The beaten knife

The 2000 year old knife was found by a Luddite child

Rusted, covered with muck

And on close observation the blunt end was hammered or beaten

The marks had puzzled experts deciphering its meaning

Most knives made in the Gen X period 

Were smooth 

Yet the region where the knife was found that used to 

Be called Switzerland

Known for its 

Hard Cheese 

Pumpkins

And Watches

The archeologists decided to imitate their diet by having one group eat

Raclette and Pumpkin gratin for 6 months

And another group 

Do the same thing while wearing Rolex watches.

The simulation was arduous, yet the findings revealed  both groups

Developed 

Acute Tendonitis 

Cutting hard cheese and pumpkins on a daily basis meant

The knives had to be super sharp however

Even so it was 

Radical living

Yet the act of repetitive slicing was -if anything

A recipe for sore tendons in their arms and shoulders.

Hence, for a population suffering of the sort

The logical step was to take a mallet and 

Bang Bang Bang!

Hit the blunt side of the knife

Until the aforementioned Hard Cheese or Pumpkin

(And some pumpkins were found be be harder than Cheese and

vice a versa)

Would be sliced without ado

The watches most certainly helped in the timing of the 

Chopping up

And down time.

How smart GenX was, no one would have guessed

They were resilient and reactive

Having little or no muscle from spending years in front of

Screens

They lacked protein

Bang beat-beating on the backside of a  knife,  their lives

Depended  on it.

Dating Seahorses and the caged fish

It was after a divorce

Bert the Seahorse was taking an 

Open Source Correspondence course

On Seahorses potential for manufacturing 

Rose quartz

There he met Elena

So different, so fresh

She could intertwine her tail like an acrobat

She swam through sharp coral reefs without a

Hard hat

Her eyes were crystalline 

Her skin taught over her fragile bones

Bert invited her for a shrimp salad course

And he wanted to show how his hippocampus was 

Developed

Yet every time he thought of hippocampus

The word Hippopotamus came out of his mouth

(The audience repeats Hippopotamus 5 times)

Hippopotamus! Hippopotamus! Hippopotamus! Hippopotamus! Hippopotamus!

"Hippocampus!" -interjects Burt

"Can you see my memory?" looking at Elena and pointing at his head

She looked flustered 

And as they awaited the UberEats delivery

And waited

And waited

He recited the 25,000 types of fish

Which included their addresses and 

Zip Codes

Elena's tail twisted so hard

It could have strangled a horned toad.

Elena looked down at Burt so hard

He thought his brain would explode

It was a good hour when

The delivery fish arrived with an injury -a missing fin

Said a water pump in a fish tank sucked him

And banged him against the head of a fake deep sea diver

The shrimp salad was 

Butchered

"Elena, Elena, don't go!"

But Bert wanted to show his Seahorsehood to his date

So he threw the yellow delivery fish into

A caged box

A timed punishment without a tip

And a negative comment on the App

Would it save the courtship?

Would it crumble in a blip?

Could Elena find another shrimp to stick up?

"Bert, Bert find me some fresh grub!

Your hippocampus might not suck

But that shrimp ain't enough!"

And the Yellow fish

That BAD Yellow fish

(That passing fish starred at

Wondering what BAD it had done?)

It better, it better

Be better off making subway sandwiches

In a sub.

Sinners and Dimmers: story of a Light bulb flickering uncontrollably awaiting an angel.

Audience divided in 3 groups and say out loud:  1) poire" 2)pomme" and "courgette" 3) and  4)"This is a world or Sinners and Dimmers"  when directed.

(Explain that these are the forms on new lightbulbs today.

Intro:

The poet, following an electrician guide,  goes high and low, a hellish journey with tense emotions, seeking 

the elusive lightbulb with 1200 lumens.

A second electrician, dressed in red, tells  him that he can use this 3400 lumens bulb with a dimmer.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

I can variate the frequency!

I can variate the frequency!

All you need to do is change the Schneider circuit breakers to Holms 

Which

Doubling input  roaming voltage frequency 

and lowering the Amps

Can supersede the oncoming flickering glare

Like that of a suspicious silhouette of a lonely car on the road

Moving slowly at night as a scantily dressed lady impatiently waits at 

A dark bus stop, stares fixedly at the blaring headlights.

"I can't see!"

          --------------------------------------------------

"But why 1200 lumens?" Wonders the electrician dressed in white.

"A Lightbulb Tourist 

I Am" Insists the Poet,

4)"This is a World of Sinners and Dimmers" (Repeat x 5)

I have gone from store to store, from country to country, seeking

Lumens, dimmers, variators

 -because the light has to be...

I can't describe it, subtle?

And 3600 Lumens  in the form of a 

1) POIRE  2)Pomme    3) COURGETTE" (Audience repeats 3 times)

(Why make a bulb like a courgette?) Is too much!"

"Relax", said the electrician, "If not you too shall be 

Fli-Flickering                        (hitting the remote control)

And Snickering 

Talking like a film noir detective

Having lost trace of that one Lightbulb that 

Got away."

"Got away? Was it too disguised as a Tourist?" asked the Poet

"But I saw it, I had it in my own hands!"

And why a 1) POIRE? (Audience says Poire)

Poet: "It's rounded like Babar,

It could be in a Church, a Museum

Lighting up a painting that leaves 

Tourists fein-fa-fa-feinting.

(Poet's voice starts to break up like a flickering lightbulb)

But why are you fading?" The Poet turns towards the electrician,

"I dreamt I saw -there was an alarmà- a Cookie Monster -a burgler... his cookies all on the floor!"

"You're fa-fading, those wires, is that the di-dimmer?

"The cookies were crushed, it was at the Vatican."

Can you he-hear the Po-Pope singing "Urbi et Orbi?"

Do-don't didn'tay fi-find 'dose cookies in the dark?

"Indulgentiam, absolutionem, et remissionem ominum peccatorum vestrorum, spatium verae et fructuossae paenitentiaeeee"

In the Da-da-dark? Did ya see? Did ya hear? It's flickering in da-da-dark!"

"I lost the si-si-signal

I am lost!"

POIRE! APPLE! Courgette!  (Audience 1,2,3)

CLOSING Narrator:

As you can see, no Angel came to the rescue, no Angel could anti-flicker those lumens made to act in an irrational way. 

And so I ask you a moment of silence for all Circuit Breakers, fuses, Sinners and Dimmers.

(Je vous demande une moment de silence pour tous disjoncteurs et fusibles, des pêcheurs et variateurs.)

END

I USB U *story of a noun turned into a verb

 

I lost my USB

I looked everywhere

Even up the birch tree

And if I had it on me swimming in the 

Dead Sea

The Salt would have erased its memory

I texted all my friends to be 

BOLO     (be on the lookout)

My USB had an illustration of a 

Golden Y 

Nothing to do with my name Ubaldo

It had

A terrabyte -or two

As its memory had a thousand pictures

Anonymous faces 

Unlike those seen in police manhunts

Faces and pixellated faces

Provocatively unveiled

That Chuck Close could often paint

And hang with one nail.

I USB U

Love

"CO2 you too!"

She repeated in his dreams

Breathless

Nothing demeaning

My

Sore eyeballs streaming

Over irrecognizable body parts

The FBI  alerted

For a few bitchy bitcoins 

Hidden in the key

Given their wobbly market disequilibrium 

Might as well ask a woodchuck to  estimate their value

You, U USBed me

Love

Your notes  

On giving antibiotics to Bees

 To build hives back better asap

And Bob, your boyfriend, had USBed me

In 2003

All those notes 

Still I failed the degree

Because some of the docs on Bees had no merit 

And some of the docs had less than no merit

I was USBed 

Peed 

Didn't know what to feel

With all the memory overflow.

Chaos Vaccine

It's been two months

Since the time that he replaced his windshield wipers

And every time they would swash 

He would scream hogwash

Bob was so upset 

'Cause they weren't wiping correctly

And out of wiper fluid

Bob added  mouth wash 

Which did the job but cost a fortune

Bob scrolled for hours, days, months, on the web

To try to understand why his wipers didn't wipe

Leaving terrible unforgiving streaks on 

His windshield meaning that while driving 

He

Either had to look over or under the streak

A trail of un-wiped water

Similar to the trail of a slug

Except it was dangerous.

His life was unravelling

Like the yarn of a knitted sweater

Often late to work

He was given several warnings

"You're not doing your job, Bob!"

"You're taking too long, Bob!"

So he went to the doctor 

He explained

How

Seemingly due to one windshield wiper

His life had taken a turn

The doctor, from behind her glasses

Pushed "Enter" on her keyboard 

And said: "You appear to have ChaosChrom22

It's a form of Chaos

That typically starts with a meaningless event 

That

Balloons, inflates into something magnanimously disturbing."

The doctor once again pushed "Enter"

and said,

"I have a dose I will give to you right away."

Licking her upper lip from left to right which made Bob think of his 

Windshield Wiper

After the shot

Bob trotted out of the office

Still feeling distraught 

He wondered why Science didn't put him in

The Comfort Zone

He wondered if the Science was eluding him or Science was Chaotic?

Was not ChaosChrom22 a manifestation 

Of a State of Exaggeration

That had no place in society?

Hence, Bob deduced

Chaos was an outcast

Not to be embraced 

Rather fettered with manicles

 Chains swinging and ringing like

Disgruntled bells

Raging

Bob drove home in the rain

Looking above and under the streak of water

That wasn't wiping  properly

He thought of the doctor pushing "Enter"

He wanted to

But didn't know how.

Come Catch Chaos *

Behold!

It's not in my sauce

A posse

Who thinks Chaos is a toss?

(The French would say, it's fausse)

For Camus to be absurd or chaotic was a toss

Fractals, the butterfly effect

(How a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can

Cause a tornado in Texas)

Chaotic, absurd, surreal?

When a person of such leanings is considered a

Jerk

One has to adjust the parameters in a non-linear system 

To instill "hyper-jerk" conditions.

The posse of an entertainer trekking across

Icelandic Moss

Wearing from head to toe

Hugo Boss

This is before WWI

When bloody apple sauce filled the trenches

And the Red Cross was just a tick under the skin

They,

They, are always in my thoughts

So I take a crayon in a cow house and draw

1/2 Pie RCµ

According to Berkhoff, Kolmogorov, Cartwright and Littlewood,

A jerk can only be turbulent in fluid motion

Yet when in non-periodic oscillation with radio circuits

The subject withstands what is sub-understood

If you think and earthquake is chaotic then

Try to eat a Mars bar with organic Ginsing,

Then walk on a tightrope that on respective sides is held by

A Fascist and a Liberal

Stop in the middle of the walk and write a new Chaos Theory that

Involves shadow water equations, the "non-ripple" effect and the 

Brazilian butterfly effect that this time, creates a tornado in Alaska instead of

Texas.

It may be possible to conclude that taking into account robotic passive walking dynamics 

Implying robots can walk and then walk some more

A topsy-turvy tumultuous knitting of a multicoloured Missoni yarn beyond 

34.42 km in length,

With no apparent structure

No sleeves or neck

Is a best seller 

For Consumer Digest.

*Elements of this poem are taken directly from the Theory of Chaos

Deep sea fish exploration

Ray was always afraid of going for the dive.

"I  believe in Panspermia*, mom, not this deep hydrothermal vent gibberish you keep talking about."

Dory, a patient mom, took a deep breath, "Dear, dear Ray. Remember what your father said: you are a fish. And the origin of life comes from down there." she said, pointing down with her pectoral fin as she opened her mouth wide. 

"You are old enough to know the elements in chemistry class," she went on, "deep-sea vents spew out bitter alkaline fluid, which is rich in negatively charged hydroxide ions, and that can be the basis for creating life as we know it." 

Mom, you have the memory of a Goldfish. If you look atsugars, and the molecules required to form RNA, we know they can be produced in space. 

"I can't let you off the hook with that Panspermia, or spermia gibberish. Any life riding on the back of a meteorite would be zapped to death with UVs, asta la vista go your RNA Ray. I suggest we go on a deep sea dive so I can show you first hand what life is out there on the bottom of the ocean."

"You hit a snag, mom. You know I'm claustrophobic, and getting into a Bathysphere is the last place you'll see me."

"Didn't you say last month you wanted "The Angler" for your Christmas present?"

"Yes, but you said I would have to pass marine biology at school"

"Well, I'll get it for you but let's go on the Bathysphere!"

Dory was a forward-thinking mom, she had already reserved a Bathysphere for the next day.

*Panspermia is the concept that life may have originated elsewhere in the universe and reached Earth through space travel, potentially by microorganisms or even advanced extraterrestrial beings.