The General, who wanted to drop 30 atom bombs
on China, addressed both Houses of Congress,
concluded with,
“Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”
He did not say, “The matrix of the everlasting
remains a triangle. I’ll give you what for
usually means a beating.” I want to understand
random matrices and their applications.
What do I overstand? Of course I grandstand
take my stand, I play a panpipe on a bandstand.
In London, I walk along the Strand toward theaters,
stepping carefully over the homeless
sleeping on metro grills.
I bone myself, my grilled sole at the Savoy.
A random triangle of numbers,
equilateral numbers not likely. History weeps
like a baby in the ruins of Nanking in 1937,
an unknown number of years after Big Bang.
Is it a fact nothing is random, meaningless?
I search for a meaningless word—
stupid, no word is meaningless.
I look for a meaningless full stop past the stars
in the night sky, I sometimes make out Venus.
Without words, punctuation becomes pop art,
red question marks, black commas.
Take the sexual commingling of all living things,
note the triangles in full light and darkness,
the angles, the mob, the overpopulation.
Still Trafalgar Square is almost a hexagon.
I do not count the steps of the winding stair
that leads to the National Gallery—
given the overpopulation, I have no doubt
someone fell down those steps to his or her death.
I attend services at Saint Martin in the Fields,
I drop into a pub for a beer and pie,
I drink till closing time. With a clay pipe,
I blow soap bubbles, X X X.
I blow Churchillian cigar smoke at the universe,
my contribution to the arts and sciences.
Thou shalt not go from concentration camp to a slumlord.
Still it is a given for most they should,
“Do unto others as you would have others do.”
In every bed a triangle, the family romance, odd numbers.
I was told as a child to keep my hands under the table.
Today I have my left swollen foot on the table,
proof, if you want proof, of the everlasting.
“. . .Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”
—2018