I set this in a weary month of Spring,
when bees are back inducing
spastic flails and lovers cause
swell love to swell.

And, moths dance around to block out
porchlights in an ecstasy of fluttering;
uttering; elastic; spastic.
Crushed.

Why, you may ask, do I set this in a generic
Noreastern American month of Spring?
For Spring meanings spring (Springing!)
from the brain.

From the heating-system du jour
catnaps of Winter, when there’s just enough
life in this snowburgh to fill
a football stadium;

Through daylight-savings concessions
to those who like to see the oily mud
splash onto their pants as they
exit their cars from work;

Into the Georgian pasture of
a right-side-of-the-brain
sprung
wet dream.

Grasshoppers and crickets sproing
around on thermodynamically-stable
phase equilibria between solid and liquid
sponged ground.

Crushed.

While the budding chemists, engineers
and the odd (very odd) political scientist
are learning that force equals
not mass times acceleration,

But negative height, a concept
only math could justify, times a constant
consonant with the massless, always massless,
spring under study.

Trouncy, boucy, flouncy, pouncy
Fun, fun, fun, fun, fun.
The relieving thing about being a cynic is
I’m not the only one.

—————————————————————

I wrote this during a British literature class (no, really I did study chemistry in college) where I’d finally had it with the instructor’s love affair with Gerard Manley Hopkins and his “Sprung Rhythm.”  So, I tuned out and wrote this in about an hour.  I know, it shows.  It’s not meant to be deep or meaningful, just a bit of fun.

Not all of our work should be deadly serious.  Even Eliot wrote poems for friends about their cats… and they are all awesome.

While re-typing this from memory, I altered the stanzas in these quatrains to see if that works better than the unbridled mess that was the original version.  Small language changes to clean up the more awkward bits as well.

Ta,