Catching Up, Round 2

I'll have Galapagos goodies soon, but in the meantime, here are two poems from July lamenting about many deaths, and griping about the devout and their discontents:


Arms

Corrine could fist a bicep to take down Rosie the Riveter,
Defiant nose ring chimes
I take this world in love,
I take this world by storm.
The pigtail declaration that promised decades
of standing akimbo astride the world crinkled ugly
from the Valley of the Jolly ho ho ho.
But one small blade can slice two arms.
Giant topples three days before Amy,
while villagers not crushed by flailing limbs
are reminded that the gentlest women leading pedestal lives
leave embossed eddies of dust like a falling Saddam,
a Lenin laid fallow.

In the photograph, he stood between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie,
one arm around each Smith.
He was not the dream investor he appeared to be.
He was an arms dealer.

Summer camp is optimal for upper-arm development.
Breast stroke, slipknot tie, slow crawl, secret tryst,
ring around the rosie.
But on the weekend of Amy pedestals,
some arms prove bigger than others.
Beach coagulation is guaranteed
unless your stroke can pull you from shore,
no coming up for air,
no sex on the beach,
no freeze-frame of a city center in shattered glass.

He would have been Japan’s greatest slugger,
but for George chiding “Fat toad, fat toad.”
He hadn’t held a bat in ten years.
He could hold a weapon of arm destruction.

Balasubramanian has studied such things. If each neuron is dense-packed in pyramids of orange, the brain burns hotter, a sacred fire. If the neuron gets bigger, the myelin sheath thicker, we become stupid before our time. The thinner, smaller neuron would seem to be optimal, but the ion channel opens more frequently, the synapse fire gets leakier, schizophrenia predominates.
We’re stuck.
Unless a dozen gooey brains can chant as one.
Join hands.

This is the bench press for Amy.
This is the arm curl for Corrine.
This is the lateral roll for Utoya names I will never know.
I’ve tapped out the book of brain teasers,
the bottle of lecithin is empty,
two good arms are all that’s left.

Loring Wirbel
July 30, 2011
Copyright Loring Wirbel 2011

No, God Must Bend
(Use of the comma in the title is optional)

Warren Jeffs and Kher Mohammed
were skipping class the day they covered
that which is Caesar’s.

I transcend cyclically in next-plane chimes,
but am mired to shit and blood,
the particular instantiation
of the long arm of which law,
which law indeed.

When the next strident radio jock declares
every knee must bend,
I’ll say “You first, God.
You first.”

Loring Wirbel
July 31, 2011
Copyright Loring Wirbel 2011