How Billy Collins gets it, kinda

Casting for Answers

after reading the Trouble With Poetry


Fish must imbibe in their own piss!

Billy Collins says it has all been said
& said & said about the useless dead,
by all those living who copy instead
of innovating to get some home street cred
amongst Aquarians they’ve never read.

Taken from a person with a legacy
who I assume knows better than me,
who’s old enough to spread incredulity
faster than some school of ichthyology
that knows Piscine waste ontology.

Do fish smell their own piss?

*

This is another thing to not over-think
Like love, freedom, and immortality
Basically it is a measurement problem
The more you think about it the less you know
Like the flow of a river
You can stand in one place and watch
Or you can go with it
It is all relative until you take the plunge

*

Like an URL in common(ness)

Aberrant dormitory hyperbole,
lock and sea (look & see)
life as submerged profundity,
web mates occupy independently—
an aquarium of banality,

a phenomena called group think,
a post modern poetry link
transmogrified: blog stink [!]
lexicographically abstracted from ink-
less mediocrity, a web drink . . .

A toast to a school’s togetherness.

The Generations of Two

Wake up Honey before Ants Smell the Roses


I am dreaming of hidden variables

Standing behind me unseen

Like ants in your pants that talk to me
Their antennae are telling me about tickling you

It is something that proper aunts don’t talk about
But ants know something we do not
They chose women to do the work as if honey is everything
The drones are a lot like the hidden variables

Functionally unimportant but necessary to balance parity
Of course all of this is just a theory
Concocted by God who could not keep Einstein from conducting
Mind experiments that had no time or space limitations
Such disregard for physical reality made laboratories redundant
Grad students with nothing to do but study honey bees
Which is why Gore invented the internet
Hooking up physics grad students with honey bees was not trivial

Why Heisenberg had to go back to statistics to overcome his uncertainty
He was always afraid the bees were going to cancel the future tense
No matter his non-local experience he couldn’t let it rest
It was either him or Schrodinger’s Cat, there weren’t enough boxes for both
A pause implies a comma but to use one makes it unnecessary
Now that we have used one there is no stopping
Before we know it the ants will start talking to me again
The hidden variables may actually be constants
If that be the case we must stop thinking
Call out the National Guard
Turn our underwear over to the CIA
Ban underarm deodorants
Quit measuring electrons
Wake up and use our noses to smell the roses
Spout French phrases
Ask Lagrange to tell us which pair got where

No Conventional Encounter

Poitiers Church of Notre Dame de la Grande [20] -- "It will be seen that the construction is such that he who traces the path eventually emerges--like the poet of the "Rubaiyat"--by that same door at which he entered; he will have encountered no "stops," but he may have "looped the loop" an indefinite number of times." (shades of the Tree of Life?) ( Follow the black lines, not the spaces in between)

. . . Lest the readers digress.
Read and ponder the stuff of grand Coleridge eloquence,

. . . like an elliptical blogger dunce,
Inspired with a rare competence,
Spouting uninhibited vocabulary
Bell hollow, empty and free
Meandering athwart with a distinctly foreign insouciance.