Mazurka

The cat is beautiful.

The mazurka is beautiful.

The cat cannot hear a mazurka,

The cat can hear a sound. 

The mazurka is a recording. 

The cat is alive. 

The performer does not know

the cat hears the sound. 

Who hears the mazurka? 

Kino

Only sadism could relieve the tedium 

of their unchallenged privilege, 

and so they entertained themselves 

with arbitrary evils. War, famine, 

and pestilence served as distractions, 

horsemen maneuvered 

with knight's move afterthought

across distant criss-crossed time zones 

and continents that tiled the masquerade 

in their villas and cavernous chateaux. 

The planet was a Riviera casino 

for their casual coin toss apocalypses:

billions of lives placed on red or black,

billions of minds taught right and wrong,

lies rolled like dice to cascade through their press.

A roulette wheel of diagnoses for their disorder

was attempted by the wise, to rattle our intellect: 

psychopathy, narcissism, dialectical materialism, 

none ever quite discerning the root cause: nothing, 

the green pocket that gives the house its edge,

the fathomless, oceanic, unending boredom,

that accompanied their vast, purposeless wealth, 

fuel to their toxic and ineffably remote indolence. 

They withdrew to their yachts 

as history broke in waves upon the shore

where the Rights of Man were written on the sand, 

under their indifferent and occasional glance

while they sipped their quarterdeck cocktails, 

for they were impatient for the End of Days.

They had a concession agreement for the Rapture.

After all, the foyer is where the money is made. 

Amelia

She hides in shelters from their bombs.

There's nowhere they can hide from her song. 

They can't escape it in their fast jets.

It's wings will carry it higher yet

than planes from which their bombs fall.

Her song is the smartest bomb of all. 

It scores a direct hit on the heart.

(After seeing the little girl Amelia sing "Let It Go" in a bomb shelter in Ukraine)

An astronomer in Ukraine

The astronomer descends from the observatory to the street. 

Stars are siphoned by her telescope into a silicon net. Caught, 

displayed and studied, their ancient light, their long cold heat,

the fingerprint of their spectra, the exoplanet's swagger, the beat

and slow sway of its waltz with its companion: her thoughts 

turn from here to worlds where perhaps things thought unique

once, divine blessings bestowed with complicated benevolence,

gifts from God with strings attached that later act as precedent

and prototype for the more worldly forms of puppetry

attempted by those who think strength confers authority,

turn out to be a cosmic commonplace, miracles on repeat,

and she descends from her observatory to the street,

exchanging precision optics unblemished by the merest speck

of dust for a dirty old bottle, filled with fuel, rag in its neck,

fuel formed from a miracle of life on which our sun once shone 

and as that ancient heat and light is released 

it helps bring about an earthly dictator's defeat.