BARRON

Tags

Bishop Robert Barron, Catholic, Heaven, Multiverse, poem, poetry, spiritual, Universe, writing

BARRON

a Catholic scholastic on YouTube
spouting about District 9, The Matrix
and Bob Dylan

did not realize the Universe had
so many channels

so many the music
of the spheres gets (peaks
and troughs) flattened
out to a dull drone

on Netflix the Nazis
are still in New York,
Japanese in
San Francisco

and here I sit
in a reality that could not
be less porous, more alternate

playing wth words trying to
undo the cosmos linguistically
figure out its sublimely secret scrabble

so far
my score so low
(high scores only for
sounds that resonate
between every
conceivable dimension)?

at least that scholastic
does a convincing
glimpse
of Heaven

IN AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE

Tags

alternate history, existence, happiness, identity, loneliness, loss, love, meaning, poem, poetry, The Man in the High Castle

IN AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE

my lover in an alternate
universe
(whom
I have never met)

is reading to me
from an alternate version of
Man in the High Castle

I lie on my back
at peace with the world
unaware of what
true democracy or
a completely loveless life can be

I think about hoping that he
is smart enough to be loving and kind
having no idea how
abject a thing loneliness can be

but whatever the universe you
are lucky, unlucky enough
to find this version
of yourself in
truth is, from resurgent Nazism
there is now
no escape

the dark idea of purity (our worst
political concept) already infiltrating
freely seeping through
for where is the person
without that part of them in them
that truly needs an Emperor, edict of
a Fuhrer
wants death camps for neighbours
they racially despise

it is only a matter of time before
we find ourselves frogmarched and swastikaed

this world or
another

evil always
resurrects

never truly dies

they reading a text in their universe
no doubt different from the
film of the book I am
watching (alone) in mine

AT ALL

Tags

Alternate universe, love, Parallel universe, poem, poetry

AT ALL

in an alternate universe
we lie parallel

we have been lovers
going on three years

and yet
we have so much to say
so much to enjoy

every moment (and we
never saw
this coming)
a kind of Heaven

once, in a whimsical moment,
you turned to me
with a deep, full-mouth
kiss
expressing your concern
that in another sad, gray,
pale shadow of our universe

we might not be lovers, might
not know this love at all

FIT

Tags

Alien, erotic, female, love, male, philosophical, poem, Poet, poetry, poststructuralist, science fiction, sexual symbolism, touch, Twist in the tail, Universe, wordplay

FIT

there is an alien species
swarming in my bed

their queen
whispering sweet
alien nothings
in my ear

telling me that
we are
made for each
other

her wings
are enough to carry me

and that, in spite
of the tricky
linguistic differences

we are
a perfect fit

DIE SCHLACHT VON BREXIT

Tags

Nazi, poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, satire

I am in a trench wearing
a Hitler helmet
shooting at my grandfather
trying to tell him to
keep his head down or
we both
won’t be in this dream

shout out: “Ich bin dein Enkel. In meinem nächsten Leben bin ich Brite”.

but he does not hear me
I keep firing

Hitler arrives on
his bicycle: message from HQ

his eyes burn with
a raw red and black nationalism
that does not look
like it will have
a good place in mind

I keep shouting, but my grandfather,
history: neither of them hear me

I am
such a good shot, stone cold killer
with this painfully accurate Mauser
with my next bullet
feel I could really
blow his head off

discretion being
the better part

he keeps
his head down

I READ YOUR POEM

Tags

poem, poetry, Universe

I READ YOUR POEM

I read your poem
like a goldfish looking
out from its bowl

everything in your world
so strange, uneasily shifting
yet, I suppose,
on its own terms needing
no second-guessing,
richly convincing

not the glass-
distorted curved
space that
I see
(sometimes the focus
almost on my
bowl itself
sometimes stretched out
to infinity)

little fish that I am
I have had my dreams
since small fry of
expanding my universe to
that of great white shark

though me and
my
tiny sea

have not travelled far, few countries visited
few worlds explored
— such a sad
self-
limiting fact

unless we include (and why not include)
all those trips, those horrendous swims
straight through the
ragged-toothed jaws
of Hell
and back.

PRETTY MUCH

Tags

poem, poetry, science fiction, Universe

PRETTY MUCH

this is not
the life
or death of
a SciFi addict

no alien embryo
eating through my chest
(I keep looking; I keep
looking)

no hive-mind, machine-
generated computer simulation
sucking up
my consciousness

no black hole at which
event horizon
I look back and
can see
no history

just wait for my molecules to
be turned into peanut butter

or slip into
another universe

pretty much
like this

BLUE PILL

I took the blue pill
followed by
another blue pill
to be on the safe side

immediately a
scrumptious soft sofa
almost swallowed me
(marshmallow fallow,
cumulus cloud)

and there and then
the flat screens came, hologrammed
in from nowhere, pure
plasma TV
dangling
from the ceiling

zillions of channels all (thank God)
not quite the same

and so I wondered
(following the Schrodinger cat
in me)
whether it
would be Mars rusty desert
I would find myself traversing
(from rabbit hole
to worm hole) having
swallowed that red pill

and now with Vergil and Dante
on track through the Inferno
to such a
different parallel universe

not a couch left to speak of
or pair of Matrix armchairs
in any of its galaxies

just those with
the power

called upon to be heroic
when they find
themselves sacrificed
in the
vanity of
the presumption that
every battle
with evil is
some non zero sum game

STUCK

STUCK

and where do
these “alternative
facts” come
from?

from the parallel universe
in the cookie jar

being mindful that when
you quantum leap
in there to grab
an alternative
cookie

you do not end up (as in
the great Simian joke)
with your
fingers (small
as they
are) stuck