Poetry

A couple of poems to help kick things off: The first is an old favorite of mine, and the second is excerpted from my book, The Sachem is Dead!

Supersonic

Skating away on blades of steel,
The cartoon town is behind us now,
And there’s nothing to see
But ten feet in front of our faces.

We see ourselves in third person,
In two dimensions, side to side,
We move—supersonic—
Up ladders, through loops,

Don’t die.

We only fear the cliffs,
The daggers that define our land,
Monsters of unspeakable strength,
A bop on the head and they fall.

A simple bridge—it will fall—
Lies square in our path,

Be quick.

Only now can we move
To the back of the cave.


Special Agent Dale Cooper Travels Back in Time to Stop King Philip's War


Diane, I have no idea where or when I am. In fact, I can’t be sure that you will be able to hear this recording, but here goes. As I cross the boundary of time, and therefore space, I am reminded of the emerging field of fractal geometry, of the concept of self-similarity. As far as I know, neither the English colonists nor the Native Americans of seventeenth-century New England knew anything about fractals, yet I suspect that, in some way, every person and animal ever born has understood them in full. The largest fractal, Diane, is but a conglomerate of many smaller versions of itself. Those smaller versions are seen to be made of still smaller versions, and so forth. It seems that everything is repeating in infinitely larger scope. In the space between these self-similar intervals, we find only more of the same: identical, yet smaller shapes of miraculous irregularity; curlicues and pointed edges abound. Diane, it is this space between where we seek meaning. Ultimately it is here where we find the abnormal movements and relations of every day, week, month, year, decade, century, millennium, and celestial epoch of our lives and the lives of all things animate or not. We find the same shapes, Diane, indistinguishable from all others.