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.
