The Quantumverse
“It is the burden of life to be many ages
without seeing the end of time.”
– Jim Harrison
Thinking God
was a watchmaker
I opened up my Timex
looking for the End Times
Or maybe a cobbler
so cut apart my shoe
searching for my soul
and the road less traveled
Rummaging now
in this poem –
find if still meaning
in words
I grew up on Jasmine –
which should make for a poet
or maybe a florist,
or at least why I have allergies
We moved to Florence
but alas I could not find
the statue of David
anywhere behind the shrubs
I guess that’s the way of it –
there were never any groves on Grove
or luminous promises
on Pearl
Though I’ve hung the signs
“Life” and “Death” overhead
I hope you will forgive
this shabby poet’s corner
For Tuesday Poetics
I slid my hand inside the rain
To feel how smooth and sparked
Under hushed grey cloth
It unzipped,
My fingers parting drops
Like brushing open
A dress of silk
That first blush of cool
Late in the evening
Clouds slipping off
Their sunsets
For dVerse Quadrille
Call me whale-boy,
call me razor fluked,
call me sharp
in my harpoon-skin suit,
call me lungs
of tungsten steel –
you’ll need poems made of bathysphere
to hunt me down.
Lunging shark-breath,
I’m your Voodoo Sleighride
to the bottom of the sea,
blowhole Davy Jones’ locker
to smithereens,
chew the rotgut spleen.
Color me flensed, stripped,
and rendered,
blind faith with fatty acid,
my heart on fire
and burning for you now –
soul light in the tryworks.
All together now children
Repeat after me:
One fish.
Two fish.
Red fish.
Blue fish.
*Incorporating by reference the first line of Moby Dick: “Call me Ishmael”.
**Dr. Seuss, but you knew that.
For DVerse MTB
Muddle me this, batgirl,
hot mess me the question
that riddles your eyes
Your crime wave of love
robbing me of sleep,
mugging in my dreams
Leaving me dazed, dazzled,
that blazon of your heart
flashing like a beacon
Like a call to arms
For dVerse Quadrille
While squinting at the graffiti scratched on the valve of this urinal, I decide I am overdue to consider Dustin Hoffman. Probably because the guy next to me sort of looks like Dustin Hoffman, and because I am in the Port Authority bus terminal in New York City, so Midnight Cowboy et. al.
Most recently I thought about Dustin Hoffman when I helped with my wife’s 6th grade scavenger hunt in the Central Park Rambles – supposedly to evoke survival in the wild. Central Park was the best we could manage. I suggested that better survival training would be to give all the kids a blanket and a knife and no money and teach them to panhandle. Nobody thought that was funny.
I hoped maybe we would see Dustin Hoffman because he lives near the park. But there was only a homeless guy, and the kids shared their macaroni and cheese with him. We gave him a big tub of macaroni leftovers to dole out to the other homeless people who live in the park. The kids voted our outing “the best field trip ever”, there’s that.
Maybe the homeless guy was Dustin Hoffman, disguised so that he can go out in public and nobody bother him. Like his Ratso Rizzo character in M.C., but maybe this time he doesn’t have to die on the bus from NY to Florida. Here in the Port Authority it smells like bus exhaust and like the bathroom hasn’t been cleaned since 1969, so maybe like death too.
The Port Authority is still dangerous because nobody has figured out how to make bus travel upscale and hipster and boutique and artisanal like the rest of Manhattan. Yet I think the cities and towns where these buses go are much more dangerous now. Meth and OxyContin in Des Moines, Toledo, Birmingham, on and on through the lifeblood of America. That keening sound from the wheels of the bus metastatic with loss.
Quo Vadis Dustin. Quo Vadis Ratso.
For dVerse Poetics
Scaredy-egg
begs the question –
which came first
the chicken or
the cat?
Electric jump back
6.242×1018 coulomb
crazy bitch neurons
firing begging burning
from the frying pan
onto the plate
you yes you honey
gonna cat-scratch eat you
gonna love you right up.
For dVerse Quadrille
Now the soul’s
crevasse yaws open —
melt of Spring
yielding up
the dead of winter, life that
slipped between the cracks.
The warming
slurry of coffee
and ground bones
looses floes,
returns lost expeditions,
love in hobnailed boots.
For dVerse Shadorma
Wake up you
chucklehead!
Yeah you! Talking to you!
This is your fire-breathing,
rip-tearing, snort-snorting
coffee speaking!
It’s Caffeine Thursday
and while there are no nuts
in Chock Full O’ Nuts,
if you laugh
it out your nose
you will miss
your bus.
An alternate, coffee-inspired submission for dVerse Quadrille
Today will you penance
the ordinary,
make pilgrimage of necessity
from your book of days –
Sulfur Monday – you are
but tinder for the world
Matchfire Tuesday – conflagration
shadows your every step
Ash Wednesday – and to dust
you shall return
For these are you lent
For dVerse Quadrille
qbit 