"periodic" poems
You bought me sunflowers last Saturday
because you like the yellow orchestra we can
listen to, but you do not have to direct.
It plays a private concert only for you.
I play a few notes here and there too,
but nothing can compare to sunflowers.
I compare lots of things to
flowers,
like your eyes.
You do something to my insides
I cannot explain
in a metaphor to flowers.
You planted a gilded seed.
It grew faster than any ****
more delicious than homemade irish mead.
Sun shining, birds chirping, children playing-
all of this-
sounds like life’s decaying
because you’re not next to me.
You make oxygen more than a box on the periodic table.
I’m not suggesting I’m unable
to perform tasks without you.
I’m used to ashes in my coffee cup.
Your presence seems to open up
cold sunflowers.
You set ablaze the sun’s powers.
I could go on like this for hours
about the love you built;
iridescent solid sunflowers
May 19, 2014
May 19, 2014 at 11:30 PM UTC
‘I am…’ 'Or am I’? Who can say?
‘A posteriori’ leads the way
For the extra and the ordinary
Axiomatic sway,
In the gravity of corollary,
‘A priori’ interplay
Ataraxic overlay of anxious automation,
As the innocence of dissonance delay.
Practicing semantic contemplation,
In willfully prevenient interpolation,
Civilly disobedient in expediently seeming disarray,
Forecasts in vague extrapolation
Contrasts the millennial contagion
Already underway,
Filling nihilistic voids with particles in waves,
To interpret dreams of Freud to free Oedipus’s slaves,
A degreeless scholastic who never misbehaves,
Simulated humanoid dramatic in the affect that he craves,
Inflating linguistics in acrobatic raves,
A thespian who plans conation with legacy engraves.
The probabilistic determiner of cosmogenous debates,
An apperceived inquirer of qualitative states,
Inspiring proprietor of dismality abates.
Challenging aporia as epistemic oscillates,
Stoically, heroically, ‘one’ who amalgamates,
Circling the infinite in hermeneutic calibrates.
An escaped prisoner from depressive disillusion,
Of an introspective extrovert who finds solace in confusion,
The personable recluse fighting an illusion
Breaking down the nuances of every institution.
Calculating consequence as time goes to infinity
Revolutionary commonsense of principal utility,
An opinionated adversary,
to the realist without evidence,
Theorizing in futility,
Stipulating every sense leading to the virility of the pretense that dominates community.
Divergently converging all the efforts we’ve personified,
Inadvertently submerging old traditions that unethically were codified,
Hastening the urgency for purging that which cannot be modified through the merging of the certainty that will no longer coincide,
Stationing the levies to finally stem the tide,
Of periodic enmities disguised to be necessities so blatantly deified.
Observing moral sentiments, perched upon eternity,
As consequential regiments are expounded universally,
To unstratify the residents indiscriminately
And identify quantum elements spiritualistically,
Changing collective behavior individually,
Socializing constructs in joint ventured logo therapy.
Nov 16, 2018
Nov 16, 2018 at 8:07 AM UTC
Dear Miss ********,
We regret to inform you that unfortunately at this time we do not have space for you at our company.
Yours,
Xxxx xxxxxxxx
Dear Miss *******,
We regret to inform you that unfortunately at this time we cannot offer you a place with our company as you are under qualified.
Yours ** xxxxx
Dear Miss ********,
Thank you for your application. We regret to inform you that you are over-qualified for the position.
Yours, xxxxxxx ***
Dear Miss ******,
I don’t think so love. This isn’t even a letter, this is my managerial position on you handing me your cv.
Cheers, bahbye now
Dear Miss *******,
This isn’t really a letter either, but despite how un-pc this is, we can’t hire you due to your gender.
Thanks anyway, save your paper.
Dear Miss ********,
Thank you for your application, unfortunately we had stronger applicants.
Yours, etc., aaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaa
Dear Miss ********,
Thank you for your application. Unfortunately we are not hiring at the moment even though we had advertised the job you applied for.
Yours, xxxxxxxxx xxxxx
Dear Miss ********,
We had left it between you and another applicant, and couldn’t decide so we flipped a coin, and she won. You’re a lovely girl though.
Yours, fffffff ffff fffff
Dear Miss ********,
I refer to your claim for Jobseekers Benefit/Assistance at VVVVVV’s CCCCCC local office. Jobseekers Benefit/Assistance claims are subject to periodic review, consequently, I would appreciate if you would attend this office for interview on the 31/17/78 and bring the following :
1. Proof of Identity (i.e. Passport or Driving Licence or Long version of your Birth Certificate)
2. Proof of Residency (e.g. Letter from landlord/ Rent Book/ Lease/ Mortgage Receipt/ Letter from Parents + Household Bill)
3. Written Proof of recent job applications and replies.
4. Proof of job applications made through FAS
5. FAS courses applied for.
6. A copy of your Curriculum Vitae (CV): unemployed from
7. If your spouse/partner is an adult dependent on your claim, please bring his/her GNIB and Passport/Travel Documents.
Failure to respond to this letter may lead to suspension or disallowance of claim.
Yours sincerely,
**** *****
Local Officer
Feb 15, 2013
Feb 15, 2013 at 10:26 AM UTC
They're huddled 'round their periodic lunch tables,
square and socially pyramidal,
and I'm at the bottom.
But they're just fluorine factions,
bullies at heart trying to steal my e-lectricity
with their negativity.
Because I'm light,
Ultra-violet violence to the eyes,
Magnesium burning.
Anti-matter meets matter.
And that catalytic, cataclysmic energy is attractive.
And they see me. They see, see, see,
But I've got too many Cs on this side of my false, metallic personality.
I'd better balance myself
Or I'm not getting a good reaction.
Classic ionic, ironic idiocy.
I've bonded with you,
just compounding the issues.
'Cause you're a complete acetate without a solution:
now all I've got are problems.
Dot Diagrams are dotted lines separating you from me,
because over the years what was a bond
became a partially negative charge
against me.
I was your oxygen, and you were carbon
-ated, bubbly and explosive.
We would Combust.
But now all's left but to see, oh, two
of your new girlfriends flanking your sides,
'cause we've decomposed, split, gone off to better things.
Monatomic monotones lace my speech,
and I'm pining for something to complete this emp-d shell
that is myself.
'Cause I miss what we had.
We had chemistry.
Mar 9, 2013
Mar 9, 2013 at 5:52 PM UTC
I will love you no matter how many mistakes I make when trying to reduce fractions, and no matter how difficult it is to memorize the periodic table. I will love you as the manatee loves the head of lettuce and as the dark spot loves the leopard, as the leech loves the ankle of a wader and as a corpse loves the beak of a vulture. I will love you as the iceberg loves the ship, and the passengers love the lifeboat and the lifeboat loves the teeth of the ***** whale, and the ***** whale loves the flavor of naval uniforms. I never want to be away from you again, except at work, in the restroom or when one of us is at a movie the other does not want to see.
I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where we once were so close that we could slip the curved straw, and the long, slender spoon, between our lips and fingers respectively. I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from slim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory, and your memory faced by distant fog, and your fog memorized by a distant face, and your distance distanced by the memorized memory of a foggy fog. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, no matter where you avoid and who you don’t see, and no matter who sees you avoiding where you go. I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this, and no matter how I am discovered after what happens to me as I am discovering this.
I will love you as a drawer loves a secret compartment, and as a secret compartment loves a secret, and as a secret loves to make a person gasp, and as a gasping person loves a glass of brandy to calm their nerves, and as a glass of brandy loves to shatter on the floor, and as the noise of glass shattering loves to make someone else gasp, and as someone else gasping loves a nearby desk to lean against, even if leaning against it presses a lever that loves to open a drawer and reveal a secret compartment. I will love you until all such compartments are discovered and opened, and until all the secrets have gone gasping into the world.
I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence, and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong.
I will love you if I never see you again, and I will love you if I see you every Tuesday.
Strange as it may seem, I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does it can be lost so easily.
Life will never end when you are in it.”
Apr 25, 2014
Apr 25, 2014 at 1:30 PM UTC
The Jewish brothers in Defiance were definitely tough.
One wanted to **** many Germans, the other to save many Jews.
The German soldiers were expendable, unmarried, unremarkable.
Each little death was very little, a little spittle in a big wind.
Fast forward to my friend's son's bar mitzvah or daughter's
coming of age ceremony. Food is abundant, the music frenetic,
the rabbi paid. Gifts generous but not obvious.
Wealth does not obviate death and we know it.
Here too we have natural leaders. Youth basketball coaches,
school principals and, again, interpreters of prayers. When
violence comes to the neighborhood they are who we'll first look to
for governance and guns. Unless have you read The Admirable
Crichton?
Boredom, boredom conflated with loneliness, may be a sign
of good luck. To live a good length or light year away from man's
bad breath, allergenic perfumes, sickening flatulence and shed hair.
But you are drawn back into the debate about perfection by your own
********
While teaching at the old city jail I have learned this: only meditation
upon the periodic table can save your soul. From itself.
Imagining the world without the self will make you whole.
What else is there to say. Do less until one thing's done well.
After the war the brothers started a small trucking company
in the Bronx. Grateful for such peace, the accounting
was relaxing. They thought back to how they met their wives, naked
before the bombs and bullets. How they lost and found themselves in
what happened.
Aug 11, 2015
Aug 11, 2015 at 4:19 PM UTC
You were as stealthy as a slow gas leak, by the time i knew i was in love with you, i had succumbed to you. You were in the drivers seat of my car lighting a cigarette with the windows up so i could breathe you in. I quit smoking so your secondhand smoke was all you would allow. I watched as you brought the cigarette to your lips and dragged in as if your life depended on it. It was your third one today and i told you that you should stop, maybe breathe me in for a second. Do you know what i would give to become second hand smoke from your lips? All you would have to do is kiss me and i would vanish into thin air, become a noble gas in the periodic table but there is nothing noble about the element of disappearance. I have been shrinking away from you ever since you held my hand in that convenience store a year ago. I'm trying to convince myself to get over you because all i am to you is someone to **** slowly through your second hand smoke. I never knew I could get so addicted to nicotine until it came from under your tongue. When you're gone, it's hard for me to breathe which doesnt make sense because when youre here my lungs are filled with your sweet black tar. But you will be gone for months when you leave in two weeks. You said you'd write to me, but written words can't carry your second hand smoke. You can't build a home out of a human being, but that doesn't mean i cant find a home in your bed.
Jan 16, 2014
Jan 16, 2014 at 1:52 AM UTC
Bipolar sunshine;
Life's periodic lullabies
Changing me,
Waking me from ash to animal,
Trapped in the cage
Of my past lies,
Present cries,
Future demise.
But underneath this skin,
I'm still a human;
Boats of evergreen
Floating on tideless seas,
Yet I think I'm dying,
Unready for breathing;
Wild waters, blood oceans;
Mind lost, nightmares healing.
Apr 18, 2016
Apr 18, 2016 at 3:38 PM UTC
soiled.
here there everywhere.
regular like.
verb and noun,
he, both.
soiled, soiled.
verb, noun.
*****
a stupid~sounding word.
say ***** *****
***** three times fast.
what is a sound of *****
intimate.
what is the color of *****
every color that leaves you,
or even begins you,
soiled, sullied, tainted.
sweaty.
the intimate man did not intimate.
his stains were visible.
no need for polite,
needless the charade,
of legitimizing intimacy,
there for all to see.
they were no longer
intimate.
he did not know why,
after awhile,
he didn't care.
pretended intimacy,
which was a ***** thing,
a stainless steel cutlery
kind of *****
a reflection visible only to the
eye of the beholder.
cutlery was never clean,
soiled, after but one use,
think.
in the mouth, with the hands.
such intimacy,
that, they still shared.
an easy pretense.
terror.
terror is intimate
and *****
lived in terror.
not constant which implies periodic spaces.
no breaks.
the terror soiled him,
you did not need even be intimate with me.
sweaty,
see, smell it.
taste it,
even better!
though the terror was deeply intimate,
in the skin embedded,
I told ya,
easy visible.
easy to avoid the intimacy of
terror.
clean, silky clean intimates,
changed regular,
changed nothing.
intimacy was a Cain mark.
his private, public.
his public, privy.
more?
more.
shame.
shame is intimate.
there are so many kinds too.
the shame of soiled.
the shame of disrespect,
the shame behind closed doors.
the shame of public humiliation.
the shame, the stink, of failure.
the shame we share in ways
we wish not speak of.
the shame of bad grammar,
shame leaves you soiled, *****
terrified.
shame on you for having read so far.
but you can boast
you knew me when,
you knew me
intimately,
bad and well.
you knew
that you did not know
anything about me,
even though,
we had been
at least
this one time,
intimate.
who is soiled now?
Nov 9, 2014
Nov 9, 2014 at 4:04 AM UTC
Life can be painless
Provided there is sufficient
Peacefulness
For a dozen or so rituals
To be repeated simply
Endlessly
Your genius does not fail you
It allows you to understand the
Truth of the situation;
Which makes you--at times--
more tragic than ever
And your genius,
like all geniuses
Suffers periodic fits
of monumental
naïveté
Hi-ho
Listen:
Where is Grace
When milk and blood
Are about to be added
To the composition of the
Stinking ping-pong
***** being manufactured
In Grand Rapids?
Schizophrenia
The sound and appearance
Of the word fascinates
It sounds and looks to me
Like a human being
Sneezing in a blizzard of
Soapflakes
This much we know:
You made yourself hideously
Uncomfortable by not narrowing
Your attention to details
Of life that were immediately
Important
And by refusing to believe what
Your neighbors believed
Hi-ho
Let your imagination continue
To be the flywheel on the
Ramshackle machinery of the truth.
But not the ‘awful’ truth
The ‘beauty’ in truth
Because we are a part
Of a system that is very
Restless,
With people tearing around
All the time
Every so often,
somebody stops to put up
A monument
Ours is a country where
Everybody is expected to
Pay his own bills for
Everything,
And one of the most
Expensive things a person
Can do is get sick
Grace:
Because if we stay here
We’ll do one of two things
(or both!)
Build a Commune
Or do like Collin Heise did:
Make the main thing that we
do be this:
Move seventy-eight
Thousand pounds of olives
To Tulsa, Oklahoma
Even if we can’t
Improve the quality of our surroundings
We’ll do our best to make our
Insides beautiful instead
Piebald Roadtrip-writing, baby
Hi-ho
You are the turtle
able to live anywhere
even under water for short periods
With your home on your back
A particular comfort in
Realizing that it so often feels
There is no order in the
World around us
That we must adapt ourselves to
The requirements of
Chaos instead
Remember:
We are healthy
Only to the extent that
Our ideas are
Humane
To you
To me
To ourselves
To We
Jun 17, 2013
Jun 17, 2013 at 9:05 PM UTC
Nothingness.
Imagine nothingness.
That nothingness which is nothing of the nothingness we are all familiar with:
Not that nothingness which is nothing but empty space and time
Like when you open an empty room.
No.
That nothingness where nothing truly exists:
Not space,
Not even time.
A singular point.
Imagine a singular point.
The ultimate singular point that contains all possible points
In the development of the universe
Come out and expand
From the birthing of time, the instance of The Big Bang,
(Which by the way is not a large explosion, as the words imply, but a silent rapid expansion)
Pushing the envelope
Where nothingness begins.
Chance.
Imagine chance.
The random occurrence of events:
Of fundamental particles colliding and uniting
Or annihilating each other,
Giving rise to protons, neutrons and electrons;
Giving rise to the periodic table,
To compounds, both organic and inorganic,
To macromolecules.
Billions of years.
Imagine billions of years
Gone by,
And billions of galaxies filling the sky:
Stars and quasars and pulsars
Planets and comets and meteors
***** nilly hurtling through
Dark matter and ever expanding space,
Yet inanimate still
,
A single cell.
Imagine a single cell
Form inexplicably so,
In a staggeringly highly improbable way
As carbon molecules combine,
Start to throb and pulsate:
Chance bringing forth life
In a barren and otherwise
Lifeless universe.
Consciousness
Imagine consciousness
Purposive, willful, deliberate
Feelings
Imagine feelings
Love, compassion, hatred
Imagine all in a universe that came out of itself from nothingness.
It is hard, of course,
For after all, we are creatures of somethingness!
But at this point
You must have seen the Point
Of all the ramblings and turns in the trajectory of my thought
Tracing the evolutionary course of the universe
From nothingness and that singular point
That without God
All things are
After all
Pointless!
.
And so,
Let us not deplore, as a great poet once did,
That this world “so various, so beautiful, so new
Hath no joy, nor love, nor light
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain…”
For what else should we expect
Of a cold, unfeeling universe?
What?
Give us some Novocain?
Jul 16, 2013
Jul 16, 2013 at 4:36 PM UTC
We are the genuine men
We are the fulfilled men
Standing together
Headpiece filled with ideas. Huzzah!
Our powerful voices, when
We cheer together
Are loud and meaningful
As wind in wet grass
Or dancing feet over wooden floors
In our damp attics
Shape with form, shade with colour,
Dynamic force, motion without gesture;
Those who have crossed
With indirect eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Forget us—if at all—not as found
Peaceful souls, but only
As the genuine men
The fulfilled men.
Eyes I dare meet in nightmares
In death’s dream kingdom
These do appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a whole column
There, is a tree standing
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More close and more bashful
Than a newly formed star.
Let me be closer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me not wear
Such obvious disguises
Silk shirt, snakeskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
Closer—
That first meeting
In the twilight kingdom
This is the living land
This is fruitful land
Here the cloudy images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a living man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a newly formed star.
It is like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking together
At the minute when we are
Shaking with excitement
Lips that would kiss
Form praise to no stone.
The eyes are here
There are eyes here
In this valley of living stars
In this flowing valley
This whole jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this first of meeting places
We ***** alone
And invite speech
Gathered on this beach of the free river
Vision, unless
The eyes disappear
As the periodic star
Monofoliate daisy
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of whole men.
*Here we go round the mulberry bush
Mulberry bush mulberry bush
Here we go round the mulberry bush
At five o’clock in the morning.*
Between the thought
And the implementation
Between the movement
And the deed
Rises the Light
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the inception
And the construction
Between the feeling
And the reaction
Rises the Light
Life is very short
Between the need
And the want
Between the potential
And the substance
Between the ingredients
And the ascent
Rises the Light
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world begins
This is the way the world begins
This is the way the world begins
Not with a whimper but a bang.
Nov 11, 2012
Nov 11, 2012 at 2:34 PM UTC
Shema (“Listen”)
by Primo Levi
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
You who live secure
in your comfortable homes,
who return each evening to find
warm food and a hearty welcome ...
Consider: is this a “man”
who slogs through mud,
who has never known peace,
who fights for scraps of bread,
who lives at another man's whim,
who at his "yes" or "no" lies dead.
Consider: is this a “woman”
shorn bald and bereft of a name
because she lacks the strength to remember,
her eyes as void and her womb as frigid
as a winter frog's?
Consider that such horrors have indeed been!
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them in your hearts
when you lounge in your beds
and again when you rise,
when you venture outside.
Rehearse them to your children,
or may your houses softly crumble
and disease render you equally as humble
so that even your offspring avert their eyes.
Primo Michele Levi (1919-1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist, writer and Holocaust survivor. He was the author of two novels and several collections of short stories, essays, and poems, but is best known for If This Is a Man, his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. It has been described as one of the best books by one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His unique work The Periodic Table was shortlisted as one of the greatest scientific books ever written, by the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Levi's autobiographical book about his liberation from Auschwitz, The Truce, became a movie with the same name in 1997. Keywords: Holocaust, poem, Italian, translation, man, mud, woman, bald, nameless, houses, homes, bread, eyes, womb, empty, void, frigid, lifeless, horror, horrors, hearts, write, etch, engrave, inscribe, children, offspring, disease, avert, reject
Mar 14, 2020
Mar 14, 2020 at 4:58 AM UTC
I guess I’m okay… What more can I say?
Forget it—never mind,
You wouldn’t understand anyway,
Would you even know what it's like?
Inside a scattered disconnected mind,
Employed to go on strike?
Where indirect misdirect
The sincerity at play,
When sinusoidal chaos spikes
And past meets the future present day?
As paranoid points outlandishly connect
At intervals of broken lines,
Memory lost in recollect,
An array of misshaped bells
Internally infect the eternal confines
Of infinite distributional decay,
Parallels with no intersect,
Streetwise cells with empty signs,
Burned out lights, potholes, and landmines,
Littered all the way.
How am I to convey that all those times
You let your mind wander away
That I was reading, thinking, dreaming,
Teeming, never idle, never strayed,
Seeing, being, so far and away,
Even the brightest intellect beaming,
Could not grasp the feeling
In the slightest of highest orders reeling,
Wound unbound, or as it would be seeming,
Imperfect, even to the disarray
Of the tamest prefect, whose verdict
Could not predict the reflect,
For in this world, seeing is deceiving,
As the lamest reject, defect,
Increasingly decreasing,
In simplistic bliss obey
Crowned unsound fallacies
That contradict all meaning,
Hiding behind reality, the actualities
Lest, protect the thoughtlessness perceiving,
Let me stop you if I may...
I must interject for I digress,
What nonsense was I weaving?
Forget it—I've lost my mind,
I best be leaving,
What more can I say?
It's periodic I must confess,
You probably don't care anyway,
Yeah, yeah, I'll be okay,
Until next time I guess,
I wouldn't want to be misleading.
May 24, 2018
May 24, 2018 at 10:10 AM UTC
Krypton didn’t fit with anyone,
as it was the unfriendly one,
it never went beyond it’s limits
even if others did loose their limits.
It was from a forlorn world,
nobody cared to say a word,
to this enigma of another world;
no one wanted to share a word.
The nobles were always preoccupied
with their occupied shells,
they never hung out with the occupied,
nor the unoccupied.
Krypton was mistaken for kryptonite.
It wondered every night,
Why they accused it for the assassination?
it didn’t have the power of absorption.
Krypton had very few of it’s kind,
it didn’t know where they were aligned.
He held the hope of being able to be lined,
with the rest of it’s kind.
Poor Krypton, he was on the farthest
arena of the periodic table
it wished if it could turn the table,
so that it can at least act a bit feeble.
Experience taught this novice,
it calculated the calculations,
to traverse the long distance,
fear hindered the transmissions.
Krypton used to think without links
he was one of the stable nobles,
he wasn’t the one that wobbles
and, one of the table’s baubles.
Dec 17, 2016
Dec 17, 2016 at 4:36 AM UTC
In high-school chemistry classrooms across the
country, you are forced to memorize all of the different
lab equipment.
They never tell you to memorize the constellation
of freckles spattered across the bridge of your
lab partner's nose, but you do it
anyways.
You learn about Marie Curie and radioactive decay, but you
find you are more interested in the way his smile starts small
and grows to light a fire in your cheeks.
You blame it on the Bunsen burner.
You study polyatomic ions and how they act as a single unit, and it
reminds you of how he winks at you right before quizzes
and you find you can't focus on anything at all.
You blame it on the lack of breakfast.
You test over periodic trends and ionization energy, but all
you can think of at night is the way he taps his fingers
and maybe it's why you can't sleep at night.
You blame it on a restless mind.
In high-school chemistry classrooms across the
country, you are forced to be careful when handling
Erlenmeyer flasks.
They never tell other students to be careful when handling
your heart.
They never tell you how much easier it is to clean up the mess
from a shattered beaker than it is to clean up the mess
from your shattered heart.
Oct 25, 2015
Oct 25, 2015 at 4:06 PM UTC
I look at my teachers
Who stand in the very front
Of every single class
And teach me how to be
How to grow and learn
And be well rounded
I think of everything they know
All which they have learned
From textbooks
And from life
All of which they share
And that of which they don't
I think of their kindness
Sometimes their hatred
How they smile and joke
Or judge and yell
Why they are who they are
And how they came to be
I think about their days
Every day is spent
Within four walls
With hundreds of teens
Who hardly give a ****
And how they get through it
I think about their thoughts
The knowledge they hold
And if what they're teaching us
Is what really needs to be taught
And if what they have to say
Is really what they need to say
I look at them all
And I wonder
What they could teach
What I could learn
From each and every one of them
If the time and place and opportunity
Were given to us
And it makes me sad
To think that
All of my teachers
And my professors
Are all going to die before me
And I'll never know
I'll never learn
I'll never grow
From what they know
But never told
Because they only talked about
Synonyms or the quadratic equation
Or all the periodic elements
And they never talked about
What is most important in life
So we never know the important things like
Laughing
And pain
And having your heart broken
And crying for all the right reasons
And why we are the way we are
And how to get where we're going
And having dreams
And participating in life
And telling people that you love them
And understanding death
And understanding life
And how to save lives
And to be open and vulnerable
And knowing that everything is going to be okay
Even if it's not
Because that's what truly matters on life
It makes me sad to think
That people go through life
Without ever knowing
All of the important things about life
Because no one ever told them
And they never experienced them
So what are we doing?
Why do we go to school
To learn about things that matter
But don't really matter
In the end?
Because in the end,
You don't think about
Synonyms or the quadratic equation
Or all the periodic elements
You think about your life
And the the people,
Even the teachers
Who got you through it
And made that difference
You think about those few
Oh, so few
Teachers who taught you
The important things
About life
And how that
Made all the difference
Nov 3, 2013
Nov 3, 2013 at 4:03 PM UTC
In high school
we learn of logarithms, iambic meter
how to balance an equation between zinc oxide
and excess hydrogen gas–
only to find there was no reaction to begin with.
We’re told that colleges get to know you
through three letter acronyms—ACT, SAT, GPA…
and our name is somewhere in the application.
It’s repeated to us to the point of meaninglessness,
like a perpetually chanted word:
Grades, scores and testing, testing, testing.
The students they want know everything
that will be forgotten by their thirtieth birthday.
I anticipate the day
that our Geometry teacher is to write an essay
on the individual’s struggle
against a systematically inhumane society
in Orwell’s 1984
only to receive a “D” under the scrutinizing eye of
the honor’s English teacher
Or, perhaps, the day someone in charge
is faced with some insufferable fate
the textbooks call chemical stoichiometry,
thirty years after repressing memories
of having to memorize the periodic table
Socrates once said that the youth today
will be the demise of civilization.
We contradict our parents, are smug in the face of authority
and tyrannize our poor teachers—
a youth who will ultimately leave behind a world
too damaged for our children to inherit.
Funny he said this
roughly 2,000 years ago–
I think my dad said something like that last year.
But, until the day we grow up to pay taxes
and marry someone we despise,
we’re just stupid teenagers.
Nov 1, 2012
Nov 1, 2012 at 11:37 AM UTC
Her blood is cyanide
She cannot seem to hide
She is light as helium
She's strong as aluminum
She is graphite carbon
As subdued as boron
Abundant as hydrogen
But toxic as nitrogen
She's precious as platinum
Her skin is thallium
In her lungs there is radon
She is as rare as xenon
Helpful as iodine
Whose life is astatine's
She is soft as lithium
Her eyes are beryllium
There is nothing I can do
Already the tumor grew
Apr 28, 2016
Apr 28, 2016 at 6:57 PM UTC
~and for Harlan, who loved this one best~
*"for tandem is the ever-changing, graying color of their fierce attached tenacity"
waking/walking in
careful pacing regular lock steps,
like new cadets, counting cadence,
in perfect silent, almost motionless,
except for the minuscule quivering of
slightly parted moving lips
these two elders,
still now plebes,
freshmen
but of a latter, graduated stage,
demonstrating robustly
the slow shuffle-along,
a well practiced dance conjured
'in tandem'
her arm, crooked in his,
his other hand,
in protective custody of a
knight's armored chain glove
encasing hers,
he, shuffling just,
a precise, intended half-a-beat slower
lest she ever think
that she, ever be a drag upon him
hair, his,
threaded with daily,
new arriving grays,
proudly accepted
as the privilege of
graceful aging
hers,
disguised with periodic outings,
outings for the hidings of life's bookmarks,
conceding nothing ever to
time's lunatic desire to separate them
modest in dress,
styling hints of pasts' elegant,
the man's hat defiant,
daringly jaunty angled,
a small scarf to handbag knotted,
matching his Windsor knotted tie
the passers-by, all smile,
the signal charm of an
end game processional,
thinking so sweet,
yet mine eyes detect more,
something
hardy and radical
a fierce, fierce fierceness,
both fighters in the resistance,
armed with tandem tenacity,
ground given,
but only inches surrendered,
wounds resisted by
scar skin toughened
by the caress of ions bonding
under the pressure
of atomic level mutuality
worn out,
well past Purple Hearts,
no capitulation feared,
to the ever changing,
enemies' new disguises,
they,
a two person platoon,
each,
having the other's back
and I burst into tears on the street,
a train of out loud moans,
even groans emitted,
like a string of perfect pearls
breaking,
clattering on an asphalt terrain
weeping
not
from visions of the inevitable,
sighing
not
from the certitude of a
cycle's uptime ending*
but jealous furious by this reminder delightful,
angry at myself, for having lost so many wasted years,
mine, the loss greatest, for absent was the
fierce tenacity of tandem
Mar 6, 2017
Mar 6, 2017 at 8:41 PM UTC
August 10th, you seemed so distant
Not quite as distant as the barrel of one gun
The gun that fired the shot that would stun
The scientific world, from Rutherford to Niels Bohr
To find out esteemed fellow scientist Moseley was no more
But before that, in 1913
X-ray spectra was naught more than a dream
Before diffraction through crystals became the truth
The wavelengths needed a meaning, and there was proof
You developed a mathematical system without flaw
One so great, it was named "Moseley's law"
Mendeleev had the right idea, but not a plan
Could not arrange the elements the way that you now can
Without you, my sir, we would not have had this premium
To enjoy the elements technetium, hafnium, promethium, and rhenium
These gaps that like stars littered the periodic table
Were filled with ease, and the cosmos became stable
You had set the foundation for crystallography of x-rays
A method of determining arrangement that is still used in modern days
The first machines in use were those for which you had the design
But their widespread use you could not see as there simply was no time
For during a battle, as you made the phone set run
A bullet took your grace away, a scientist dying young
Oct 17, 2012
Oct 17, 2012 at 4:21 PM UTC
“and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
Walt Whitman
<>
having recently been on standby for a permanent-entry residency visa
to over & just beyond death’s door, Walt’s prescient prescription strikes my broken breastbone even harder much, than the persistent
periodic pains confirming the breaking and the healing
of this man’s mending of the human centric poetic *****
for this warped heart mine, now rejoicingly rejiggered with some threads and wires to deliver a new but fresh bloodied wisdom,
begs me, eggs me to torrent word streams, but Whitman’s wisdom cautions a new slowness, the wisdom of mortality’s hot breath urges careful consideration of every letter that my second chance, consignment shop flesh, eagerly embraces, to both prescribe and proscribe inside-insights tween the deafening sounds of eyelashes beating synchronized to the revived heart rates rapid renewal and
last second-chances….
torn tween minute torso sensations and the running silence of
a new battery’s internal rapid intervals, the silent timing gaps tween beats leaves-just-enough-space to ask over and over again,
from whence will come my richest fluency? (1)
at 300am, I lay carefully caressing and chewing well each transitory
thought, absent the former energetic ability to just spill,
though highly desired,
now requires, like me,
steady re-piecing together
the steady drumbeat of now-nearer-my-god-than-thee Titanic reflections
demands a slowing rapidity
this I thought before and now ken, even and ever better, that our primary endeavor shall always be the giving, the disbursement of the act of love…for therein lies the healing of each, and wet eyes,
make necessarily concluding this poem about nothing and everything
and I comprehend Walt’s dictum:
my very flesh is a poem,
every sensation a lyric,
every breath taken and returned to the atmosphere
so unconsciously
are my oldest
and newest
3:00 AM poetry companions
Aug 18, 2023
Aug 18, 2023 at 4:41 PM UTC
while the debate goes on and on,
as to which country has the longest, continuous
democratic parliament, have it on on good authority
that the subject above,
is it better to love your kids too much than not enough?
was the first among all temporal discussions ever held,
despite periodic tabling, the debate remains unresolved,
the question unsettled even after 1000 years+ of argumentation
when over time, Universal Adult Suffrage finally came to be,
the debate became renewable, enflamed, divisive most contentiously,
various coming down on each side of a point of view topically
since mother, father and child, i.e.
pretty much everyone, definitionally,
claimed total expertise,
and sparing the rod was deemed by most to be illegally,
no plebiscite, amendment or ballot initiative was resolved resolutely,
the beat goes on continuously as new children reach voting age, sagaciously repeating their view, personally
my view?
I’ve tried both and failed equally
so I’ve little to contribute,
so let it be stated in manner unequivocally,
the sweet sensibility says too well,
but helicopters crash and monied snowplows
run over other both their own and others better deserving,
leaving all of them buried in snow piles street side,
while those who blame their faults on insufficient love,
are later most demanding more attention than any,
having becoming painfully hardy, by being treated hard about,
hard on themselves and worse to others
everyone knows the answer to this question for themselves
but I’ll leave you with this,
permitting a child to fail is a winning strategy,
as long as there is no legal limit
regarding the amount or frequency
on lifetime hugging
Mar 28, 2019
Mar 28, 2019 at 2:14 AM UTC
It is only when you realise,
As you sit in the far corner of the room,
that they are all so far away from you.
So
Distant.
Laughing amongst themselves
In a joke you clearly don’t understand.
Alienated from the throws of conversation
And the formalities of friendship.
You daren’t say a word for the silence that will follow.
A dragging
Periodic
Calculating
Silence.
So you sit, content with your space
In need of something you cannot categorise.
They’re all just
So
Distant.
If the physical space weren’t enough,
Your individuality will seal the deal.
So
Distant.
Nov 9, 2010
Nov 9, 2010 at 2:18 PM UTC
Negligible morsel of biomass
my fat belly, formerly abs
insignificant yet it occupies me
hourly while bored or hungry.
Fat is what? a picture
of despair, giving up caring
or man out of balance, other
side of the world's starving
mass, case of the soul's malnutrition
industrial agriculture, television
supermarkets, vacations, hydrocarbons
and the grid. Electricity, urban
traffic jams, photons at final
rest. Sugars synthesized, abundant
plastics to carry them home in.
Into your house and into your mirror.
Memorizing the periodic table
and learning the calculus makes one
no thinner. Walking the mountain
in heat and cold and rain, alone
or in fire crews should inhibit.
And a healthy fear of death. A laugh
a day at *** and pain and fate
which renews the biomass I hate.
Feb 2, 2016
Feb 2, 2016 at 10:52 AM UTC