Caligula's Concomitant

Cautiously, he steps across Caligula's concomitant 
Which forms a long, curved, polluted stream 
Flowing in the wrong direction
His feet seemingly defy gravity 
He floats through every step
Never falling into the suffocating material below
Rather, the mass of strange black matter
Is precisely what holds him up 
And carries him to the other side
It is hard for him to be grateful, though
As the dark material is the reason
He was initially forced to move

Humor and Dreams

There is an old man
Who I've known a long time
Living downstairs from me
He used to tell me humor
Was number one on his list of the most
Precious things on this Earth
If a person didn't smile
He had the talent to change that
His charisma always shined
Sometimes brighter than he wanted
In recent times, he's been quiet
He doesn't talk about humor
He doesn't try to get people to laugh
Instead, he carries a shovel everywhere
And when he finds
A soft patch of soil, he digs
I asked him what he was digging for
And he told me dreams
Which are, of course, the second item
On his list of most precious things
I don't know why he has to dig for them, though
Perhaps he buried them before
He discovered humor
And now that it is gone,
Perhaps he hopes to find
The next best thing.

The Expanse

On an uncharted, soil-less
Expanse of metal and steam
Hissing sounds of valves
The whirring of lubricated parts
A repetitious machine
Stirred out of rhythm for an instant
But was quickly corrected
By the surrounding machines
This was something that had never,
In previous operations, occurred 
Yet, it had been planned for,
Accounted for,
And the processes, the controls in place
To correct the error
Immediately reacted
Setting off a wave of occurrences
That had also never happened previously
The precise perfection
Of a thousand planned motions
Made imprecise by a fraction of time
Displaced by the steel hands of chance
The ripple traveled across time
Heavy vibrations penetrate form
As the collective weight
In spite of its perfect symmetry and balance
Rotated the mass of its whole
Contorting and pulling
Shapes from shapeless
And shapeless shapes
Settling into a new collective
Its deformity becomes the new mold