Streetlamps

The unplowed road is unusable

unless there’s no snow.

But in dry, warm weather,

it’s never called an unplowed road.

To call it so, when it isn’t so,

doesn’t make it so, though it is so

when it snows and there’s no plow.

It’s a no-go. Let’s stay inside.

And here we are again:

no cake without breaking

eggs, unless it’s a vegan cake

in which there are never any eggs

only the issue, the question,

the primacy of eggs,

which remains even in animal-free

foods, eaten by animal-free

humans in an inhumane world, lit

with robots breathing

powerlessly in nature.

O streetlamp,

wallflower clairvoyant,

you are so futuristically

old-fashioned,

existing in the daytime

for later, because it becomes

later eventually, then

earlier, then later again.

And a place is made

for that hope, if I call

it hope when half the time

is erased by the other half.

Light becomes itself

in the dark, and becomes

nothing when the real light

comes. It is enough to make

even the simplest organism

insane. Why did the chicken

cross the unplowed road?

Because it was trying

to beat the egg to the other side.

It wanted to be first,

at last, and to stay first,

at least until the day

breaks itself sunny side,

and the rooster crows.

The only snows are dark snows.