I still have a lot of text files from when I was in college and even high school, sequentially copied from floppy to floppy to hard drive to hard drive over the decades. I used to write poems and they were not good and neither is this one, but to my surprise it had some lines in it that I remembered but did not remember that I wrote myself. What was I doing with the line breaks though? I am pretty sure this would have been written in my junior year of college, maybe spring of 1992. Around this same time I submitted a short story to a magazine and the editor wrote back to me saying “free-floating anxiety cannot be what drives a narrative,” but I disagreed, obviously.
To a Crackpot
He eschews the shoulders
of giants. He chooses instead
the company of thin men, coffee-stained,
stooped with knowledge. They huddle
on the sidewalk, nodding, like crows
or rabbis. He speaks:
the world is hollow and we live
on the inside. (Murmurs of assent.) There
is a hole at the top where the water runs in. The sun
is smaller than my hand, and the stars
are smaller than the sun.
A woman walks by, drawing
his eye. She has no idea. Beneath their feet,
out in the dark, secret engines. The Earth turns like milk.
Same, but 1982, and lost. Lost. LOST! Thank God.
We are the hollow men/earth,
Black milk/sun,
There is a hole where the (no, I cannot speak of it)
But the universe wheels and wheels, unknowing, unknowable, without cause, without reason, without us.
ALAS!
Peerage
there’s no presumption in peer,
much less peremptory emptiness,
to whom can crack a dictionary.
but who presumes to umpireship,
is a nonpeer captain of umpiry.
crack this code, crack a smile,
and put the e bak in crackpoet.
thus spake 0*
10 Dec 2005