Trampolineinverse

Don’t you love the circularity
Of the rubbery tarp metaphor
For spacetime in the geometric

Description of gravity curving
Everything? The more massive objects
Create indentations in the tarp,

And anything passing bends along
Those dents or fully falls into them.
See? Gravity works like gravity.

Of course it’s only a visual.
Nobody means it literally.
By why spacetime should be curved at all

By such a ridiculously weak,
Relentlessly accumulating
Whatever-the-hell gravity is,

Until all the furies of atoms
And subatomic particles force
Each other to explode or even

Swallow their ongoing explosions
In confined heavens light never leaves
And information only maybe

In hairy haloing holograms?
Well, there are theories, many theories
Crawling around this saggy cosmos,

Giggling toddlers in the bouncy house,
Screeching toddlers in the bouncy house,
Ghosts leashed in the haunted bouncy house.

The Poem Before Full Bore

Proper boredom takes some time.
At the start, you’re both relaxed
And fidgety, settling down.

You need to know the gap’s there,
That the alarm won’t save you
At any moment. The wait,

The awareness of the wait,
The awareness you’re between
The beginning and the end

Of a boring stretch of time,
Not very near either side,
That’s what you’re going for. Now,

If you’ve blocked your gap all out
Like a well-planned reservoir
Starting to back up time’s streams,

And you can feel it rising,
Floating you to the middle
Of interchangeable waves,

Equidistant from all shores,
You’re almost ready for it,
As soon as you drop this poem.

Mexican Blood Plasma

Turning back to humanity
For a moment, as if you had
Chosen it—like Eckhart Tolle,

That Clive Wearing of all gurus,
Choosing just the present moment—
Consider the blood in your head.

You made it yourself? Good for you.
Did you know—in America
You can give plasma twice a week,

Far more than legally allowed
In much of the rest of the world?
You, too, can be a factory.

For this reason, America
Supplies about sixty percent
Of the plasma available

For swap among humanity.
But that’s a little misleading.
Mexicans with visas can cross

Into the States for short-term stays
To give up plasma for some cash,
A big chunk of the US haul,

Eleven percent, in fact, which
Means roughly a fifteenth of all
The plasma that’s circulating

From human bodies to human
Bodies came from Mexico.
The comparison media

Favor for this sort of stat notes
That the country of Mexico
Is home to under two percent

Of the world’s whole population,
So it’s punching above its weight
By providing near six percent

Of the world’s medical plasma,
Some of which might have been transferred
To you in your last surgery.

But that’s slightly misleading, too,
Since only a few Mexicans
In reach of the US border

And in possession of visas
Provide all of that plasma.
Which stat now seems aptest to you?

Choosing just the present moment,
Consider the thoughts in your head.
You thought them yourself? Good for you.

The Agile

There’s remarkably little
Agility in the known
Universe. Things move and burn,

But outside of Earth’s surface,
You don’t see a lot of chase,
Not much pursuit and escape,

None at all, to be precise.
You frame this in terms of life
And the quest for life. But life

Could be quietly growing
Its humble lichen patches
All over the face of god,

As it’s been called, the cosmic
Background radiation splotch.
More to the point, why’s nothing

Frantically running around?
For some little while now, Earth
Has writhed with pursuits and flights.

From such jumpy perspective,
The grandly burning, stately
Night’s vacant of the agile.