CYNICAL ODE
I’ll take fire and water over virtue any day, no matter what you say, Confucius!
Prometheus was a man rubbing two dollars together.
Real knowledge is knowing the extent of everyone else’s ignorance.
Even the cloud sees silver as a trick of light.
And the glass, whether half-full optimist or less-full realist
is nevertheless stolen and gulped by full-full opportunist.
And this, our love, so like a cake I can’t help but haunt your kitchen
itching for a lick of spoon.
A love so like the moon: an oscillating dance of wane and wax
brilliant but hardly here, yet we dance anyway
because to dance is all that matters anyway and anyway
all that matters is we think: why you think you matter, anyway?
Like to think and therefore be is exactly the kind of thing
that got my coming-of-age punched in the teeth.
O this life! There is so little and so much of it.
Ditto time. Ditto time.
The spine, now a question, turns in on itself.
Hello coccyx, my old friend!
Hello asshole! Hello id!
Hello god we forged in a crucible of violence
taught him then to walk and walk over
to talk in quids and pro quos
QEDs
Ipso factos
Maybe that is why when you scratch my back
sometimes I stab yours (ergo, the opposable thumbs)
or why I never learned to fold a swan
but the full Windsor’s down pat?
And what is origami anyway
but the art of folding dead trees?
Sure, Borneo lost some forest
but now they have the internet
and the internet has Google
and Google has everything.
I am telling you, world, father god to mother maker
when man stares into the abyss
it trembles.
Glint Literary Journal 