NPM 2

Today's wank poem started its brief life as a villanelle. You can still see hints of it floating around, all free-range-like and crazy like molecules or Sal-Army browsing hipsters. But mostly, it just didn't work that way, so I'm satisfied with another run-o-the-mill free verse-type endeavor.

This whole poem-a-day thing is really just about being more deliberate with my observations and ideas and channeling them into poems. Deliberately. I find I often stumble uncomfortably into poems, and sometimes that results in a months-long lag in writing, which I just don't like a bit. So I want to shake things up. And while I'm not quite sure where the banana peel came from, I have an idea that perhaps I was wanting potassium this morning, and that I've heard before that banana decay is strikingly similar to the breakdown of human flesh (I like crime shows), which I've always found simultaneously entrancing and hilarious. I have also been reading Decoding the Universe, which has strikingly nothing to do with Andy Warhol.

But here is Andy Warhol! Will wonders never cease?

M. insists that Decoding the Universe will cause me to freak out about the inevitable collapse of everything. As I'm only fifty or so pages in, however, it feels more to my mushbrain to be a high school physics refresher. Which, naturally, has me thinking about the law of entropy. And has me feeling a great and overwhelming foreboding. And entropy is just a cool word. So what would it look like to be purely a product of entropy (in this case "raised by it" - I like the cultural/religious significance of this phrase)? Well, you'd be pretty laid-back, I think, because you'd just be all over the place - pffft, wherever I am there I am! - that sort of thing. You would also be an atheist, probably. Or, you would be cooler if you were, probably.

And of course, we can't get away from my lack of love for the Church at present, particularly its more arcane bits of ceremony (the image du jour being the St. Catherine wheel, a rather ostentatious processional trick performed by a skilled thurifer given a wide berth - I've only heard one ostentatious clergyman refer to the trick thus as it is more commonly something bitchin you can do with fireworks; also, rather ironically methinks, a Medieval device of torture/capital punishment.). Thus, I peddle to you, hapless Reader, my offering on this, the second day of National Poetry Month. Try not to think about it as much as I have. Or do. Whichever is your wont.


Doubt

I was raised by entropy
so as to always fall in line
I study the procedures of decay
by the putrefaction of banana peel
on the heels of dead vaudevillians
their manic displays
made to disrupt the senses
to the facts of matter

A dummy engine
St. Cathy wheel
processes down the aisle
her chastened vapor trail
almost preserves her ghost
the ghost of her evades
dispersal, being thus contained
by circular logic.

She waxes preserved by a real
holy gusset of thurifer's arm,
plenary indulgences,
patterns of genuflection.
But I was raised by alms,
know borrowed knickers
and potions do not a saint make
and nothing has been saved.