Life, love, and math.

This poem is an attempt to make math and numbers possibly seem slightly alive if that's possible. (I'm not the greatest fan of things numerical, as you may have guessed.)

Theorems

If confusion is to sadness as life is to pain,

then reality divided by perception equals sanity.

If we walk at ninety degrees to to what we believe,

then do two wrong angles make a right?

Hell+heaven multiplied by people divided by limbo=earth.

If fingers on keys type love notes or hate mail,

does my keyboard cry bold font tears?

If i slide down a ruler, do i end up in the sands of time?

Or the dust of ages?

Or are rules broken by figures fired from the barrel

of chaos theory?

Anger+crowds times fear=riot divided by police action+violence multiplied by stupidity-apathy+mob psychology=life.

If I don't travel a third of the way around the wheel of life,

do I still get pi in the sky?

if music is to madness, as ink is to imagination,

then life is love is light is loss is lethargy is luck is life.

And if names were numbers,

would you+me equal us,

or them?

Mail order Armageddon.

This next piece is somewhat depressing, very cynical, extremely dark, and hopefully rather funny.

For those of you who worry about my mental health, don't worry, I keep it in a box in my closet.

Mail Order Armageddon

Are you feeling down? Depressed? Gloomy? Suicidal? Tired of life?

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Plus, call today and we'll throw in three tablets of hellfire and brimstone, absolutely free of charge! It's our way of saying thank you.

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complete with book burnings, stoning homosexuals, and public executions!

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For you we have some more specialized options, including the

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Mail order Armageddon.

St. Patrick's day special

Happy Saint Paddy's day!

Because today is a holiday, and a very nice excuse for a party,

I have decided to do a little piece on/about/around St. Patrick's day.

If you are Irish, I apologize for any offense I will probably cause you inadvertently. I myself am part Irish, so hopefully you'll forgive me.

Enjoy.

St. Patrick's Day Parade

One day every year, we all decide to get smashed

and blame it on the Irish.

We pick the stereotype of the emerald isle we like best and wave it like a flag,

drunken people the world over will, for today,

be drunken without the guilt that follows them home like an AA member pitching the spiel.

Green top hat wearing frat boys will crawl out of their houses to spread that festive viridian racism to all sober enough to listen,

or drunk enough to care.

A conga line of shamrock waving, green face painted, Guinness drinking, professional slackers, all the fault of the Irish.

Well this year I propose a toast. A toast to all those who laugh every time St. Paddy's day rolls around, laugh at the insecurity of a world that has to have an alibi for being so drunk they think they can dance a jig, an alibi for being humanly weak,

this one day of the year only, and decide to blame the Irish.

A toast, I say, to everyone who has the spine to get drunk without

pointing fingers, or needing a reason.

A toast to every lime-faced, stumble-footed, kilt-wearing, Jackass,

that gives us something to make fun of today.

Here's to the Saint Patrick's day parade.

Okay, that kind of turned into a rant, but it was a damn good rant.

Ghazal time!

Today we are going to do some form poetry, specifically a type of poem that comes from what was, at the time, called Persia.

This form of poetry is called a ghazal, (pronounced "guzzle"), and consists of many rhyming couplets, not obviously connected.

Of course they are connected, otherwise we would have what we in the trade like to call "complete and total screwed-up nonsense", but they are connected much less blatantly than tradition english stanza poetry.

Anyways, history lesson aside, here goes.

Home away from home

People in cardboard box towns,

Buried in cardboard caskets in the ground,

People collapsed and folded into briefcases

in their own hands on escalators forever going down

White line code written on bathroom stall walls

Spelling out trash can fires dusted in brown

Rusted tin soldiers wearing moth-eaten coats

and hobo glove crowns

Empty three-piece-suits doing

only what the television tells them is allowed

Assembly-line rebels

marching in time with the crowd

Deaf homeless with canes

hearing voices through the ground

Flight plan laid world

turning backwards around

The Hunt

This is a fun little poem inspired by the hundreds of wolf spiders that inhabit my yard.

The Hunt

Patient, in the browning grass,

all is still, time made of glass.

My prey remains as still as i,

but a movement in the earth i spy.

Time shatters, the world narrows

to a half blurred circle going past like an arrow,

eight legs beat a tattoo on the ground,

all the watchers they scatter as they feel the sound.

Low to the the ground, i skid through the dust,

pounding legs threaten to break the earths crust.

wind through the grass blades, fly through the flowers,

the seconds are rubber, they stretch out to hours.

A wolf in the gravel, i race and i run,

my quarry is tiring, my chase almost done,

then finally i catch him, my vision stops spinning,

I'm through with today's "population thinning".

I remain the assassin of this waving green ocean,

my name is spider, natural selection in motion.

Wheels

This is a poem i wrote after spending several hours waiting for a bus that didn't end up coming.

Wheels

Sitting on a bus stop bench, cold crawling over me like a concrete spider.

the city spins around me, a little point of solitude, concrete bench pinning it to the ground,

as the cogs of the city grind all the people around in between them,

so i sit here and watch the wheels.

wheels of buses, turning in time with the concrete heartbeat of the city,

worn-out drivers, giving tickets, taking change, but never making any, even though they wish they could, they just keep going, slow moving blood clots in the city's arteries.

slowing and speeding as they see they are not the one to carry me today.

wheels on minivans carrying mothers and children,

their tires ground down, their rims wrung out,

their brakes screaming in tune to the children yelling, the mothers yelling back,

the radio yelling at them all.

worries piled into the trunk with the soccer equipment,

resentments bottled with the gatorade.

wheels with massive tires underneath the

jacked up, flame painted, exhaust pipe adorned, surround sound stereo pumpin' ,

"real man's vehicles barreling past in clouds of carbon monoxide and testosterone.

wheels with rusted hubcaps under the old green pickup

of a man doing the same job for twenty-five years and he isn't going to stop now.

He will keep working until his pacemaker stops keeping the peace,

because that is all he's ever done.

slow turning wheels on a hearse, celebrating someone's life and death

by adding a few more cells to the city's

ironclad arteries,

his soul spinning down and out through the wheels and into the

grinding cogs of life in the not-so-big city.

after hours of waiting, my bus arrives.

i decide not to get in.