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THE ERASURE OF CERTAINTY city poem in Genghis Lotus Poetry Collection, a selection of poems free to read online. Webmaster for this site is poet Hugh Cook, born in Britain, educated in New Zealand, and the author of, amongst other works, the fantasy series Chronicles of an Age of Darkness.
Vocabulary note: "IPO," for those of you who don't usually read the financial pages, means "initial public offering," the point at which a new company is mature enough to be launched on the stock market, with shares being made available for purchase by the public. |
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The erasure of certainty Was never quite announced But has arrived. We start the day with accelerated rainbows, The bitter colors Frogmarching the fractured seconds Raw to incineration. Before coffee break, We're recapitulation evolution, Transforming seed capital to IPO. By 9 pm, We're still at it, Selling the Andes, Renting the benthic depthspace, Mortgaging Japan. Arbitrage: Those Dead Sea thirsts, that Canadian water. Brazilian sunlight to central Alaska. By 2 am, it's getting hectic. The temps are dancing upside down. The boss starts speaking Tibetan. A disenfranchised stapler turns carnivorous. And this is only the beginning. Another midnight Brings Saturday. Our fingernails are shorter but our jobs are still here. Days off? Oh, those got exported. Somewhere in distant Mekongalota The company's vacations are getting done By vivisected members of the wombat tribe, Working for the minimum. And we are here, at deadline, Trading options in genetic bingo, Leveraging Iraqi chihuahua patents For prime-time shares in trans-Plutonic orbits. Sunday, The stockmarket makes a surge, But we are trashed by the cockroach derivatives, By the prolapsed bonds, By the dollar's brutal allergy to the eggplant. The famished roses Suck the taste of steel from the dead. And so we're struggling. It's downsize, downscale, And cut, at all costs, our costs. Yes, we're economizing, The plumbing vetoed, the sanitation Outsourced to a morgue in Ulan Bator. Waste not want not! Recycle! Telephone conversations Reprocessed five and fifty times, Blur into rosebuds. The full-grown famished roses, Which we by now are far too poor to water, Suck the living liquid from the dead. Marvelous technology, the dream compressor. Three hours of sleep To crush the rehab into us. We dream communally And swap our vital memos as we dream. Then Monday morning cracks the world awake. Monday shoves me awake, Cracked to five dimension. Transmogrified! The turgilator, evidently, Has been at work. I'm sprouting voices, I'm linking With the Higher Powers. And find more turbulence. Gravity Insists it must renegotiate. The photon Wants to default on its transcedence, And, with this treason, The whole foundation package, Time and space, The basic deal, Is up for grabs. As the TV news reports, In the headwaters of the River Thames, The wings of a butterfly are beating. Ominously. |
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May be photocopied for classroom use |
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