The night that the Accountant

The night that the Accountant figured out poetry
was a simple story
about a man and a woman
and the stories they tell
each other-
About
who should and who should not
discuss poetry,
since there is no GAP
in poetics or likewise, alibis.

I told him a story about a poem
that was a story
I made up,
I was never really there.

He said, 'Of course it wasn't true.
Being pushed off a bridge was just a
metaphor-
for what-
I don't exactly know, but if I know you,
it was a feeling
you felt that day.'

I confessed
it was true, all of it.
I could have jumped.
He understood
more poetry
than he ever could have
accounted for.

Along this
line lying between non-and-fiction,
a subtraction connects us.
And we reconcile our difference
of opinions in between
heads and tales
black and read
to solve all word problems.




Photo credit by Mathew Brady, Long Bridge, Washington, D.C. in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Time Leapt

I vaguely remember arguing with an accountant
(or mathematician)
about reconciling the Years End with the Leap Second
(or loss carry overs and off-setting capital Gains)
which of course led onto greener pastures,
futures, and master plans
such as the old erratic Julian calendar,
disappearing days, the value of time;
since time is money, paid hourly,
benefits and salaries
traded for living richly-

But, I bet his figures are better than
all my Reckons added up, The ante:
don't gamble if you do not count
on losing.

We've agreed to disagree
semantically about 'Balance'
and whose 'books' are better,
whose red-what-
Whether time matters more
for some
time we've known is not a matter
of physically covering ones assets,
or stock splits-

And yet, this hiccup, jump,
an algorithmic appliance,
rounding off and ballpark-
GAP
brought us back around to black holes
(and stellar bureaucracy)
being the center of each universe,
resistance, gravity, monogamy, and
uneven solutions such as slices of pi
or other dark matters where time is converted
instantaneously beyond what we can conceive
in a mind, in a hand, in a life
time-any-thing-more
slips through the cracks,
between fingertips, spills out, tells
all to watch, wait, rely, count on,
change, coinage, patronage and no matter what-
we were never Here too long to be wrong.

Still, I will
deny any transpositional errors or leaping
to conclusions. Definitively:
broken down seconds were
never more
than
firsts.

All accounts have been settled.
The time is Now.


Painting by Nicolas-André Monsiau (c. 1800) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.