Agendas

It was never about the invention and the potential

Lives it would save,

It was about who would be written into History as the Hero.

Humphry Davey tried to hide his poetry but stole the lamp.

All for naught, while I sat in the reader's circle, stitching

around Cat’s Cradle-the Dissertation,

and  getting into mining

text instead of ice-nine, we found something like 

fire-ten

and it is spreading.

They were all over the place, Vietnam, Silicon Valley,

East and west coasts, away from the story 

and as Vonnegut said,

Disappearing up its own-

Never-mine-

The kids are still mining for cobalt in the Congo.

No, no, no better. In any language

even with repetition. When does practice make

better-off schadenfreude

Karma is driven toward the one who hit my car 

and drove away.

The grandma laughs at the puke from her grandson.

That makes her son puke too,

and she gets her just desserts 

in between the seats.

We both like the smell of horse manure. 

Italo is easily distracted at first, every day, I should stop 

feeling “death hath undone so many”*.

“In headaches and in worry, 

Vaguely life leaks away

And Time will have his fancy

To-morrow or to-day”**, as Auden would say.

Of course, the dryer refused to spin,

the bills keep pouring in, and there are two-thousand

nine-hundred synonyms for drunk, but sober I remain

loaded on the sole adjective, waiting on the verb

of Time. 

Meanwhile, inspiration is found in flying buttresses, 

among the changing sky, ribbed vaults and pointed arches 

that withstood thirty percent more stress.

Oh yes, it was time again

to act as if one never knows

how things come together.

*T.S. Eliot and **W.H. Auden

Painting by Frank Dobson, 1944 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.