The Trans Ordinary

The sound of a window-unit air conditioner.
The soft buzz, almost mute;
Caused by a filter that sifting through stuff, just stuff;
The cool air pushes out.
This sound is built into its physics.
You pay for that sound with money and sinew.

Who mentions such things as energy transference?
Energy–
intellectual pieties;
noise to
the body.

You do not see but feel how other, former bodies long dead
Have been strewn into a heap of History.
Like so many reasons
All given up for the sake of having one–
a reason.
We speak nostalgically–
the dreams of those historical beings called generations.
And the young must bear such talk as though a nightmare.

Unknowing was always the first privilege.
For knowing a reason is the first kind of nightmare.

The relative cost of this knowledge ought to have shattered all privileges.
Consider, for example, the crisp distinctions between word and deed.
How “person” means and “a person” has meaning–
very different.
Consider how it is possible, for example, for criminals to die–you might say, for who will miss them?
You would be morally sound.
Consider, for example, how it is not possible for innocents to die–you might say, for they would be missed.

We learn the relativity of memory somewhere, and doubt it.
We learn the relativity of time in classrooms, secure in it.

Again, who remembers the criminal?
Once a person, having meaning,
now cleaved from them by the word-deed “crim(e)inal”?

These are things you learn.
This is ordinary physics–
The costs while you temporize life.