Thursday, October 13, 2011

A performance poem in response to Ruchi Bhimani's post of There Are Not Enough of Us by Adiran Mitchell on my Facebook Wall

‎'A (somewhat cheesy towards the end) performance poem in response to Ruchi Bhimani's post of There Are Not Enough of Us by Adiran Mitchell on my Facebook Wall'


If all that we knew had to be shrunk
From the follies of a monk
To the sapience of a drunk
Thesauri of cumulative nomenclature
"E is M C squared" kind of consignature
To the size of a grain, or a cell in the brain,
To the strain of the cell that's right as the rain
It might not be vain, to sound
This little concern that last time around
It drowned, and when found
It stunk of a skunk,
The bottle with the message sunk
And a big fat chunk of genetic literature
Lied filed as "junk".

There are two kinds that notably fail
One that's lost meaning like the great ape's tail
And the one that is topsyturvied,
labyrinthian, obscured by a veil.
And there are many ways still why it wont work -
It's simply wrong or a system with a quirk.
But it's that which starts in verses, that disburses
The cure to death or the chess playing Turk.

Poetry is process: this cake will take time to bake
You get to Mitchell when you start with Blake
To answer the big question, a smaller one grew
You get another riddle, when you ask for a clue
So it all depends on wether you tap
A finger pointed at the sky or an exact map.

Let's get the bets right -

Put one for the absurd dialogue that goes ping….pong
Put one for the quark-slicing nano-knife
One for the Tambourine man's one last song
And one for that Pied piper's mendacious rife.

So how much of it works, how much sucks?
Well how much does love and how much does life?