Round and Sound

To find a new center
we can focus on balance,
sides and equilibrium,

Although atrophy never lasts
-nothing to sphere-

Diametrically, we weigh shape,
as if a perfect circle was the ideal
to show the ray.

Light bends, travels,
precedes, tints, radiates,
shape-shifts, falls and lies.

Some angles are smoother
than others,
shorter like radii
Such is life.
Piece of unfinished pi
and I-colored-out-side
seek only to penetrate

Inside the lines

of poetry.

Painting by Vassily Kandinsky, 'Circles in a circle' (1923) in Public Domain via Wikipedia Commons. 

A sense of place

There was this song I have never heard
but its rhythms told my body that we've danced before.

In the yellow sunrise, the old farmhouse glows
like a candle in the road and looks as though I've lived there before.
The side door, if I remember, is unlocked.

The old woman that peddles vegetables every day in her blue bin on a bicycle,
I've never seen her before, but I bought some more Romas anyway.

Tulips in the garden are breaking their silence, like the mockingbird
the chorus, the words, I've heard anteriorly in this same spot before.

I thought by now I'd be pining for the giant hewn tree,
the shade it once made-but the roses are blooming,
and I'm left feeling stumped.
The grass is greener.

The new postman, who sometimes rings twice
because he forgets where he is at,
delivered a package for me down the street.
A neighbor I had never met brought it over to me,
like long lost friends, it was good to see both of them.

At home, I have house-guests
I rarely see.
Teenagers, some call them.
Outside, I feel out of place.
Inside, I feel too big in my own space.
Today, I picked up a peculiar novel
idea, and went with it.





Image By Yinan Chen (www.goodfreephotos.com (gallery, image)) [Public Domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

wild is relative to tame

The wildcat lazes in my lap,
his sleep disturbed suddenly by my human
sounds-briefly he stirs to make certain it was not him,
my stomach growls at him,
when his attention snaps suddenly, pupils go black
above me, behind and over my head,
enrapt in some blurred glassy vision-
I see-I feel nothing-my vision is going-
and he is cautious, cowering without stalking-it moves
His focus-
Upward again,
I peak-

A cobweb, or ghost spider home
flutters downward over us.
The hall light flickers, like my pulse
and then I can only close my eyes
and pretend I am purring along.

We rest our heavy animal heads
and listen in deeper
but fall into the same trap
as our hairs, split evenly
and stroked lightly
by an errant cool breeze.
It was touching
to be chosen

likewise.

Hunger strike

Neuroscientists now say,
our guts shrank
as our brains grew-
in finite-ness of our Energy,
due to our limited potential.

(1. the maximum energy output
is metabolically capped
2. larger brains accompany
smaller intestines in primates)

Have you heard that we only use ten percent
of our wetware? A grey area, I guess.

(Our brain is at best two percent of our total body mass,
yet devours twenty percent of our energy -at rest)

For better or worse, without any reception
or honeymoon, we are wedded to this
precious ratio for the next
few billion years it seems...

The smarter we get,
the harder it ALL becomes to digest.

Repetition can find and (sometimes will)
correct errors such as duplication, repetition
and redundancy.
(Try, try, try again)

Do I look good in these genes?
The smarter we get,
the harder it becomes to fit in
to our thinking caps
with all these insatiable cravings

to consume (us).

(This poem was inspired by the article "How Humans Evolved Supersize Brains" featured on Quanta Nov. 2015)


Painting by Gustav Wentzel, 'Breakfast II' c. 1885 in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Relay racing

Pluto is not a planet.
The atom cannot be cut.
The moon is not cheese.
Stars do not fall in order
to make our wishes come true.
Lightning strikes wherever the hell it feels like lashing out.
Tooth fairies are Bone Collectors-specifically
employed by the American Credit Counsel for Est. Wants and Greeds
otherwise, controlling the supply and demand for our Ivory Towers.
And, we all know now that Columbus was lost,
Not just directionally challenged.
Native doesn’t mean ‘Here First’,
it means ‘Grows Wild’.
Weather was never an omen
forecasting results of the battle between
Man and (his) Nature. It just is.
Women are naturally gifted in Sciences such as;
Biology & Psychology.
Men possess many gifts they will be glad to tell you all about.
Men may cry. Women may murder.
The Human Genome Project collapsed
in the storm of clones.
The Brain Maps that intended to carve a path for AI,
got us lost somewhere between the formula and the fractal.
The last one left was the hen.
The race was over
before the starting gun was fired at Heaven
and the sky began raining steel
in sharp scraps of twisted space junk.
Gravity, being the weak force that it is,
cannot uphold Truth
against the atmosphere we have made
Here.
it must be okay
to come in last
because we finished

in the first place. 

Painting By Paul Louis Martin des Amoignes (1858–1925) (Bonhams) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

VR

They have to learn us-
I mean, accumulate all
impressions captured,
you know, geo-tags, less spikes and lags.
And by establishing parameters around
relevant competition
so that the satellite knows where to point-seek
Look-scan-interpret-coordinate-
see and target
your location. Listen. It is always on.
The side windows have been tailored to suit your
viewing interests and browsing history,
like likes and bounce rates, time on page,
so we may streamline and then stream it all
in quibits and bytes, encoded in panglish
to converse a vice
between hard and rock, speak and spoke
or 0 and one
copy(right)
away
from figuring in and factoring out the optimal solution
to reality and our abundance of equations.
They will learn us,
if given enough data to digest. Input. Output.
Recycle and Reduce the point of Occam's Razor.
Another You beta, only in row phase,
randomized for optimum complexity.

We taught each other how to live. 

Image credit by Carol M. Highsmith [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, 'Data Storage in Modern office building' c. 1980-90.

The w(h)ole thing

When we say something is porous, it is a description of the holes
that allow other matters to fill the spaces between,
also known as absorption.
And this process ends when the porous body becomes full
of itself.
When we say, "poor us", we mean what we don't have,
as in desiring something to fill the void.
When look closely for the smallest common denominator,
we would find scores of pores all across our largest organ,
we would be referring to the spaces between
us and the world. Da Vinci knew there were no dividing lines.
When this skin tightens and turns to gooseflesh,
it is an act of repulsion or rapture.
We open our mouths and nothing escapes,
this is a microcosm of the black hole.

Standing atop the threshold, I open the door and I wonder
if I am letting the hot air out or welcoming
the cool air inside? How is relativity related to reality?
Loosely. Do virtues exist in the virtual world?
Is our privacy other peoples business, like common stock,
traded for common knowledge.
Have you been to the Public Domain?

Time is money expressed in regular intervals,
like breath, hard to catch with our heads at this altitude.
In theory, if we can't count it, can we make it count
without real numbers? It all adds up

to unfathomable astronomical units.

What was needed was more space,
but how to go about collecting more nothing
and where would we keep it...
Something was missing,
we knew this much.


Painting by Ernest Slingeneyer, 'The art collector' 1881 in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.