*****

1. IMMORTALITY AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE

Immortality 

Is possible 

At the end of the Universe

Accept the following as facts

Subjective time 

Is the time we live in

Subjective time

Is based on the overall 

Information-processing rate

Consequently

Subjective experience of

Life’s duration 

Is based on

The total information processed

Consequently

Life’s duration 

Can be measured in terms of 

The total information processed

Can you process the information

That the Universe shall come to an end?

Now then

***

The open cosmology

Is how the Universe will end

Or

The closed cosmology.

The open cosmology 

Theory

Famously

States that

The Universe will infinitely continue to expand

As a result

The temperature of the Universe will approach 

Absolute zero

The sentients

Will experience a dramatic 

Decrease

In their 

Information processing rate 

Time will pass so rapidly

Subjective time

That is

That a year will seem like minutes

The sentients

Will experience their life 

To be very short 

Compared to their chronological ages

But also

The efforts of

The sentients

To maintain their body temperature

As 

The temperature of the Universe will approach 

Absolute zero

Will ultimately be futile

Which is a rather grim scenario all around and interests us not

The closed cosmology

Does

***

The closed cosmology

Theory

States that 

The Universe will not infinitely continue to expand

That the present expansion of the Universe will reverse

And the Universe will

Collapse

As a result

The temperature of the Universe will approach

Infinity

As the Universe collapses 

And its temperature approaches infinity

The sentients

Will experience a dramatic

Increase 

In their

Information processing rate

And 

Consequently

Their

Subjective time

As the

Information processing rate

Approaches

Infinity

In 

The last three minutes of the Universe

The sentients 

Will be processing at such a high 

Information processing rate

That their

Subjective time

Will be infinitely long

The last three minutes of the Universe 

Will be infinite

The sentients

Living in

The last three minutes of the Universe

Will therefore experience 

Immortality

As the Universe ends

***

I hope I am around

As the Universe collapses

There are two ways to prolong the longevity of sentient beings

One is 

To survive as long as possible

The other

Is to look for a means to increase the

Information processing rate

Drugs such as 

Caffeine are known to

Increase

The

Information processing rate

The effect

However 

Is minor

Some more serious

Drugs such as 

Metamphetamine

Produce more major changes

However

They are also dangerous

Did you know

That crystal meth was once used to cure hay fever?

Can it make you immortal?

Death seems to run in my family

People die from it

I hope I am around 

As the Universe collapses

2. LITERATURE

Yes, it could begin this way, right here, just like that, in a rather slow and ponderous way, in this neutral place that belongs to all and to none, where people pass by almost without seeing each other, where the life of the building regularly and distantly resounds. 
I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little see-saw of the right throbs and the wrong.
My name is Howard W. Campbell Jr.
How do you do. 
One of the luckiest accidents in my wife’s life is that she happened to marry a man who was born on the 26th of September. 
One of many inconveniences of real life is that it seldom gives you a complete story.
Jesus…
I believe I am well prepared on the subject about which you ask to be informed. 
Mother died today. 
Vaughn died yesterday in his last car-crash.
One day in August a man disappeared. 
A long train journey on a late December evening, in this new version of peace, is a dreary experience. 
I was 37 then, strapped in my seat as the huge 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to Hamburg airport. 
What in the world can have made you leave your haunts in the Lyceum, Socrates, and what are you doing in the portico of King Archon?
The wise traveler travels only in imagination. 
The captain’s first voyage, the beginning of a long and distinguished career on the high seas, had taken place a number of years earlier when his sister, the last surviving relative of his own generation, had sailed back to Scotland to die.
Loneliness lies in the centre of the Kara Sea in the northern Arctic Ocean.
They went overseas to the Varangians and said, “Our land is great and rich, but there is no order in it, come and reign over us.”
The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. 
I shook hands with the skipper and he wished me luck.
It was nearly bed-time and when they awoke next morning land would be in sight.
The night hung obliquely about them, depthless, quiet, and cold, growing quieter and colder as the minutes passed. 
The day broke grey and dull.
Peter Morton woke with a start to face the first light. 
Bateman Hunter slept badly.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. 
Bull, a large and heavyset young man, awoke one morning to find that while he slept he had acquired another primary sexual characteristic: to wit, a vagina. 
I do not vouch for the truth of this story, but it was told me by a professor of French literature at an English university, and he was a man of too high a character, I think, to have told it to me unless it were true.
When I reached ‘C’ Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of the early morning. 
I had been making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother escaped. 
Two of our boys had escaped during the night, so at dawn we still hadn’t left. 
The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way towards the lagoon. 
He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.
Then there was the bad weather. 
Soon it would be too hot. 
For some time I could not make up my mind if I liked Peter Melrose or not. 
I was prepared to dislike Max Kelada even before I knew him. 
I don’t know that I very much liked Landon. 
Second Lieutenant Edward J. Nately III was really a good kid.
All this happened, more or less. 
Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father’s house in Beldover , working and talking. 
Mrs. Hamlyn lay on her long chair and lazily watched the passengers come along the gangway. 
Anna was in the kitchen washing a head of Boston lettuce for the family supper when the doorbell rang. 
Two or three people, hearing sounds of a quarrel in the patio, came out of their rooms and listened. 
The elevator continued its impossibly slow ascent.  
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do; once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversation?’ 
It must have been a Thursday night when I met her for the first time - at the dance hall. 
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
I saw by the clock at the little station that it was past eleven.
She stood in the center of the room, her arms folded across her ample bosom and I could almost see the fires of anger flickering within her. 
It was love at first sight.
The woman might have been sixty or sixty-five.
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
It was a pleasure to burn.
She found me in the evening under the trees that grew outside the village. 
I caught sight of her at the play and in answer to her beckoning I went over during the interval and sat down beside her. 
The bar was crowded.
There were about forty people at Jerry and Samantha’s cocktail party that evening. 
It was a mistake to take Lola there. 
Carl entered the room, placed his raincoat on the back of a chair, and began taking off his clothes. 
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. 
There was the usual insincere little note saying: ‘I wanted you to be the first to know.’ 
It was the strangest murder trial I ever attended. 
Mr. Chalfont ironed his trousers and his tie. 
The communists were the first to appear.
How you have been affected by my accusers, men of Athens, I cannot tell; but I know that they almost made me forget who I was - so persuasively did they speak; and yet they have hardly uttered a word of truth. 
How much of my life has changed, and yet how unchanged it has remained at bottom!
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I have been turning over in my mind ever since. 
Some people lose their sense of proportion; I’ve lost my sense of scale. 
Something has happened to me: I can’t doubt that any more. 
A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sadness.
It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. 
Hell has become, over the years, a wearisome speculation. 
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. 
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. 
I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all.
He did not seem to hear me. 
One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it - it was the black kitten’s fault entirely.

ACTUALLY THE SAME

How often do I wish I was one of those knights of old,

Riding forth into battle for justice, king, and kingdom.

Saving damsels from dragons and evil men abound,

for no other reason than the right one.

Girding myself in the finest plate and the sturdiest shield in the land.

Sometimes I feel like I was born in the completely wrong time altogether. 

Knaves and wenches are bitches and whores and dragons?

Those be corporations. 

My steed a street bike. The damsels these days are in no need of knights for the can defend themselves just fine.

When I look at it this way I guess I’m in the right time, everything is as it was but with a different twist.

As much as I talk I’m definitely glad. I doubt I have what it takes to slay a dragon.

HER EYES ARE THIS

A golden nebula from which all good things spawn from are the eyes on her face.

The way they slow time when she looks at me and when she smiles times stops completely.

Like twin topaz jewels that you’d refuse to set on a stone for fear of ruining their beauty.

To look in those eyes is to realize a truth that most men spend a life time trying to find.

Like most good things though, you stare at this truth and have no idea what it is.

two poems and photo courtesy of travis underwood, © travis underwood 2012

IT SURE IS A GOOD DAY FOR WEEPING

1.

Let’s focus on the living.

These are great nights

for reading, going bankrupt

or killing one’s mistress,

which is not to say

that we won’t sleep:

we will.

But let’s slink off to bed

reluctantly,

unless of course

fantastic sex is waiting.

_

If I hear myself

telling yet another fashionably gifted

narcissistic poet

at some ratty bus stop

or in some empty donut shop

that it’s great sleeping weather,

then I think I’ll have

to shoot myself.

2.

Am I way off base

asserting North Americans,

excluding Canadians (can’t speak for them),

are obsessed with sleeping at night?

What’s wrong with the day?

Didn’t Breton write

we’re born in a bed, make love in a bed

& dream in a bed—

or was that Desnos?

Padgett?

Whatever the case,

I don’t recall anyone

mentioning sleep.

3.

I’ve noticed the internationals

gather at the café well past midnight,

though they certainly

don’t wait for nightfall

to converse in their

native tongues.

I can’t understand anything going on around me—

I only speak English—

but I can still stick my tongue out

at you.

They carry their languages

with them wherever they go,

the same way some people carry

abstraction, sadness or death.

They sure do liven up the place.

  ELEGY FOR THE ECONOMY, ODE TO THE BROAD

[the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum is scheduled to open in the spring of 2012]

If the future looked bleak,

as it so often does,

you wouldn’t find me idly

worrying a razor blade or a bottle of pills

or searching for a conference

to attend;

you’d find

me killing a half

hour in a gallery or

an art museum until

I felt sufficiently

recharged or decadent.

On a really grouchy

morning you’d find me

sitting on the patio

of a café with

a cup of coffee,

black,

no room,

wondering

what extravagant or economical brand

of pure & grandiose schemes the rich & poor

return to on an ordinary day.

Standing

in the sunshine

on the upper level

of the parking ramp

on Grand River Avenue,

watching the crew

transform Zaha Hadid’s

futuristic design,

  the whole shebang

resembling Duchamp’s

nude reclining instead of

descending,

 it hits me

that it won’t even have to

house a single

invention, a single

work of art, its structure

enough, the metal

pleats & vectors

stabbing me in all the

vital places.

two poems and photo courtesy of tim lane, © tim lane 2011

CANNIBAL WEDDING

When two cannibals start dating, they’re just like us.

First awkward date includes coffee or alcohol.

Maybe some furious necking in a cab or in the hallway 

Near the restroom. When she got home, she looked in the mirror

And she looked the same as yesterday.

But in her own eyes she saw something different.  

She saw who he saw.

Aristophanes’ creation myth was never considered,

But its blueprint was etched inside her skull.

When two cannibals continue seeing each other seriously,

It’s no different from when you started dating your lover.

The bathroom door is kept closed during use

Even though the conversations were so damned interesting

And hard to pull away from. Sheets are washed at such 

Rapid pace from wear, at least one cannibal cancels a long-held

Gym membership. One cannibal says, “You make me a better person.”

This makes the other cannibal cry. Their mouths meld together 

Wet with tears. The feast was quite fine. To quote August Wilson,

The cannibals “try to blast a hole into forever.” They stay in all weekend

Continuing a decently organized search-and-destroy mission that always ends

In a self-absorbed celebration. But when one cannibal finds out

That the other cannibal was still fucking his ex for the first month they were seeing each

other—When things were so perfect and intense—the cannibals stop seeing each other.

Thankfully, the erring cannibal certainly knew enough about how Hollywood

Defines romance to show up unannounced with flowers and cries his heart out

Until their mouths pressed together sticky with tears, and they decided

(With their breasts, penises, vaginas and assholes, mouths and eyes)

To face infinity together. At the cannibal wedding those invited looked upon them.

Those who had loved and lost cried. And those who had never loved but wanted to love

cried.

And she, who had looked inside herself and knew that it’s just fucking wrong

To expect another person to fill one’s vessel, cried too because she was the loneliest.

She was the one person whose heart needed to be eaten the most, and so it was.

 

MAXIMINUS THRAX

Power must be seized by force

One must recollect all blows

But be free to let other things be forgiven

 

With a large army one can do nothing

With a large army that believes in you 

One can do anything

 

Don’t let your army 

See your overgrowth

Don’t let them see you drink wine

And above all, don’t drink wine with them

 

When they kill you 

It means they’ve seen your overgrowth

They’ve seen your moustache hairs fall to the interior of the lip

They’ve seen the nose outgrow the face

They’ve seen the pubic hairs climb through the cotton codpiece

 

As an adult you’ve never stopped growing, towering to eight feet 

And six inches.

And your beard

Only lengthens the effect in the face.

two poems and photo courtesy of amy lawless, © amy lawless 2011