How do you pick the stuffs
To lug along on journeys to the stars?
What data-computation’s marrow flesh
Do you jot-tittle jettison or packet tie
For Alpha circumnavigations? bright folk came to ask.
Your task, I said, is: clear your heads!
Stuff the equations!
Take everything! titanic, super-giant,
Mega-minute small.
Ship tons of dumb confetti,
Trolley tickets!
Rosebowl seat-stubs!
Take it all!
All??????!
Professors rhubarb necks empurpled as they
Spun to
Flay and flense me
With their gaze!
My craze for any stupid damned old briarpatch fact
Backed them away.
What say?!!
They burned me small.
White alum pursed their lips,
What, ships, they cried, vast rocket ships
Crammed full of seashell nonsense, toast-crumbs, menus,
Everything?
Tributes to lost God Omnivia?
Dumb trivia?
Trivia! I cried, But, look!
Great whales survive on trivia!
Blue whales, the gray, the white?
All night!
I said
They gargle sloughs of junk
They dunk in jeroboams of brit!
So I, with molecules of sifting pollen words
Turn gunk to wit!
I imitate the way whales suck their teeth
And gasp great hurricanes of microscopic breath
Whose bright bacterial bods and bloods
Save avalanching whales from death.
What take to space, you ask, and at what cost?
For want of a snail, all Mars is lost!
So film-tape-keep-bank-sum
A for Alice Faye,
Z for zounds.
Mute not the smallest sounds, blink not bacteria
Fetch life from every class,
Crop devil-grass, bindweed, fresh clover,
Your soul the rover
From Aardvark A to D for DeHavilland, Olivia.
Recall the whales, the gray, the white
Who feed on night and brit, survive,
Thus stay alive…on trivia!