Zumwalt Poems Online

Posts tagged ‘thoughts’

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)

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)