"Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments,
and they wander
off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure
which has no relation to reality." - Nikola Tesla
Open sweet can of soup easily
with that crank from an old model T.
Rush the running boards, pretend
you are Bonnie and Clyde shot
in the dark, stumbling out of phase
with Venus and dirty from Mars.
Add onions, bell peppers, salt, basil
chili powder, ginger to soup; cut the
flow from weary glaciers that melt
too fast, watch the pot boil, no control, --
we latch Pi to the square root of -1
letting the geese flow out of slavery
where infinity has nothing to wear
but a dangerous knife, scabbard and
a long sweet forks used last at the circus
marking the faces of clowns in red blood
and carving peace in the tails of dogs
gathering friendless at the north portal.
Every one screamed, and has missing
syllables in their food, and why would
we want to eat and write poetry at
with dangerous angels at our harp.
I know we were told by the Master
of Masters that we're slaves to magnets,--
gizmo’s that slime the power of urine
to sacrifice land for
obscure
survival on the docks with dead
longshoremen and prostitutes who
gathered with the tattoos as complement
to that drubbed, inscrutable desire.
I do love first soup, -- I am
not playing.
We will drink it all even after death if need be.
I record shrieks to unearth yellow
fires
of daffodils and morning glories as bleach--
Men, boys, girls, -- flowers were set up
to answer reasons why we understand
the conservation of matter;
we copy by rote how that
child
inside can be released from its father,
mother, or that ancient priest who swore
he knew the answer to all god’s tests.
We must pass them;
nothing we say
can speed that process
unless we lie,
run behind the curtain,
carry away
some wenches for an infantile bestiary.
Remember Africa prepared Gillespie’s trumpet.
He bent it, marked it with blue stars,
calculates
the boundaries of glorious
musical snafus,
so easy, impractical as great ages
of broken slave traders, as we threw dice --
list the labels in our notebooks, one and
only one formula, if and only if, as
function
X tends to zero, variable left behind
sometimes small children wasted by
adults in spectacle rhombohedra.
Have you ever watched children play
hop scotch? They throw tired stones
at hit every number in sequence to skip
backward as time perplexed forgets
the linear function for negative sine's.
Watch the Mushroom soup. Do not let
dried splash over the sides of the pot
as ash
spawned from tidy volcanoes --
Forget the formulas, catch
grief
and stain disreputable memory to drub
the interior line, keep them in order,
marching the entire quadrangle
along
the undercut road as we pass for cheer:
good food, and provident formulas for life
settle down in the margins; recalled eons
later when the origin of soup, vegetables,
and the simple outline of sunsets and waves
are all we know when the formula fails
not for any predictable reason, but out
of disrepute that poisons the tributaries,
to map how complicated stairs unfold
into great gateways without reward.
Do not open the Mushroom soup
too quickly,
or pour it out to sample
transitions with test patterns and
bio signs set up to rig the tests
that way no one succeeds or lives.
We create monuments none the less.
No one knows every purpose, at first.
When the right arms pushes correct levers
then the universe aligns with formulas,
derivative functions, and involved
differential equations drawn from solution
sets, some numb, dead, lively when
a child, six, watching the world spy him
gives him names, attitudes, larger frames
than the innocence he reveals sitting
in one
large white chair at home, with
mother and father,
sipping mushroom soup
confessing that he had whispered to one
of his
friends, as mirth, "I will murder you
for
looking mean with equations in your hair."
3/2/06
