Daily Poem: January 15, 2006 dft1 (from a prompt) revised
by 
seanfarragher
|
Posted: Sunday, January 15, 2006 Word Count: 411 Summary: First Draft from a Prompt at Zoetrope written today: Write a poem in any form or style incorporating: rabbit, gun, cradle, couscous, paragon, cheese steak (for my UK friends cheese steak of course is Philadelphia food, but Camden is a city immediately across from Philadelphia. Step on the bridge in Camden, New Jersey and you are immediately in Philadelphia. Camden had horrific schools. I taught there in the 1970s, and from what I hear it is no better today. Related Works: "The End of the World is Near" • “The Garden of Earthly Delights -- 2005” • |
Daily Poem: January 15, 2006 dft1
by Sean Farragher
The cradle sways. The world is old
Race under rough hands.
Find the limits of comets spread
to tell long stories in sine and cosine
long parables of differential equations
random numbers without design
There is no logic left. We find no
solution sets beyond X tends to
infinity when Y crosses zero.
Don’t study this arbitrary equation.
I have not plotted it fully, as life
cannot substitute one variable
for another without knowing
how the next dimension cried
when Terra was unborn.
What will remain when rabbits eat
the couscous not inhabited by
Homo sapiens or any other person
raised on the amino chains of stars
long dying in dark matter invisible
as the pain of the old left to die
in the middle of a tempest with
Jazz in ferment raised up to hold
graves above the earth, consumed
by the shaking hands and horns
of respect and joy off rebirth
in the safety of death, so they
imagine on that walk as stars
dried on the rug with semen
stains lifted by flesh and the
thighs of lovers rasping for
breath in a world without air.
After the festivals and rock shows
we spring with gun to empty cradles
to forestall the prophecy. We cross
eyes, hands and break bread with
death: the child was soft in ground.
HIV walks it soft mile to devastation
Does that signal relief for some
watching the sidewalk empty?
Do we clap at the waves and lie --
told to cover up our blindness
by cheese steak left to mold
on a Camden Street --
the meat wrapped in parchment
from storm in the desert of 3000 BC.
There Sumerians wrote in cuneiform
about Baal and his court of lies.
How we have changed – more people
far more than the mind allows
larger numbers than stars broken
down into the periodic table of whim.
Will we join dead stars in swart space
Watch the living lift that paragon of
substantial insecurity, that age of man
and woman brought to a halt by Bush
riding the rail out of town stripped
of power so we can dream that
the revival planned by his patrons
will be as oblivion and not honor?
How can we justify breath without
air in a world where nature always
lives longer than carefully groomed
fingernails cut into dead arms
to prove that they are no longer real?
XX
by Sean Farragher
The cradle sways. The world is old
Race under rough hands.
Find the limits of comets spread
to tell long stories in sine and cosine
long parables of differential equations
random numbers without design
There is no logic left. We find no
solution sets beyond X tends to
infinity when Y crosses zero.
Don’t study this arbitrary equation.
I have not plotted it fully, as life
cannot substitute one variable
for another without knowing
how the next dimension cried
when Terra was unborn.
What will remain when rabbits eat
the couscous not inhabited by
Homo sapiens or any other person
raised on the amino chains of stars
long dying in dark matter invisible
as the pain of the old left to die
in the middle of a tempest with
Jazz in ferment raised up to hold
graves above the earth, consumed
by the shaking hands and horns
of respect and joy off rebirth
in the safety of death, so they
imagine on that walk as stars
dried on the rug with semen
stains lifted by flesh and the
thighs of lovers rasping for
breath in a world without air.
After the festivals and rock shows
we spring with gun to empty cradles
to forestall the prophecy. We cross
eyes, hands and break bread with
death: the child was soft in ground.
HIV walks it soft mile to devastation
Does that signal relief for some
watching the sidewalk empty?
Do we clap at the waves and lie --
told to cover up our blindness
by cheese steak left to mold
on a Camden Street --
the meat wrapped in parchment
from storm in the desert of 3000 BC.
There Sumerians wrote in cuneiform
about Baal and his court of lies.
How we have changed – more people
far more than the mind allows
larger numbers than stars broken
down into the periodic table of whim.
Will we join dead stars in swart space
Watch the living lift that paragon of
substantial insecurity, that age of man
and woman brought to a halt by Bush
riding the rail out of town stripped
of power so we can dream that
the revival planned by his patrons
will be as oblivion and not honor?
How can we justify breath without
air in a world where nature always
lives longer than carefully groomed
fingernails cut into dead arms
to prove that they are no longer real?
XX