Square Roots:
- Increment
- Nightfall
- Revel
- Flatworm
- Glass Eye
- Cubism
- Tirukkuṛaḷ Rules
- The Witch
- Cosmic Plato
- Eden
- The Sea
- First Light
- Rollercoaster
- Motion is Relative
- The Grasslands
1
Increment |Eko|
Growth.
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2
Nightfall |Biter|
Veiled teal:
stars wheel.
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3
Revel |Trier|
Drink the wine !
Dance in time !
Joy be thine !
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4
Flatworm |Quarter|
Bilateral
with no tube in—
side is for all
gas diffusion.
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5
Glass Eye |Fiver|
Bill “the Butcher’s” glass
eye brings quivers stark,
from the knife-tip glance
on the crystal arc—
peal: an icy trance.
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6
Cubism |Sixy|
Mr Boxx’s head is
a cubical graph, a
rhombic hexahedron.
Six square pyramids hide
in eleven nets flat—
so square among boxes.
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7
Tirukkuṛaḷ Rules |Septer|
Couplets on morality
and ethics form the vision:
Tamil book for India.
The spear of bloodletting rests
for the staff of righteousness.
The kingdom withers under
the baton of submission.
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8
The Witch |Ahter|
The crone in her hovel alone
chants by fire crackling under plants
and parts, once having hearts and bones.
Cackles ring from circled incants
of bewitched verses stitched in skin.
The chemic cauldron smokes splenic:
the din stops, the goddess steps—yin
drawn white in the Yule dawn scenic.
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9
Cosmic Plato |Niner|
Stabbing heat of the tetrahedron,
the stars blaze. Tessellation of ground,
the hexahedron squares against water’s
icosahedral flow. The Wind’s round
cheeks breathe miniscule octahedrons
across the compass rose. Beyond the
lapis vault, the constellations rest
in dodecahedrons of darkness.
All is protracted geometry.
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10
Eden |Dasher|
The living clay moistened with saliva
surveys the garden planted midst desert
and mountains, the misty morning sylvan.
Spider webs of neurons weave in response,
glyphs on the melted wax: the human script.
Primal fruit tempts this offshoot of phyla
despite the pine seeds and acorns peppered
cross the fertile soil graced by four rivers.
Subtle, the serpent waits with scales of bronze—
hominids break from paradise eclipsed.
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11
The Sea |Hender|
Ocean followed the molten planet orange,
cooling darker to end in blackest basalt:
the basin. The hissing vapor encircles,
then falls torrential upon the smoking world;
aftermath: the empty primordial sea,
soon to be teeming with specimens of life.
Far out to sea, far below sun: the abyss
harbors ebony pools mythic with monsters,
underlings of the dragon goddess of old.
Near the waves, fish doff plates of armor, swimming
streamlined above the coral branches spreading.
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12
First Light |Duodenur|
Three hundred thousand kilometers per second:
the distant sky imparts the past: sunshine in eight
minutes; Betelgeuse may have flashed super nova
and bloomed nebular under six hundred forty-
two years. Run the clock backwards and the cosmos shrinks
smaller until the whole universe is a star
for seventeen minutes. Hydrogen forms, fuses
into helium, gamma radiation trapped.
The white-hot, dense plasma continues to expand,
cool until three hundred thousand years after the
Big Bang, when light shone, and space became transparent.
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13
Rollercoaster |Treader|
Relentlessly chain clinking to the coaster’s apex,
tightening the gut in preparation for the plunge
when the grapnels of gravity slingshot the thrill ride
headlong toward the singularity in the void,
centered in the starkness of chaos huggermugger
ever waiting the wheels to roll slower to a crawl,
an end like the beginning of the climb to the prime
at the precipice of the tallest parabola:
a bittersweet moment teetering with potential
for g-force helixes and hairpins and barreling
over tracks of amplitude in adrenaline rush;
realizing however, from the start of the ride
that mechanical friction dooms all machines to stall.
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14
Motion is Relative |Fourteener|
Race toward the Western rim and the sun will rise again;
faster: gravity and day will fall behind the raw night
comprised of billions of bygone days darkened by distance —
circadian clocks tick to the calculus of motion.
The Earth with debonair tilt waltzes the changeable moon,
unsettled in unbalance from an impingent outset;
day and night, and the wheel of the seasons offer context.
The grand, seeming quietness of galaxies swirl in space-
time, the fabric unfurled quicker and quicker by darkness
from a quantum source of infinite turmoil, uncertain.
Meaning exists in eddies at the edges of chaos
where sentience manages to emerge from the looking-glass
particles, a floodplain stasis after a white-water
onslaught from a furious spring into cosmic offshoots.
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15
The Grasslands |Fifteener|
Grass carpets continents one fifth the blueprints current the drift
in naps: tropical, temperate, and tundra; flooded, zeric
and montane; grasslands various didst spread to end Cretaceous
—sundry graminoids dotted by sedge, rushed to the forest edge—
[buffalo, blue brush, red oat; purple needle, lemon, and Rhodes]
the drumming hooves heard mutually, with the upping of herbs.
Lo the buffalo ruffled low, snuffling clumps from undersnow,
tallgrass in loess and till, nitrogen from the urine spilled;
bands of pronghorns, prairie-born, munch scrub until the white rump warns.
And grassy-sand springboks prong, and lope shrubland in harem throngs,
while the tommie gazelles sail through shimmer of wildebeest trails,
and galloping Great Steppes, pangaré takhis with buzzcut necks.
Forsooth. Cranes wade swamp blades, as sharp-tooth gators slide Everglades.
Beyond the fence the moocows moo, grazing green pastures like gnu
blue numbers on savanna midst brays of wavering zĕbra.
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Occupation: Poet. 