Posts from — February 2012

We Are A Kind Of Map


A buzzer-beating three-point shot reveals
We’re born to know our truths about this world,
And so is everything: a fly conceals
Itself till it’s grown wings and they’ve unfurled;
A virus has the key for just that cell
Where it can multiply; that cell, dying,
Creates an army ready to repel
The sudden viral horde or die trying.
Of course that’s metaphor, but not a lie,
Not just a way of trying to impose
Some sense on senselessness, a useless “Why?”
We answer till we like what we suppose.
There’s something might be learned when we’re betrayed
Seeing the world with eyes the world has made.

Changes prompted by comments on a mail list – if I broke it, then I’m the one who broke it.

I found the form yesterday, browsing through Lew Turco‘s Book of Forms, and spent my Superbowl Sunday writing one. I’m not at all sure about the title.

No Joke

It used to be I’d wonder at her laughter —
I’d try to tease her secrets from that tone,

From how she’d turn away just moments after —
Or was that when I didn’t join her laughter?

Sometimes she laughed at something she alone
Could see, and something jagged in her tone

Would haunt my waking dreams for days thereafter,
Such a bitter mockery of laughter

That every laugh I heard, even my own,
Became infected by its mordant tone.

Now every night and every day hereafter
Forever will be crowded with her laughter,

My fascination with its broken tone,
The secrets buried in her teasing laughter.