by Dan Elton


Words the mathematician spoke at the end of the world
Did you see, did you see??
the dying moths, the symmetry?

The fearful broken glass array,
scattered along the cracked road,
like a drunken musician, it composed
a random matrix of doubtful glances,
a tensor of silly stagnant dances,
an algebra of smashed dismay.

The fire came down,
the wind went around,
the fire was hot,
the wind was cold,
And somewhere, somehow,
I lost my hat!


Listening to Chopin at 2am
If I could explain how I felt right now,
our souls would have merged into one,
and I would not be sitting here,
looking out the window.

Halogen street lamps are a cold blue,
but colder still was my heart today.

As the photons pierce my retina
they remind me how
your glances pierced my heart.

These lights transfix me:
pink, orange, red, and green,
softly they glow in the distance,
as headlights drift between.

do they twinkle, or is that my imagination?
I no longer know or care,
With no desire to keep track of reality,
I fall into a blank stare.

Notes fly like atoms drifting in empty space, sometimes
colliding into chords, other times spinning around each other
in a complicated dance of mathematical precision.

Transfixed, I am spinning and moving with them
now and then catching upon a melody line
at other times getting struck by large chords
which suddenly appear out of nowhere.

Now time itself has
quit behaving
correctly
perhaps a drunken frat boy
is playing
with
Newton's metronome.

It is strange how the notes trickle
but do not splash
I am not sure whether
they are moving, or I.

With ease I violate the conservation of energy;
I always thought it was a rather silly idea anyways.

I am tired of searching for something
and then pretending to find it, when really,
it never existed to begin with.

I should mention the colors...
somewhere a mad physicist is playing with his lasers,
and the pure tones look very pretty.
But now the modes are going out of phase and some
higher order terms have come back from the dead.
It's more chromatic than a scherzo by Schoenberg
played by John Cage on a piano that has been smashed
with beer bottles and dragged through the slums of Warsaw.

In endless error I am hurled...
my anchor line broken, my compass cracked,
and probably demagnetized as well,
adrift without a paddle,
I feel I will be blown haphazardly across the universe,
forever.


Poor Poem
Gentle reader:
the rhymes here are pretty lame
the language quite inane.
I have tried to make it rhyme
in measure and proper time
but I have to admit,
stuff doesn't always fit.
I don't have much good to say
and I bid you go your way,
lest you waste your time
looking for verse sublime.

This is my poor poem,
the existential rant
of a driveling sophocant
explaining his days and ways.

Late hours, memories lay in dusty corridors.
I drift slowly through tedious neurotic algebras,
and the ravages of deep thought make me weary.
I adopt a pastoral mood.

Dancing among butterflies and flowers divine,
under the silver apple of the moon.
A Chopin nocturne drifts amongst the night air.

My mind lingers and then malingers
I feel as though it floats.
Time flows without end.
I fly amongst the cleansing winds.
But just as time marches 
so the beat of my heart
brings me back to earth.
 

darkness
the void is dark.
my dreams are
stretched before me
like an event horizon.
do I dare?
do I dare?
do I dare go down that path?

The path I've been down before,
and back again, only to turn around?
I know its meanderings, its dead ends,
they only lead to madness! 
Perhaps once more, I will go,
to account and recount my loss. 
I will try to build something
out of the nothingness that remains.
A shelter perhaps.
But from what?
A shelter from myself.
A shelter from the pain.
Do you remember the fresh spring rains?
and the bright summer sun?
Do you remember the autumn leaves?
and the somber snows of winter?
I know these things through you.
Spring was a romance,
summer a comedy,
fall was a satire,
and winter a tragedy.
I know these things through you.


Tangerine dream
the smell of the eternal feminine lingers in the cold dry air.

the air vibrates
as static sweeps through it.

hisssyyyhissyyyhisssssssssssss

In the air dust floats
with chaotic motions.

beyond the known,
beyond the knowable,
beyond the self.

glimmer
pop!
glow

LED!
laser!
cathode ray!

Full of obsession,
in a circle of confusion:
orange fuzzballs,
scarlet circles,
a somber green dot,
bursts of laser light.

Dead metal,
broken machines,
smashed concrete dust,
a vibrating transformer.

Borken borken, in the case!
a sicky sticky slobby beat--
a honey diffracting metal sheet,
with a slow glow flow pace.

break the night,
break the day,
break the broken dream away.

Caught in the trance
of a laser light dance,
I will follow my desires
through cold electric fires.

Geometrical Poem 1

no things know nothing nothing know things no
things know nothing no no nothing know things
know nothing no things things no nothing know
nothing no things know know things no nothing
nothing know no things things no know nothing
things nothing know no no know nothing things
no things nothing know know nothing things no
know no things nothing nothing things no know


0 and 1

There is a universe between 0 and 1
I tried to look for myself there:
caught between nothingness and being.

When I looked at zero I saw nothing
but it was indeed something.

When I looked at one I saw something
but it was indeed nothing.

And being and nothingness were one.
 


© 2008 Dan Elton