Zumwalt Poems Online

Archive for the ‘2011’ Category

The irreplaceable moment

The irreplaceable moment

We passed a law that two things
must not occupy the same space
at the same time.

There were some dissenting votes
and much discussion about how to enforce.
Our representatives had to think of the interests of the constituents mainly,
which, in this case, coincided with the interests of the constituent assembly.

We, the people, needed to have a nice place to live.
We evicted the indigenous
making them all indigent
and our leaders sometimes evicted us
as a matter of common sense and expedience.

We, needed a way to move from place to place.
Metal mines swallowed eco-lifelines,
oil sputtered and splattered
coating the coast
from sea to shining sea.

We, needed something to eat.
Food replaced foul-tasting pests
with the help of
magical chemical tricks.
The fumes were awful
confining us to hospitals.
The country became prosperous
as the food became murderous.

My chainsaw spins and thus once again
repels all like things from its space.
It must create to destroy and destroy to create
following the inviolate rules of time and place.

My friends all slash and burn the best they can.
They may displace,
efface and even disgracefully debase nature’s very own birthplace
but it’s all to simply appropriate our formerly shared estate
and establish
through each on-demand phase of
tactically-driven blaze, graze and industrial haze their
own personal haste-makes-waste
state-of-the-art ahead-of-the-pace
deadly-embrace-the-human-race
monetarily-based
technically-graced
profit-making showcase/workplace.

Yes, our life may be just a moment but
the damage we do by being a bit too clever lasts forever.

— Zumwalt (2011)

Category:

2011, I, T, Zumwalt

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Your anonymous blog

Your anonymous blog

To my face you are kindness itself:
cheerful, always upbeat,

but in your anonymous blog
you rip me apart.

You press your thumb and forefinger on each side,
hold, pull and rend,
and rupture my very innards.

You focus on me,
my life, my words, my actions and my body
like you are a Celestron Telescope
searching for every single crater and irregularity.

With an Ultima Barlow lens
and your Leica M9 18MP
You grab each natural image
and then rearrange reality with
your precious, perversely persuasive, periscopic Photoshop technique.

poetic liberty has leased you a license to assassinate,
humiliate,
decimate,
invalidate,
severely lambaste,
and mockingly castrate
everything that I identify as me.

literary freedom allows you to liberally fabricate,
mutilate,
denigrate,
incriminate,
scathingly castigate,
and maliciously urinate
on what others think of me.

To my face you are kind beyond selflessness,
but on your online beat,
your anonymous malevolence
sets you apart
from all the others
that have ever wanted
to write me up,
put me down,
and publish me out.

— Zumwalt (2011)

Category:

2011, Reader's Choice, Y, Zumwalt

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Something Bad

Something Bad

Something bad is coming
Worse than any Grand Funk Railroad Reunion Concert
Worse than watching a full episode of Meet the Kardashians
With all commercials included.

I not only have read about it
I can feel it
So much more bothersome than
Hay fever in May.

It’s the Universal Fender Bender
Havoc beyond compare
It’s Universal Affliction and Ruination
Heavyweight and high-profile kind of stuff.

This universe is dumb
So much stupider than the armadillos that get hit by my little Fiat
This universe is worse than any teen age driver
Not watching where it goes
Or what is coming down the road.

Ten to the ten to the ten to the ten and more universes out there
Outnumbering all the cable channels both regular and High Def
More numerous than all the cockroaches in all the cities on the East Coast
Going any which way they please
Not planning ahead
Or working with the AAA or the highway safety department

More universes than every single observation ever made by every single person
More than every single argument between all the married couples
In all countries
On all existing planets
In all existing galaxies.

Each time you think of a possible universe, it exists!
Unless we all stop thinking there will be more and more and more.

Each universe moving
Some fast
Some even faster
Some inches apart from each other
Concealed behind some hidden dimension
About to turn the corner at full speed.

There’s a collision
A crash
About to occur
Every universe distracted
As if they are texting away
Following their own set of laws
Without regard for any right of way.

There’s a smash-up coming up
Sooner than later
One universe piles into another
With one of those universes being ours in particular
The one that I live in.

I am scared
I know that adding a shoulder harness to my office chair
is not going to be enough.

I am terrified
I cannot figure out
as I make my last will and testament
who I can leave the house and dog to.

Today, tomorrow or maybe later
It is sure to happen
All my plans for no purpose
All my purposes to no point
I panic
Abandoning all my activities
Crawling into the attic
Taking a pen
A flashlight
And a notebook
And wondering
If there is any new thought
I can have that might make this all better
Without creating
One more
Damn reckless
Out-of-control
universe.

–Zumwalt (2011)

Category:

2011, Reader's Choice, S, Zumwalt

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(True, haiku guru: all through!)

Why can it not last?
You’re like a rhyming haiku:
Too much, much too fast.

— Zumwalt (2011)

EDITORS NOTE: This particular short poem, received from Zumwalt last night via email, seems to have meaning at multiple levels, as one would expect. This quasi-haiku could be about one’s lifespan, the duration of a relationship, possibly the duration of a passionate encounter, or very possibly, due to Zumwalt’s interest in physics, about the relatively short life of a super-massive star, the brief duration of artificial atomic elements (like ununoctium which has a half life of less than a thousandth of a second) or the very brief duration of a subatomic particle (the Xi-sub-b referred to in “science delivers” lasts less than a billionth of a second.)

All that said, it seems the poem has some literal meaning, also. Zumwalt subscribed to an automated feed from a haiku blog. Soon Zumwalt was receiving one low quality haiku after another, each apparently written rather hastily. The final straw, it seems, was when Zumwalt received a rhyming haiku. This poem, along with Zumwalt “un-subscribing” to the automated haiku feed, was the result.

Category:

2011, short poems, T, Zumwalt

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asleep

asleep

My arm fell asleep
one night
and I wiggled my fingers
and then wiggled my hand
and then even my entire arm
yet numbness prevailed.

My heart fell asleep
one night
and I didn’t much care
about the starving children in East Africa
or the endangered whales in Western Alaska.

My brain fell asleep
one night
and I could no longer sort out
why I was here
or where I needed to go.

These tiny thin-tooth bedbugs bite at my body
munching on my toes,
pilfering fluids from my fingertips.

I stay awake itching
but itching only
makes the itching worse.

I, myself, somehow, finally fell asleep one night
and since then
I bounce from night
to night
forgetting everything
that happened in-between.

— Zumwalt (2011)

Category:

2011, A, Zumwalt

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science delivers

science delivers

Some order off the menu
I fancy what I can fancy;

I imagine whatever I imagine
And science delivers.

Give me a
continually brined,
triple-hearted,
blue-blooded,
color-changing,
golden-pink,
cerulean-ringed
octopus
with drops of venom on the side
just enough to kill a full-grown gorilla.

Then I’ll try a portion of nearly translucent,
high-altitude,
streaky,
wispy,
cirrus clouds
made of hexagonal prismic plate crystals
converting sunlight
into a dazzling fire rainbow.

Follow that with hundreds of hyper-velocity stars
spit from the galaxy’s center,
millions of years ago
moving more than a million miles an hour
careening through a galaxy
that is held together by
cosmically-aged cold dark matter.

Top it all off with
various flavors of increasingly attractive quarks and anti-quarks:
up,
down,
charm,
strange,
top and
bottom
with various
spins,
color charges (red, green, blue),
masses,
and electric charge
assembled in
various palatable forms
from simple, garden variety protons and neutrons
to Sigma-sub-bees and Xi-sub-bees
to highly anticipated anti-matter anti-hypertritons.

Yep!,
I imagine what I imagine
and it’s just a matter of time
before science delivers.

What cannot be imagined
will not be.
What cannot be,
will not be imagined.

No price is too high
No wait is too long,
but clearly
being on good terms
with the head chef
ensures
some notable advantage.

-Zumwalt (2011)

Category:

2011, Reader's Choice, S, Zumwalt

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Runiverse

Runiverse

She radiates brilliance based on fine features,                 
               good form and skillfully applied cosmetics.
He balances confidence and accessibility 
                    with an unerring certainty of success.
The universe is expanding,
Inflation rampant,
Stretching everything more than any yoga instructor would 
                                                    allow.

Our planet is stuck in motion 
           at hundreds of thousands kilometers per second.
I stock up on Dramamine and Ginger Ale.

She worries that she will never see him again.
He is lost in the business of the day.
These galaxies race away from us faster than 
                              the speed of light
And are accelerating more each trillionth of a second.

Some Alien out there has calculated that 
            this is the last week to 
                      DVR an episode of the Game of Thrones
before losing all contact.
Some Star Watcher is now 
            stuck with a static picture 
                   of this faraway galaxy from here on out.

She is not simply a set of particles: 
                                she is moving very fast.
In relation to her changing position in space, 
                                he is moving even faster.

This universe is not stable;
It strays too far from itself
Running away from a past that was too small.

This universe is accelerating
As if it has immunity from moving violations
Or has appropriately mounted a very good radar detector.

One day her particles and his
Will dance tumultuously in the debris encircling some 
                                             infant sun
Or get pulled into a 
    black hole.

She radiates,
He balances,
The universe inflates,
Stretching everything way beyond belief
And ultimately, slightly out of reach.

— Zumwalt (2011)

Category:

2011, R, Zumwalt

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nominal thought

nominal thought

Without forms, phones and Facebook,
there’s not much need to have a name when you’re dead.

— Zumwalt (2011)

Category:

2011, N, Satire, short poems, Zumwalt

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Of Contrary Motion

Of Contrary Motion

The notes go 44 this way and 44 that.
You pick the upper half.
The low ones are much more attractive.

How can I boogie-woogie without the bass?
How do you manage staying sweet and serene?

It’s not melody I need, it’s the rumble of solid earth.
It’s not the airy fluff that keeps me filled, it’s the meat and potatoes of life.

As you go up, I go down.
To the right you go,
I am off to the left.

And yet on your rare descents
And my occasional rising up
We meet.

And in those moments,
past the awkward near-collisions,
we again are as one
and forsake our vows of yin and yang.

— zumwalt (2011)

Category:

2011, O, Zumwalt

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Better than

Better than

The land and water is haunted with beasts.
Some are carnivorous;
Some are microscopic;
None are smart like us
or entitled to dine at a good restaurant.

They think, we think, but differently.
None speak Mandarin or Cape York Pidgin English.
They have offspring and some care for their young,
Some eat their young,
But not a one makes contributions to a college fund.

I can wear them as hats, or mount them on my wall
But I can’t suffer this idea that they deserve representation in Congress.
I can grill them on coals, or tie them to my sled
But I won’t consider giving them my email address.

Evolution is a dusty and poorly mapped path
Nonetheless, it does not cross upon itself
And head back many miles
So that one easily confuses the end with its beginning.

It doesn’t jump from amoebas to mudfish and then back down to insects
then jump up to chimpanzees, over to worms and across to chihuahuas.

It progresses steadily, more or less,
from moss to shrimp to clown fish
to red-legged frog to crocodile
and then on to penguin or duck,
next visiting the platypus,
on to rabbits and rats
and terriers and tigers,
or lemurs and monkeys
and gibbons, gorillas,
bonobos, and our friends next door,
the Millers.

At the top are we,
and granted certain privilege and priority.
We can extend our parking lots
and re-engineer the best sun-bathing spots.

At the peak are we
with our rhubarb pie and peach-ginger iced tea.
We have power of attorney to set fires to ancient trees
and reclaim land from the South China Sea.

The air and ocean is haunted with creatures.
Some are carniverous;
Some are microscopic;
None should have free trespass without our permission.

We should put up security gates
And start up detailed dossiers.
Every genus should have a dedicated database;
Every species captured in a redundant set of disk arrays.

They may think that we think they are not much different than we
But none speak Mandarin, Hindi, Hungarian or Burmese.
They have offspring so that their lineage continues on
But that’s up to us and little to do with them.

We may not hang on.
We are a destructive bunch
With a vicious knock-out punch.

We may not survive the dawn,
but if we do manage to last
and hold on as the entitled upper class
they need to take note
most carefully
that we not only own all we buy, lease or see
but in the end,
we can certainly ensure
that none of them,
aggressively,
or at their leisure,
pass us
on any given branch
of the post-Darwinian,
well groomed,
often pruned,
evolutionary
tree.

— Zumwalt (2011)

Category:

2011, B, Editor's Choice, Zumwalt

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