Lab Test Poems

The following short poems I wrote while tending various lab processes. There can often be 15 and 20 minutes between major actions (or reactions, as the case may be), and so if there is no data to crunch, nobody to cackle with, I sometimes write poems. I recently discovered a small collection of such poems, and now present them to you.

Dasani

Bottled water, bottled water
Water bottled for my thirst
More than likely it is nothing
More than city water
And some osmosis
It will not cure your halitosis

City water, reverse osmosis
Cannot cure your halitosis!
Ozark Trail, hail, hail!
Will rip you off with every pail!

Funny

Not to say you’re funny
Funny can cover rotten floors
Like strong perfume o’er drunken breath.
Don’t say funny, don’t say such stuff,
We’ve always been too mature to notice.
Old canard, the cannery floor is teeming
with trimmings and tidbits, all of the misses
and extras that almost made it in.
In, into the compressed and paper-labeled cylinder of tin,
We ate pickled flounder with tonic and gin.

Merchant

In every pinecone between tufted leaves
are the seeds and the pollen that everyone breathes
Borne up on a tradewind, borne down by the clouds,
these heralds of newness battle across vast
wastes of Tyvek, Hardiplank, OSB, and
cross-hatched vinyl windows.
A residential reservation of voluntary servitude
to the large retailers, volume discounts,
close-outs, sales, and specials,
the merchant peddling price pornography,
the masses reveling in the merchandisiac.


From boredom during a recent conference:

Italiano

Galvanize the narrow gap between your eyes
the spiral swirl will mesmerize
your faith trades chairs with Italian food
to sell one’s soul for tastes-so-good.
Can one imagine the height of greed
that brought about this unseemly deed?
The mesmerific elevation of need,
to exchange one’s pearls for a pasta feed.
Italiano, Italiano, curly hair today
but gone tomorrow.
Down the hatch and eliminated,
dung is uniformly fated,
outside the city, outside the wall,
the creep of maggots, the smoldering pall.
Time is come for consideration
how much does one value salvation?
An ephemeral spiral hath bewitched thee
and parmesan peddlers have deftly tricked thee.

-SST, Gatlinburg, TN Oct. 2009



Aisle displays

Aisle displays, idle forays into
Newfound hobbies, and needs unnoticed
Suggestion
Awakening oneself to
Foam rubber horizons, a
Waking world of
Wing nuts and lockwashers.
No tools required.
No skills required.
Self-installing software module
Get plugged in, the operating
system will install you, update you,
and keep you from harm.
Educate for vocation
A model of adaptation

Hanford

Flaxen grey whispers
Of a landscape echoing
Restless confusion
A weathered woman weary of festive chic
Unsure of what to wear
First this, now that, her
simple brown sweater, quiet, hiding nothing
A suit for all seasons
Under dead and damp, rustlings,
A breeze beneath the canopy of last season's excess
Next year's promise is guarded,
given, grown.

Exo

Walk away from the exoskeleton
Calcified shell
Let rainwater wash it, thin and dissolve it
Habits and notions, fashionable poses
Wash it, thin and dissolve it
Vulnerable and fluid, avail the renewal
New forms and old fears
Impulse ossifies quite by surprise

August

When a better day seems
so far, so far away
What we hold tightly, we miss,
we mourn, misery, when it is gone
If we hold only promises
If only dreams
We were always free to imagine
Free to create
The meadow blossomed beneath our feet
but withered brown in the August heat
What held such delicate, fragrant
promise hangs scentless, dry,
Tragedy