TO MK
Meghan, once a man who’s run
Through all his options, chooses one,
His choice appears, suggests Bergson,
Necessitated;
But any choice, once made, bar none,
Would seem as fated.
The false conclusion that one draws is
Sustained by cants of causal laws. Is
There a fluke? An “unknown cause” is
The prompt suggestion;
The answer, which stems hems and haws, is
To beg the question.
The causes current cant endorses
Are market and genetic forces.
I waive all those too-handy sources
Of self-excuse
To beat that deadest of dead horses—
That slow-cooked goose—
Which ten years in I’m at a loss to
Name, or put a valid gloss to.
It would be nice to say “star-crossed two,”
Or say our craws
Were throttled by an albatross—to
Import a cause,
Instead of owning each ad-libbed
For why we, at those junctures, jibbed.
You, when, while my swain’s heart a-fibbed,
You quashed my suing
With that canard, so clearly cribbed—
Viz., nothing doing,
Since “second times around the block
Never worked”—a total crock,
As if you knew (from what great stock
Of re-romance?) of
A cause for squashing them en bloc
And in advance of
The twists of this proposed adventure.
Now, when there’s blenching, sure, the blencher
Is in her rights, so there’s no censure
Here attaching;
And granted, if I were the wencher,
Cradle-snatching,
You ended our first passade
Indignant with, the same three odd
Decades still contrived to nod
Between our tallies;
But what I’d hoped was that the squad
Of too-banal he’s
Who’d formed your six-year losing streak
Had proved how, I don’t say unique
Our intersection was, just freak
Enough you’d sabby
How wishful were the hopes you’d eke
A match less shabby
From such confessedly slim pickin’s.
Except you passed. And why the dickens?
That things work out is each spring chicken’s
Firm conviction,
Howbeit, as resistence thickens,
It proves a fiction,
And you, though well past Doctor Seuss,
Could cop to that. But what excuse,
Once you’d cut your next nebbish loose
And sworn off trifling,
Can my sagacity adduce
For that night stifling
The really viable pre-nup
I was intent on bringing up?
And whether you’d have answered “Yup!”
Or “Nosiree!”
Is not the point—which is, the cup
Came round to me,
And all I thought to do was: dally.
Except that proved our Grand Finale:
Instead of down one more blind alley,
An evil Fate
Led you to a less-banal he—
It seems, your mate,
And so there was no second shot to.
Oh, well. It seems less pain’s a lot to
Expect of life—though I hope, not to
Expect for yours;
When one’s about to bid ta-ta to
One’s own, old scores,
Old flames, old hopes, old “roads not taken”
Are casualties one has no stake in.
A great peace falls; like a Van Aken
The outre-tombe
Perspective such world lines pancake in
Produces calm,
And one looks down, like those who climb
To mountain peaks, on space and time.
I gotta tell ya, they’re sublime,
These moral heights;
One goes through motions, but, like mime,
The winds one fights,
The walls one bumps, the girl one missed,
In some dimension, don’t exist.
The rules of chivalry insist
That one pretend
That winds still blow, that walls resist,
And hearts still rend,
However little one may want to;
But promise, when you cotton on to
How fluky was our liaison, to
Perform a wake
Above the grave that I’ve long gone to—
I’ll undertake
To turn a little in my coffin.
Till that day comes, perpend: the boffin
Calls mind a possible one-off in
The cosmic waste;
If so, and boons, which don’t come often,
Go unembraced,
The loss (as silly as this sounds)
Is really cosmic—it redounds:
The universe indeed abounds
In quarks and mesons,
And stars blow up, and orbs make rounds
For causal reasons,
But there is not an ounce of brain
To register the loss or gain.
Indifferency that inhumane
Made Pascal cower;
When true loves, though, go down the drain,
Swears Schopenhauer,
The universe, which does keep score,
Compassionates the lost rapport
By groaning deep—once each, no more.
And may it just’ve?
I thought I heard it twice before.
This time it must’ve.
Meghan, once a man who’s run
Through all his options, chooses one,
His choice appears, suggests Bergson,
Necessitated;
But any choice, once made, bar none,
Would seem as fated.
The false conclusion that one draws is
Sustained by cants of causal laws. Is
There a fluke? An “unknown cause” is
The prompt suggestion;
The answer, which stems hems and haws, is
To beg the question.
The causes current cant endorses
Are market and genetic forces.
I waive all those too-handy sources
Of self-excuse
To beat that deadest of dead horses—
That slow-cooked goose—
Which ten years in I’m at a loss to
Name, or put a valid gloss to.
It would be nice to say “star-crossed two,”
Or say our craws
Were throttled by an albatross—to
Import a cause,
Instead of owning each ad-libbed
For why we, at those junctures, jibbed.
You, when, while my swain’s heart a-fibbed,
You quashed my suing
With that canard, so clearly cribbed—
Viz., nothing doing,
Since “second times around the block
Never worked”—a total crock,
As if you knew (from what great stock
Of re-romance?) of
A cause for squashing them en bloc
And in advance of
The twists of this proposed adventure.
Now, when there’s blenching, sure, the blencher
Is in her rights, so there’s no censure
Here attaching;
And granted, if I were the wencher,
Cradle-snatching,
You ended our first passade
Indignant with, the same three odd
Decades still contrived to nod
Between our tallies;
But what I’d hoped was that the squad
Of too-banal he’s
Who’d formed your six-year losing streak
Had proved how, I don’t say unique
Our intersection was, just freak
Enough you’d sabby
How wishful were the hopes you’d eke
A match less shabby
From such confessedly slim pickin’s.
Except you passed. And why the dickens?
That things work out is each spring chicken’s
Firm conviction,
Howbeit, as resistence thickens,
It proves a fiction,
And you, though well past Doctor Seuss,
Could cop to that. But what excuse,
Once you’d cut your next nebbish loose
And sworn off trifling,
Can my sagacity adduce
For that night stifling
The really viable pre-nup
I was intent on bringing up?
And whether you’d have answered “Yup!”
Or “Nosiree!”
Is not the point—which is, the cup
Came round to me,
And all I thought to do was: dally.
Except that proved our Grand Finale:
Instead of down one more blind alley,
An evil Fate
Led you to a less-banal he—
It seems, your mate,
And so there was no second shot to.
Oh, well. It seems less pain’s a lot to
Expect of life—though I hope, not to
Expect for yours;
When one’s about to bid ta-ta to
One’s own, old scores,
Old flames, old hopes, old “roads not taken”
Are casualties one has no stake in.
A great peace falls; like a Van Aken
The outre-tombe
Perspective such world lines pancake in
Produces calm,
And one looks down, like those who climb
To mountain peaks, on space and time.
I gotta tell ya, they’re sublime,
These moral heights;
One goes through motions, but, like mime,
The winds one fights,
The walls one bumps, the girl one missed,
In some dimension, don’t exist.
The rules of chivalry insist
That one pretend
That winds still blow, that walls resist,
And hearts still rend,
However little one may want to;
But promise, when you cotton on to
How fluky was our liaison, to
Perform a wake
Above the grave that I’ve long gone to—
I’ll undertake
To turn a little in my coffin.
Till that day comes, perpend: the boffin
Calls mind a possible one-off in
The cosmic waste;
If so, and boons, which don’t come often,
Go unembraced,
The loss (as silly as this sounds)
Is really cosmic—it redounds:
The universe indeed abounds
In quarks and mesons,
And stars blow up, and orbs make rounds
For causal reasons,
But there is not an ounce of brain
To register the loss or gain.
Indifferency that inhumane
Made Pascal cower;
When true loves, though, go down the drain,
Swears Schopenhauer,
The universe, which does keep score,
Compassionates the lost rapport
By groaning deep—once each, no more.
And may it just’ve?
I thought I heard it twice before.
This time it must’ve.
