Zumwalt Poems Online

Posts tagged ‘humor’

(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

Tagged with:

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

Tagged with:

In contest with a hippopotamus

In contest with a hippopotamus

me and the hippo
race
to lose weight
at such a frantic yet erratic pace

me and the frutifly vie
to try to not age
to postpone the next stage
to delay each and every turn of every single page

Hey babe! What? I’m staying away from the eggs.
And the butter.
So don’t stay away from me.

Hey boy! Look — I am not old.
I expect to send tingles down your spine,
not receive a courteous nod like you’d give to your great grandmother
several years after she’s been buried.

Gee.

This dog I have smells.
No bath rids the odor.
No change of diet freshens the breath.
The only remaining option is to the change the dog
for I am getting tired of changing the carpet.

me and the sunset
will meet again
at some appointed time
until then I compete against the shadow it causes the body to cast
seeking any remaining light while vanishing in the darkness

— Zumwalt (May 1991)

Category:

1991, I, Zumwalt

Tagged with: