OFF THE PAGE

OFF THE PAGE

I was writing about
the world
but it all
got very
faint
and small

like a film dissolve
set to permanent

and those strong words
powerful words
there to express
energy, vigour,
passion, life

went elsewhere;
refused to show
their faces

leaving me
in my watercolor world
pigments merging
everything
that might have made
this a poem
dripping off the page

HEAR

HEAR

wrote you a poem
but you said
you preferred silence

so I doused  dampened down
the lines made them quiet
as can be

forbade
everything from shouting,
speaking, making
a sound louder
than a whisper

and I would love
my poem to sidle up
right up
    to your ear
almost say
all the things I want to say
that you say
you dare
not hear

IN THE CORNER

IN THE CORNER

in the corner
a bucket of nothing
full of nothing
under a sign
never to peer inside

for no one can tell
(though we all hypothesize)
the true threat
of nothing

what it might
do to us
how deeply
it might
skew things

infect our Universe
run riot on the inside
end body and mind

or just
open a doorway
to paradox
upon paradox
mystery
within mystery

get us, searching
for final
ultimate truth

truth
    by its promise
presumed depth
and nature

way
  above our pay grade
impossible to find

IMMORTALITY

IMMORTALITY

you are still here
but your body
is buried
in a thousand graveyards,
has been
reduced to
handfuls
of ash scattered across
a range of locales

you should know death
so intimately, but
are none the wiser

have no kind of access
to all these fatal histories

and so
    it still continues this
curse of life since
consciousness. horrifically,
is forever
is immortal

that sleep of sleeps, that
fruit
    of the fall
most
   ingrained wish
just
   a fantasy

you still here and the
you that is here
forever survivor
          blessed with
the curse
of immortality

hard luck trying
to disappear

ALMOST MEMORABLE

ALMOST MEMORABLE

a floating feeling
my inner snake checking in
with me sadly, peering
into my eyes and
then it disappears

I wish it well, God I’m
going to miss him
so much
he gave me, made
this almost memorable,
made it
almost worth living

but now floating out freely
with the current, along
this river
of darkness,
       not a care in the Universe

all my stars going out
down to the last sprinkling
       and then they disappear

LIKE THESE

LIKE THESE

strange that so
many
ultimate particles
can turn
off
the great on
switch

can turn
the bright cosmos
to
one deep
dark
dead
hole

the more we discover,
the more we learn
the worse
it grows
the more
mathematically certain

so much
bad down there in
the small print, subtext
that is fatal

quark, quantum, strangelet,
neutron, Higgs Boson

so much out there
could be
our annihilation

just one
moment here and pop!
gone the next

not fusion, not fission,
but more absurd demise
new set of
parameters, laws, that
change
our entire situation
rewriting the Universe
in a way
not to think
about,
our minds ill-
equipped to envisage,

no one ever considered
nightmares like these.

,

SPRING CLEAN

SPRING CLEAN

vacuuming the house. mowing the lawn

wonder how many
subatomic particles amongst
all the grass, dust and, fluff?

better make
a really good job of it
before the Higgs Bosun field
decides to
do its worst to me

(the more
stuff we discover
the scarier it gets)

false hopes false dreams
pyramids of false assumptions
everything we thought
provisional at best

vacuuming the house hoping
not to throw into thrall
any off-kilter false vacuum
moving slowly,
carefully,
seemingly static

                 observing every
margin of safety

way below
    the devastatingly instantaneous
speed of light itself