I listen while the headlines disabuse
my senses of how evil should have limit.
I seek (sad, giving up on reason) rhyme
which also hides its head at so much sorrow
leaving headless iambic lines mute, blank.
Until a jackdaw chortles. Springtime sun
casts shadows of old dragons in the bin
of banished, vanished nightmares, which, though real,
are balanced by the living season’s thrill.
He was tired of being old. He chose a body
from the vivarium of the opulent hotel.
He watched the steps. Staff priests removed its soul.
Technologists blanked its memory. He moved in.
He is twenty-eight again! For the fifteenth time.
The fit young brain rejuvenates his mind.
He gifts the brain the wisdom he’s accrued.
The motion sickness made by melding minds
attracts the front-desk staff. A bellhop aids
his sprightly ill-coordinated walk
to pay his bill, and exit through the door
that says Exit, but should say Vivarium.
Imagining calories count less in the dark,
he snacks throughout the night continually.
He wiggle-walks across the sand to park
his BMI’s (yes, plural) by the sea.
He would splash in, were fear of pleurisy
less in his thoughts. A box of doughnuts jam
the milkshakes in the thermos near the ham
beneath the turkey biscuits in his hamper.
I am, he thinks, the people that I am.
I shall leave it to these thin sand fleas to scamper.
It was Spring, a time that Grungy Dinah pined
for love. Spring sprang sap-hazardly. Dawns lengthened.
Eves shortened. Adams appled. Fauns were fined
when caught flagrante delicto. Their lusts strengthened
poor Grungy Dinah’s dreaming that her own fate
involved one couple’s coupling, wherein she
was the female actor (actress?), and the ‘he’
was whichever ‘who’ three gins proclaimed her mate.
Not ‘whom?’ she pondered. Days and fortnights passed.
The winds of grammar wound their winding sheets
around her nouns and pronouns. Sap was sassed
till Spring wound down in Gunga Din defeats.
The question whether poetry still matters
is jejune this April as it ever may
become or was. Illogic in it shatters
all hope of answer. Fitful fey things pay
silly devils to say there’ll be hail to play
with in the desert, before poetry
begins (or stops) to matter to the free
and gloriously inequitable curse
of prose that’s lifted high enough to be
poetic tropes. It could always be verse.
I look at the shell, and let my preconceptions
replace themselves with others. There’s no way
I can see the shell for simply what it is.
I regard the shell and try to squelch my thinking.
As far as I succeed, it disappears.
I cannot find it. I stay unaware
of what I think I’m seeing when I see.
What does the shelled ghost of the fighting conch
think of when it tries also to see me?
Earth Tourist 