Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Young love

Never shall I
Be thrown into despair
By a network malfunction
Or honey bees buzzing in the air

I listened 
Motionless and still
Waving finger over screen
As if I had no will

Your texting mingles with the splendour
Of a youtube clip with a million hits
Your blue ray love stings my heart
A song ebbs and echoes in its chambers
Katty Perry, Dark Horse, hashatag, #never apart!

I cradle for a home with hot plums
Where a brash black crow
Eats a worm in front of Emily Dickenson
And then rows away in the sky

Today my emotions go toe to toe face-timing virtual foes
Face-timing until I'm faceless,
Over connected 
A  Teletubbie stuffed in the fast cycle of a dryer
With no wifi just whistling fi fi
And Spock who could forget the gifted Vulcan 
Tribulating with Tribbles
That purr to get stroked 
Spock ain't no dope
He never played with magic
Tribbles were hybrids 
Tribbles multiplied and got stoked

I got a trophy tweet 
From my homeboy wearing a straw hat
In the shadow of a pumpkin field
Says he’ll get me a chip and an app for my
Birthday all weighing less than a gram
And I should come as I am

I chuck my new trending 
Gaza Strip loafers
Into my River Island vintage bag
Knowing I can move faster in my sneaks
But at the door I pivot and spin
My battery is down
Down
Gotta recharge
Texting “Recharge”
My nail speeds over the keys
And it has the texture of a butterfly on it.











Sunday, March 22, 2015

Wearing Leonardo da Vinci’s Hat









This weekend I went to the Santa Maria dell Grazie to see Da Vinci’s Last Supper.
What an amazing work: such colour, balance, all the characters seem to be joined and working together. On my train ride home, as I ate my garlic stuffed snails from my light green tupperware, I couldn’t help but think about their antennae, shells and longevity. So I wrote a poem about it.

When I measured the 
2.2006 microns that straddle
The peering tentacles of a Roman Snail
And multiply that distance by 100
You get the same distance between
2 horse ears

And upon further observation
The visual memory of a snail
In captivity or in jail
Could last a good 10 years or
The same as any Ecquus Caballus trotter.

Surely snails' snail view few mountaintops
Rather the paths it slimes over
with scoops of  home blend mucus
Are part of it visual highway of information

As I pulled an antennae delicately out from my teeth
It dawned on me how when I was 6 years old
A row of snails ran into a srteam where I used to play
Making olives bounce off the water 

And I saw the water swirl over their shells in
The same manner that 
Years later in Med school I witnessed 
Blood in the left ventricle valve of a giraffe
Swirl and gush before reaching the lungs.

(Lazzaro Spallanzani the father of Gastric Juice
and chemical digestion, also uncovered the mystery of
Skipping stones, in Italian,
Rimbalzello or in Chinese, frog jumps 
The record today by
Kurt Mountain Man stands at a jumpy 88 which 
exceeded my skipping olives by 22)



Fascinating how just like the heart valves,
The snails would not recede 
On their mucus bed they rule
even upside down albeit some drool

The Roman Snail that I am eating
Sails at 2.5 inches per minute
Yet a Red Hook Snail 
Trucks at 9.2 inches per minute
And though snails can hibernate
And live long 
A hermaphrodite Roman snail 
Surpasses the Red Hook by 3 decades!


In my simple train compartment
The mountain pass offered unexpected jiggles
With my special fork I pulled then
Placed my lips over its shell and
Sucked and aspirated the chewy mollusk
Its body arrived in my mouth at
80 feet per second
Meaning that if I or it or
We together in a car
Travelling at present
Would be flashed by radar at a speed 
Most objects would fly
I need now to calculate the quantity of 
Ooze that need be emitted to reach such

Prodigious speed.