The Gods We Imagined
We have become gods or what we imagined them to be
possessed of the power to destroy more or less
everything we see in anger or indifference,
able to create entire worlds inside small places
or across invisible tendons, nerves, cells.
We receive entreaties from afar nonstop
through squares in our pockets.
Send money.
Solve love.
Shed pounds.
But mostly let me know where you are, god.
And, I am here.
I don’t know exactly what I imagined
but I did not think it would be this.
Rather something like lavish meals without calories,
acclaim without jealousy,
sex that lasts precisely as long
as long as I want it to
with no cleanup or obligatory compliments.
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I never imagined gods having body odors,
running out of t.p. or catching a whiff of anything foul
but here we are.
From this digital throne, it is nice to pity rulers in the flesh:
all that paperwork,
the need to articulate one’s ambitions and powers,
the dreary matters of directing torture,
and the tedium of dispensing terror to tamp down potential betrayals.
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Louis XIV knew that style or, to be exacting, stylishness
would endure much longer than a dynasty or quivering borders,
red heels, diamonds, whigs that were way, way over the top.
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But now everyone on the tour becomes bored by the site of the 99th mirror.
And staff still complain about the plumbing of Versailles.
Ingrates
Having a finite life suffused with ephemera
is supposed to intensify meaning.
So much to be done, so little time,
while physicists and mathematicians
assure us that time does not work that way.
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It works in ways inscrutable infinite remote,
where it curves on a scale vast and majestic.
We should be so lucky as to rule such a realm
and be ruled by it.
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