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PSALM
Thanks for the light and the noise of the lark.
Thanks for the silence and thanks for the dark.
Thanks for the power that creates and destroys
and for always giving me more than one choice.
Many thanks for my will, whereby I may do what’s forbidden,
and for those friendly shadows that may keep my secrets hidden.
Thanks for those secrets, delicious and deep,
and even for nightmares that punctuate sleep,
for letting me choose not to do as I ought
and for sometimes allowing me not to get caught.
Thanks for the evil as well as the good -
for the fact that I don’t have to do as I should.
Thanks for the demons I often adore.
Thanks for not making existence a bore.
(Mike Cohen – Mar 2000)
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Free will affords us responsibility and regret along with options and opportunity, giving us just discretion enough to make quite a mess as we go about living our lives by the forkful.
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LIFE BY THE FORKFUL
You needn’t wait to come to a fork in the road.
You’re always at some fork or other.
Some of the forks have so many tines
you would not recognize them as forks.
But at every step you make a decision,
weighing certain considerations,
failing even to consider others.
There are advantages and disadvantages to each alternative you choose,
and to every one you don’t.
There are multiple possibilities
that are multiplying all the time,
requiring infinite parallel universes to accommodate them all.
Onward you choose, realizing some benefits
and some consequences, dismayed
at how often you feel betrayed by your own decisions,
finding at length, that no matter what choices you make,
you just can’t please all of yourself
all of the time.
(Mike Cohen – Sep 2010)
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You go through life making your choices and taking your chances. But sure as there are choices you make, there are choices that make you, choices that have at least given you a chance.
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CHOSEN BY CHANCE
If your parents had waited another day
or another moment,
there could have been a different child born.
The egg might have been the same
but the race of the sperm
would most likely have crowned a different champion.
The sperm run is chaotic.
It is a shuffling of the deck,
a chance for chance to reset itself.
There is sufficient Brownian motion involved
that victory does not necessarily go to the fleetest.
Life begins always with an element of the capriciousness
that characterizes it throughout.
But were life predictable
it would not be worth its own while.
Life is full for being full of choices,
conscious and unconscious,
whose outcomes cannot be clearly foreseen,
small choices that make great unknowable differences,
choices made with scarcely a thought,
choices like waiting another day
or another moment.
(Mike Cohen – Apr 2007)
It is not hard to imagine a small shift in circumstance, a cough or a belch, a minor distraction, a vague impulse bringing about a bit of hesitation or haste that might easily have made you into another person, or might even have made another person into you. Nearby may be a person you might have been, a person you may never know, but whose presence you may feel in a dream or in a waking…
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A LIKENESS
Maybe it wasn’t you,
but someone just as winsome and worrisome
who smiled that same sad smile you are wearing.
You may not know each other,
may not know yourselves,
standing some moments apart.
But I saw you…
or someone just as wishful and wistful
who wept that same persistent tear
you are trying to wipe away.
(Mike Cohen – Jan 2010)
There may be planes not far away, where the same choices have slightly or vastly different outcomes, working out for the better or for worse, because of a variety of variables such as balance and probability.
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BALANCE AND PROBABILITY
I thrust open the window,
and my face into the morning air.
The ground is two-and-a-half stories distant,
a height somewhere between
serious injury and death.
I lean out, out,
and in several nearby parallel universes I fall,
balance and probability being what they are.
In some of these universes my fall is fatal;
in others it is not.
In one, I teeter momentarily
then topple backward,
striking my head against the end table
and dying instantly.
Balance and probability have a wry sense of humor.
In the vast majority of parallel universes,
including the one in which we seem to be residing,
I simply inhale deeply,
filling myself with the splendid emptiness
of an as yet unspoiled day,
and return inside,
oblivious to all the drama and tragedy going on nearby.
(Mike Cohen - Aug 2006)
