Poetry
The Meantime
Dear friend,
While you're away
I am keeping
your potted plant
neatly bounded,
precisely watered,
and mostly alive.
It's on the floor
in my house,
unsettled.
I haven't made
a place for it
because
I know
what that
would mean.
This must end,
in one
of three ways:
One, you …
The Ballad of Old Man Bruggers
When Old Man Bruggers lost his mind
we lost utopia.
It started with his crazy war
on fecophobia.
At first he ventured subtle hints
to folks he saw in town
like "Funny how we spread manure,
but flush our dookies down!"
Beneath his breath, he muttered things
about the flow …
Under the Crust
This is morbid, but in the winter
sometimes I go outside
with a round-point shovel
and scrape and pry at the crust
just for a peek under the surface,
just to see if anything down there
is still alive.
This behavior does not at all
accelerate the arrival of spring …
Idolatry and Iconoclasm
It's a fearful thing to love a statue,
returning every day to circle the dais
and study again every immortal curve—
unyielding, immutable, awesome. At first
you marched round and round like a supplicant:
incanting, worshiping the platonic form
of beauty. But now you circle like Joshua
around Jericho: tooting …
What French Programmers Do
They smoke and model their berets while all
their code recurses infinitely and
will choke, will suffocate on out-of-memory
exceptions. Helplessly they laugh and smoke
and model their berets as if they no
more choose Computer Science than they choose to be
the French. But in the smoke are others …
