…the universe is a big place, where improbable things happen all the time. Look at you.
– John Matson
At its deepest core
Reality is mere chance
A riot of bubbles boiling
And bursting, all unguessed
Unless the ever disappearing
Always borning bodies flung
Into pointless being, seething
In the cosmic whistling teakettle
Unless by the grace of improbability
By statistical nethering whimsy
By the merest intractable stroke
Of lunacy
We come back for the next moment
Again
And
Again
How odd, when teacher becomes pupil.
How startling, when a depth of meaning
Lay on the surface all along.
Wisdom, it’s said, is indistinguishable
From farce in the fullness of youth
Or unmitigated age, bent on redemption.
Could it be we’ve seen all of it?
No use adding footage to pore over
In search of cheap salvation.
There, written on a careless breeze
Was the whole of it,
Gone until the next moment.
That winter in Palavas
We pulled our coats about us
And stamped our way
Along the bundled beach
Brisk wind whipping
Through our young hearts
Sparkles gleaming from the prancing shore
We caught shelter
Among the sun-slanted shadows
From the slow cadence of the surf
Rush…rush…rush
Down the beach
Two hale young men
Germans by the look of them
Dressed in scantly painted
Swimming briefs
Tossed a medicine ball
Back and forth in rhythm with
Weathered waves
Determined beyond all reason
To return to work
All a-dusk and rightly trim
Later, some chance-encountered lads
Suggested an evening in Grand Motte
“We’re not rich!” I laughed
But we were
Serenity falls
Into the open morning
Stifling a yawn
Life ain’t what I thought it was
All those years ago
In the end, all the pain and joy
Alike
Fell in a grand heap
And life, stripped bare
More like a humping walrus
Than a lame gazelle
A poet once told me
He’d rather write about
Cabbages
Here’s a little quatrain for your Monday amusement:
On the coast of never
What sailing there will be
Our sacred bonds we’ll sever
And cast ourselves upon the sea
exiles child 