Worlds Turning
Every single bean needs to be picked by hand...
The missing poem from my "String Theory," my short story published in Unpsychology Issue 8: an anthology of warm data, in Book 3: Aphanipoiesis Section, pages 241-42
The Bead Game
A cup of piping hot, the flavor of woody beans
ground not to powder, their magic releases
at the beck and call of boiling water,
cautiously slakes my inner craving
for warmth and security.
A wave inside the cave
between my teeth, I savor the flavor.
Rest in peace it is said, a last farewell to recent dead.
Gone but not forgotten, a dozen songs by Johnny Rotten,
a cheap trick used to stick a serial killer in a Hollywood flick.
May it all be soon forgot.
This sad excuse, a cultural knot
that tightens incrementally, caped in sentimentality,
while pirates loot the last remaining megabits of truth.
We hold these spooks to be irrelevant,
that all things exist beyond precedent.
The past does not the future make,
one mistake leading to another.
Oh, city on a hill, seen by one and all,
in hope ever rising by dawn’s light,
as another night passes, an owl takes flight.
The mind is a curious thing, wherein wisdom takes wing.
Some say it seats the consciousness.
Others have doubts, searching for a soul somewhere else
within, between, or without.
Wordsworth comes slinking up the path,
a book under his arm. “Whatcha readin’ Bill,” I ask.
“Memories of a bygone era, something enlightening from the ancient past.
The Book of Thoth,” he says at last,
pages flapping in the wind.
“I know not what God hath wrought,”
he says in words to the wise, unsought.
Guilt weaves a burdensome blanket from actions taken without thinking.
“Shit happens,” or so they say. “It’s broken beyond repair.”
“I won’t accept the victim’s role safely couched in weak despair.”