1. FIVE TO PERPETUATE - Torso, Cement, Survival, String Theory, Gravity

The Torso


A thousand years from now, perhaps,
a traveler finds, near an ancient wall,
a twenty-first century artifact,
the torso    of a Barbie doll.


They wash it, mount it, tag it: "Vinyl Trunk
from old-time Ayer, a form revered
in the Cult of Dolls. Beheaded -- hacked
in unknown rites -- the aim unclear,


"because the antique writing,
on magnetic disks,
requires machines
that don't exist."
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Earlier version published 2005 by Iambs & Trochees




Cement - limerick


If you see semi-solid cement
That has not hardened yet, and you dent
It with fancy designs
And a phrase that defines
Randy minds, is your labor misspent?
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Similar version published 2008 online in OEDILF, The Omnificent 
English Dictionary in Limerick Form, under my pen name, joankay.






The Survival of the Motorist


When six-tined flakes
Pile up to make
A four-foot-deep, sealed landscape,
When the Ford is lost
Beneath the frost, 
And won't yield to a handscrape,


Then why not try
Just once -- deny
Ourselves the transportation
In heaps like these.
We'll rent some skiis;
They'll be our adaptation.
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published 2008 in Raintown Review

String Theory Clarified


With strings and membranes
physics is immersed
in hypothetical ulterior dimensions
that posit unperceived a universe
that mirrors our gravitic power.


Yes. Science has elbowed out
old-fashioned atoms
to tie itself with Strings
and micro theories
that disregard our
common reckonings.
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Earlier version published 2007 by Raintown Review.
(Inspired by a New York Times article, "Scientist at Work: Lisa Randall, On 
Gravity, Oreos and a Theory of Everything." Nov. 1, 2005. F:1.)

Gravity


The story that Sir Isaac Newton discovered the Law of Universal Gravity 
by watching an apple fall from a tree may not be legendary...
                                                                                        ---George Gamov, 1962


It was a fall from an apple tree,
far from the plague, in Lincolnshire,
that Isaac contemplated.


Did the apple fall by centripetal motion,
pulled by an irresistible core
as Isaac enumerated?


They say a focus of molten iron
gyres and drags things ever down,
things like the fruit he calculated.


Did he know he'd uncovered the law that rules
the rate of the fall of the malus domestic
as he timed it, then peeled it, and ate it?


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Earlier version published in The Lyric, 2007.