Hairspray, History, and the Wheel of Life, or Why Poetry Thrives on Discontent
“The dead are nourished on judgment, the living on love.”
— Elias Canetti
He insisted on going his own way. In a ferry made of stone. King of the mountain, he yodeled again and again. Snow is a hoax. Goats make good cheese. Bury me in blue. Drink Clorox if you sneeze. Ice was his mirror. Dice, his middle name. Falsifying fatal flaws, he was an amber fossil, filling his pockets with greedy claws. Simpleton, noodle, fool. He was. Too big for his boots. The heavy steps of tomorrow, a Yeti in snowshoes, in search of the missing link.
Square Dancing in a Roundabout
The statue was almost finished when the chiseler went to jail. No one was really surprised. It was all like a bad dream. Senators in togas playing ice hockey, green with envy. A missile on every pew. Only a few crackpots going ballistic, though we all should have channeled our anger. Long before the marble was cut from the quarry and Phidias was cloned from a smudged fingerprint on an ancient tetradrachm.
T’ou Tzu was plain and truthful. The Pi Yen Lu tells us he knew his ass from a hole in the ground. When a clever monk tried to beat him with a question, he answered that the chisel edge was square. That was awl. The point. To grab a tiger’s whiskers.
It is useless to stop and think. A sad person shouldn’t talk to sad people.
The Watchmaker Analogy
He walked out of the Rolex factory with a falcon on his wrist. Time, he said, is ours. The aitch not with standing.
We seldom stood in the hallways, with bombs dropping everywhere. Better to curl into a ball and roll the dice. Words have a way of finding cracks in the walls of meaning. Windy alphabets pray thee well. Look over the bottom line. Rise like the son each mourning. Pretend. You’re alive. Go digital after the spring.
tik-tok
an atomic clock
waiting for a cuckoo
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