Poetry Break: "The Fullness of Time"

A Little Bit of Stellar Twisting

Not really time for a poetry break, but since time is running out -- end being near and all that -- I'll post this apocalyptic warning to all you paynim out there:

The Fullness of Time

High clouds come crashing to the ground; rocks drift
aloft, slipped from the fingers of the earth,
who in her second juvenescence finds
she has forgotten laws that she gave birth.
Poor senile girth.

Time sputters, gutters, threatens to go out;
the world turns 'round in fits and gazes whole
upon her grown decrepitude. Abrupt,
she wheels about and totters off her pole.
Diurnal toll.

Space bends and twists till all tensility
is gone; fatigued, the earth releases her
cold grip to fall into the crack of doom,
eternal gloom from which she shall not stir.
So pity her.

Why did I write a poem like this one? I was sitting upstairs in Cafe Mediterranean (click Photos, then VE65) on Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue back in 1985 thinking about the word "tensility" and wondering if the gravitational bending of the space-time continuum would cause it fatigue -- similar to metal fatigue.

Seriously, I was wondering about that. But I wasn't wondering about it seriously. Rather, I was just letting my history-of-science mind wander playfully over things like the fact that Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend used to sit in the same cafe back in the sixties and argue about the history and philosophy of science, which probably associated in my mind with the entropic end of the universe and various endtime scenarios from diverse religious systems, which led to random thoughts about...

I never claimed that this was all logical.