist face
we’ll know it is you.

Family and dinner guests will know.
Coyotes and foxes will wail their plaints.
Strangers will feel ill at ease.

Reduced to cut and paste.
How can the overloaded systems
create a third system?

[RK, 3/6/21]


Coyotes

Those coyotes have been with you since
puberty, awareness, and independence.
You chose to forget their names,
even as you cling to their tails.

Now reduced to organic passions, and
far removed from their origins
they are still relative to your “I am”.
You must follow them through the forest.

Forget the laudatory fairy tales.
Forget the never implemented intentions.
Reread the diaries you compiled
in their footprints.

[RK, 3/6/21]

N+1 Redundancy

I reduce the most affable memories
to sepia sketches that could delineate any life.
Each backup plan has its own backup plan.

Möbius Strips, Klein bottles, and the infinity symbol
throw stones in my path. I’m my own archenemy,
caught in the bare branches of an October cottonwood.

The core rotten, the bones of archetypal whiteness,
the slow fade as nature erodes the skin on my face.
Coyotes squat by my door with their autograph albums.

Easily sidetracked with rabbit holes, I join marble statues
in the museum of possible side effects.
Infinity is too much to compass in one day.

“In nature’s infinite book of secrecy a little I can read.”—Antony and Cleopatra

[RK, 3/6/21]