Shrinking Uiniverse Blues

You’ve wondered why your moccasins wear out?

You’ve pondered why the bathroom tiles need grout,

or why we have to sicken, age and die?

You’ve wondered why we’re always asking “why”?

 

I, too, have rued that vandals never build things:

bacteria don’t chow down, it seems, on chilled things.

You’ve seen a tootsie-roll that someone’s sucked on?

Far easier to destroy than to construct one.

 

Our universe is saddled with expansion

(free verse now counts for more than that with scansion) --

thus, everything must fail, compelled to wither.

What spark (or quirk, or quark) propelled us hither?

 

Condemned to angst, Alzheimer’s, gallstones, grief,

until this frail raft, Life, wrecks upon some reef,

we have to lose our looks, must earn to live.

Consider, though, the harsh alternative!

 

One day, we’ll reach the cosmic tipping-point,

and Time will then be truly out of joint!

Imagine all our foibles in reverse --

From grave to cradle, herschie bars from hearse!

 

When anger grips us in its ugly thrall,

we’ll hurl loose sherds of glass against the wall,

and down will fall a pristine champagne flute.

Each tramp will wear a white Armani suit.

 

Besetting problems?  Far too much conforming.

(The villains will be in-laws.)  Global Norming.

While distant Derridas dream up Construction,

new novels will be named “Gone With The Suction”.

 

We’ll drown in fossil fuels, and we’ll be faced

with challenges like “fritter”, “squander”, “waste”.

At filling-stations, lines of drivers, waiting

to pay to dump the gas they’re generating.

 

We’ll wade through streams, avoiding every bridge,

and grow our marijuana in the fridge

(but streams will flow uphill, and weed’s new status

will rest on how it works to agitate us).

 

Push comes to shove.  You drain a glass, it fills

again with beer.  Instead of paying bills,

we’ll get rich drinking.  Storm before the lull?

Yes, I’m a pessimist, my glass half-full.

Reviews

[Nico Reznick]

Sublime! Great phonetics with the effortless-seeming rhymes, great bits of alliteration and just generally satisfying word sounds. Dense with imagery and clever ideas, you wrote the hell out of this one. It's a pretty ambitious poem, from here to entropy, then back the other way, but you pulled it off.

[Arezzo]

It's not often that I find myself speechless, but ....

A humble "thank you" for this diamond of a review. I think I'll print a couple thousand copies, and wallpaper my room with it!