Weekend Poem

Apoptosis

When a cell suddenly dies it’s called apoptosis.  

No one knows why; it’s a secret knowledge,

A microscopic biological gnosis,

A screeching stoppage.

Maybe we’re all programmed to just croak

According to inscrutable cosmic algorithms

Each and every cell in on the joke

Songs clang out of tune, drums lose the rhythm. 

Our cell membranes were always just a temporary redoubt,

Fragile molecules arranged in aqueous oval orbs.

The killer never comes from without;

It was always a destructive directive from the inner core.

The lines drawn were always contingent.

One day they suddenly wobble,

Waver like highway apparitions in summer heat

Before a final fading oblivion.

This enclosed space was never a real dominion.

(It was a gift, it was luck)

Form dissolves into the surrounding solution;

Ribosomes, nuclei spontaneously deconstruct.

x

Soon all the cells around you will go quiet;

The humming machinery of life stalls.

Does the silence distill a cold sweat,

Do you wake up soaking wet?

A sleeping sickness spreads like osmosis,

Last one left adrift in currents, untethered.

This then is the one time for fear,

Surrounded by silence, by formlessness

Underwater drifting with eyes closed

Not knowing what begins in this unmarked frontier.

Will you run out of time

To crack this code

Before your own scripted de-quickening?

Will we rise when we lose the lines that limit us,

Or does the meager space between the confines define us?

Do lines and spaces forever inhibit us?

When we fade and become formless

What remains may be the gist of another.

Primordial stew of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen

Driven to new patterns and connections by a quiet narration

We've always heard but now are expected to confess.

The timer always resets:

Another countdown, another secret expiration

6/22/18

Father's Day Weekend Poem

Search History

After we read and say goodnight I see your chromebook glows

It glows so I sit for a moment at your little desk

I click and I click and this is what worried daddies do in the dark

When their little girls go to bed

Do boys like tomgirrls or girllygirls

Do boys like shy girls?

Talking when boys talk when boys are funny

How do I get flat firm my tummy

Exercises for flat bellies

Short girls are pretty girls too?

Short girls or funny girls

Diets for girls healthy and good for you

Pretty girls popular girls
Straight hair or wavy curls?
How do I grow and when will i be the right size?

How to be poppular and pretty
Pretty hair and pretty eyes

And I sit and the light glows

The rest of the room quiet and dark

(She always falls asleep so quick)

Wedged in a small chair in a little girls room

And I type and I type

To guide her search, to shine a light

You are a beautiful girl

You are kind and sweet and nice

And all I ever wished

A little girl my little girl would be

And the world is lucky

And the world is here

In your luck and your good
And you're here

And the world needs more
Of you here
For too much lurching and wanting and hate
More of you here before it's too late

For your nice and your kind

And your smile and your sweet and your just as you are.

And I will be here in the glow of your light

My strong little girl

My beautiful girl

I leave these tabs open

For the history that gets saved

A history of searches for answers

To the questions we only ask ourselves,

Questions afraid of the light.

I’d say to her in the morning (mourning it won't matter):

Beware of the answers lurking behind silences,
The instant answers that appear on screens
When silence itself is a kind of an answer.

For there will always be questions
Unpaired from answers

That I know I can’t stop from you from asking.

You have find them out yourself

Without asking

As you go on living

As you grow and you love and you live

In the light of the day

In the unanswerable darkness.

6/15/18

Weekend Poem

Poem, #2

The first draft was about a resilient oak that stands its ground

Despite tornadoes and storms:

“Though branches be whipped and shed their leaves

Though the trunk may sway and creak in the torrents of wind

The blossoms will bloom in May again…”

And anodyne drivel of that form.

But my interest in the tree and its leaves soon waned.

Who really gives a damn about them?

The tree can go straight to hell.

Let it get snapped in half by a good-hearted gale

I wanted to know what happens to the roots below.

What happens underground when the tree hollows out dead?

What happens when I plunge a spade into the ruined earth?

Does the blade strike gnarled hardness of desperate thirst?

Is the soil snarled with the sinews of foolish youthful forays,

Into an impassable latticed bulwark?

Or does the woody root soften as it decays?

Is there a sliver of space for another translucent root?

Those are the real questions;

All else is moot.

A tree is a thing that falls down and dies.

The cyclic bloomings are the bromides

We tell the frightened children at night.

A poem is not the tree with blossoms and leaves

Nor the broken thing that crashes to the forest floor.

But now is the time to let your own tree fall,

Let it crack where it once was strong.

A poem is the hidden treasure left over

Long after the roots dissolve into soil.

Stand ready with your shovel and rest, rest.
Wait, wait for the right moment;

And then dig, and then dig

And then yes and then yes

6/4/18