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Michael Greene Aug 2011
Old poisons bake from the soil;
Pluto, underworld god, pitches
Plutonium, god of dirt and death.

What was it ****** cried  --
Judische Physik? His lucky hate
Kept Dybuk in the dust,
The devil inside uranium.

But, ****** left us behind:
       his U-Project,
The creatures who salted Carthage.
When the Romans captured Carthage (Libya), they tore the city down and dumped fifty thousand tons of salt so nothing could grow. I imagine they would have nuked it if they could have.
Mike Essig Aug 2016
A Ballad For A Thin Man.

Understood backwards. Lived forward. Life.
Haunted by diverging others. Us but not. Wraiths.
Ghosts of what if? Who then? What might have been?
Leave room. Turn left. Lovely house, wife, retirement.
Leave same room. Turn right. Shack, loneliness, poverty.
Theorize games. Physik quanta. Slide down strings.
Into Wonderland, Oz, Middle-Earth. Narnia.
All the places that don’t exist and matter the most.
Where doors open up to impossible possibilities.
Fight your way through every day. Pit bull of potential.
Just do your work and be kind.* That is a separate peace.
We may be others in other universes, but here we are just us.
**** it up. Love your life. Do what you must. Soldier on.
Real realities can really hurt. Take it like a Man. Or Woman.
Be grateful for your trials. Trials are you. Struggle.
Mount the philosopher’s donkey backwards, advance.

— The End —