Psalm N
Reading about Cain & Abel
I fall asleep—
I dream I keep kicking
a ball downhill
then running to fetch it.
I wake up and wonder
why I don’t kick the ball
uphill and let it roll back
to me.
I have two friends who are electricians.
Working in a house once,
they see the guy who lives there
walking naked through the house
to get in his hot tub.
What a doofus!
I read Freud saying we all have dreamt
of being naked among strangers,
and it’s an attempt to fulfill
our wish in our long, long stretch
from where we started.
Will we ever all be doofuses?
or is it doofi, since I googled
that doofus is masculine,
doofa is feminine,
and doofum is neuter.
I believe everything I google.
I bestir mine runabout for a spin
and see a banner on the well-worn building
in the well-worn town proudly proclaiming
“Organic Cannabis,”
and I think I should have seen it coming
but I didn’t.
I read Antony Flew positing
that the human mind
has power to have chosen
what it did not choose—
in other words, a behavior
other than cause & effect
or quantum probability.
(Might this power be the image of God
into which people were made?)
Mr. Hume shows us
that cause & effect has never
been proven necessary.
Mr. Bohr and the Copenhagen crew
say quantum probability explains
what cause & effect does not
and necessity is a philosophical problem.
Herr Einstein proclaims
“God does not play dice with the universe,”
but later nails a horseshoe
over the door of his office,
explaining to his colleague
that he is not seeking good luck
but that “it works
whether you believe in it or not.”
Mr. Bell’s theorem later upholds
quantum probability.
I try to extend Mr. Flew’s thought
which is also the thought of others
and get nowhere.
I realize I don’t even know
how I think or choose,
who or what I am.
I read Mr. Whitman’s
“As I ebb’d with the ocean of life,”
to feel his kindred crisis.
I listen to the Beatles’ old song
“He’s a real nowhere man
living in his nowhere land—”
Once I tackled a whole book
on the subject of consciousness
that said nothing.
Nothing.
Diane Seuss says that people
who write poetry that
says nothing have syphilis
and people who write poetry
that is meaningful
have tuberculosis.
What a world!
James Joyce wrote a book
called Finnegans Wake
but if you blinked
you missed the wake.
What a world!
A simpleton suffering from neither
syphilis nor tuberculosis
pretends he can dream up an ego
whom he names poetchilde
and writes a book.
What a world!
Out of a thousand million people
the simpleton talks about
himself.
What a world!
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