Deifying Gravity

You proclaimed yourself a fighter
You knocked the bishop out from under his miter
With Newton, your high priest
And his minions around him
You looked for a Messiah
And, by God, you found him

Necks bowed, in vestigal depravity
On your knees, worshipping gravity

You logged on in the lumber camps of technology
With the hard wired veins of your cyber-biology
With Einstein, your Saviour
And the kids, and their 'net
And the quantam mechanics
That you don't really get

Spewing shibboleths from the generational cavity
Genuflecting lower, venerating gravity

We were good Luddites
We prayed to an unseen god at night
We built fantastic altars
But it seems that all that's altered

Unseemly scraping, bent low to the ground
Lying prostrate, before the Messiah you found

Deifying gravity, Newton pulling us down

Due Date

When you are seventy years old
And your mother is rounding the bend
To one-oh-one
And I am a chiselled one liner
Memorable, pithy, aphoristic dad
Walker yourself over to the memory box
And spend a quiet moment
Reflecting on the eternity in your bones
The antiquity in your liquids
The sinews, hamstrings, ropes of veins
The beginnings
And even this instant
This primeval, antedilluvian pause in thought
When dear old dad
On his father's birthday
Reflected on the sorrows, yawns, and smiles
And the everyday of our longevity

Architexture

I am a building of old stone
I exist
I strive not to
Anthropomorphisize
(Do buildings strive?)
I feel my walls strain
Under copper rooves
(Do buildings feel?)
I sense the rain
In green-stained tears
(Do buildings sense?)
I know history
In every cornice line
(What does a building know?)
I see folly on the sidewalk below
I see the chemistry of greed
The alchemy of isolation
Spawning copper tears
Growing rings of brick and mortar
Like a tree grows
Betrayed by similies
I exist and strive

Smoke and Mud

Smoke and mud
In curls, licks, wisps, and tufts
In an exchange of breath
And wealth
And life and health
Which evaporate in puffs
And condense
In hurried emotion

1 Bedroom + Den

We existed on a diet of nothing but gruel
With peat moss for fuel
Living in a hovel
No bigger than your navel
But what was really amazing
In the midst of all this navel-gazing
Was the enmity I bore you
How I loathed and abhorred you
And, had the world not been so flat
I surely would have pushed you
Off the edge of it
Or something like that

King Street Day Job

I have a day job on King Street
I sit on a sidewalk and weep
I lie on the asphalt and sleep
I spit on the subway grate
And slowly decompose
Picking apart a symphony
In tragic, symbolic telemetry
In elegant, wasted dysentery
Like a TB wretch with the King’s Evil
Coughing; and
It’s the scrofula talking

(a word of explanation: sometimes when you are watching Barry Bonds chase down mythical numbers, you remember that you wrote a poem about Ted Williams and the fight between members of his family to see who could desecrate his memory fastest ...)

Ted Williams Decapitated

Splendid, he thinks
Splendid—Ted Williams decapitated
No, not some other .400 hitter come ‘round
Not some new ballgamer with an eagle’s eye
Ted Williams—Ted Williams himself
Has been decapitated
By an eager cryogenicist
With a startling lack of respect
For the Splendid Splinter’s mortal husk