Imagine A Planet

I try to imagine a planet with no predators.

It must necessarily have no life.

Only life competes for resources:

to continue living, to dominate,

some will struggle, will give up, give out,

will be vanquished, will perish, die.

The Universe had no life for eons of time,

and presumably no conscious life to measure it,

but only the building blocks.

Life could not have survived the conditions,

when all was elementary particles creating heat,

explosions, all in chaos, when all was molten or void.

I try to imagine life having never been.

What would that Universe be?

Rock, dust, the nuclear furnaces of stars,

and the empty vacuum of space;

Quarks (Up, Charm, Top,

Down, Strange, Bottom);

Electrons (Electron, Muon, Tau);

Neutrinos (E, Muon, Tau).

There are no grasshoppers, no trees.

Nowhere would there be birds or bees,

no hair or blood, no ears or eyes,

no death to fulfill, no demise.

The great events in history

did not occur, no mystery

did fascinate our curious

minds. There simply never was us.

Imagination

for all it destroys, so it

creates everything

All rights reserved ©2020 Todd Franklin Osborn

I Blossom In Autumn

I wrote this poem for a poetry challenge, of sorts. My Twitter friend, Laura Schmidt, of Voyage Of The Mind, launched a Poetry Day for Monday, July 20, 2020. She's an excellent poet, and her work on Seasons, the theme of this year's Poetry Day, inspired me to write this autumn themed one. If it's good, I credit Laura for challenging me to excel!

I blossom in autumn,
and that's backwards, I know.
I expose my life's inner core
the closer to the snow
I am. When summer is closed,
my closet opens anew,
and I rummage its depths
for petals, deep red and blue.

I thrive in the crispness
of dry, cool, metal air.
I long, in cloudy wanderlust,
for the sight of trees, all bare.
Their pointed, bony fingers reach
to clutch at the starry sky,
to fairly move the sun's arc,
bidding summer's heat goodbye.

I blossom in autumn
with the other flowers shriveled,
their pistols all fired
and their folds all now leveled.
The crush of life's potential
will renew in spring afar,
and until that day, my hopes will chill,
and freeze, us where we are.

Murder

This one has some strong language in it. It's a short I wrote while sitting in a park, enjoying a nice autumn day. It's really strange where the mind goes. I was most likely influenced by then recent Drumpf-era news items, and was feeling pretty sad for we human beings who actually still give a crap about each other. 

The crows began increasing in number, and at first, I gave it no thought. I had been reading in a park on my days off for a while, when there were nice days, enjoying the mellow late summer air, which then became a crisp fall air. I would always go in mid-morning, read for a couple of hours, and then return home for lunch. I held to a kind of ritual: my three block walk, sitting down on my favorite bench, sipping my tea, looking at the trees, listening to the bird songs, then diving into my book, which at this time was Virginia Woolf's The Waves. I didn't notice the crows, at least not apart from the other birds, until my ritual was well established, perhaps 50 pages into The Waves (I was taking my time with it). One day, however, there were about six or seven crows that I suddenly heard, then looked up and saw, a few on a nearby power line, and a few more in the tree roughly above my bench. They were quite noisy that day, cawing loudly as if in intense crow conversation. It actually sounded a lot like an argument. I fixated on them, already being distracted from Woolf, and found their traded banter fascinating.

Over the next couple of weeks, their numbers grew, and I eventually would leave my book at home, deciding to study the "text" of the crows instead. I would listen intently to different groups, and occasionally two individuals would dominate my attention. One day, I arrived at the park at my usual time, initiated my ritual, and within seconds dozens of crows arrived, and kept arriving, and I watched them pour in, feeling more than slightly concerned in an "Alfred Hitchcock" sort of way. As they struck up their conversations, I estimated that there may have been hundreds in the vicinity, not merely dotting, but lining the power lines, and filling several trees, too. Their voices blended in an indistinguishable cacophony, and I sat taking it all in as best I could. I was entranced by it, if also a bit frightened. After several minutes, I began to hear familiar sounds. I could have sworn I heard consonants and vowels occurring in between the bedlam of noise. I tried to mark when I heard one: "there's a distinct P sound; now an S; there's a T...an R...a long O." At first I tried to understand whether it was spelling something - a foolish notion, I thought. After dismissing this, realizing that there were likely far more of these sounds happening than I was able to perceive, I suddenly thought I heard a word amidst the din. I could swear I heard the word "why." I listened even more intently, and heard it again, then again, and it kept popping up, not seemingly in rhythm, but none-the-less more and more distinctly enunciated.

It was clear as a bell by the time I noticed another word: "you." It occurred not long after "why," and that's when I began to discern a rhythm. I started counting the seconds, or beats, between the end of "you" and the beginning of "why." I made it as about 6 beats, as if it was a line from a song. I was sure this had to be some kind of aural hallucination, but then I heard another one. The word "this" came as an offbeat in comparison with the rhythm of the other two words. I was so freaked out at this point that I felt like leaving the bench, but couldn't bring myself to do so. As I tuned my concentration more intensely on what I was sure was a message of some kind, and fully believing that I must be completely mad to think so, I heard the word "are" between the first two words. "Why are you.....this....?" Holy shit, there was a sentence forming: a question. The fragment kept spinning within the aural tornado that I was unable to stop myself from hearing. My senses began to turn to pure emotion, to a kind of manic feeling, yet one so dripping with dread and revulsion that I began to cry, tears streaming down my face while the last few words came suddenly, within seconds of each other. I finally heard the entire revolving question, like a vinyl record skipping, or a looped audio file, and I sat in horror, glad that I was alone in the park so that no one could witness the agonized look on my face, and my limbs folding up to my torso, and no one would call 911 to have medical professionals cart me off to the loony bin. The hundreds of crows had crowded around me, had chosen me, to ask, "Why are you fucking destroying this mother-fucking planet?"

All rights reserved. ©2018, 2020 Todd Franklin Osborn

Swan Dive

Here is a poem I wrote in 2014, when I really thought I would never feel love again, either toward another, or coming from another. That may sound like sad hyperbole, but I remember with clarity the defeatism that was my life then. Writing helps you hold on to these things. Life is a little better now.

Love is falling from a great height, plummeting toward Earth at high speed,

yet it's taking forever from my particular vantage point,

where I stand poised like a Greek archer with my bow,

arrow pulled back, awaiting the perfect shot.

She falls as gracefully as she lived, her long neck pointed straight down,

and lovely white, feathered body stretched out behind her. I can only watch.

I can't save her, nor was I the one who made the kill.

My arrow, tuned to my one open eye, follows her descent, ready to seal the deal,

my arms slowly adjusting the angle downward from my original position,

the right angle attitude straight up toward heaven,

as much directly away from Earth as it could possibly be.

Is she always falling, eternally? Will she ever reach the ground?

My flexed muscles are taught, holding the arrow in place, cocked, fingers cramping,

the tension running from my arms through my shoulders, down my back and into my legs.

I feel this tension everywhere at once, and even my mind blazes with my irrelevant task,

to deliver this load into the lifeless, falling corpse, like a gun with only blanks in a movie,

like a staged fistfight where the blows are faked, yet the audience flinches,

believing that one of the fighters is the victor, and one the vanquished.

Somewhere in the distance, and at some time in the future, Love must strike the horizon,

but I never get to see, and I never know it's done.

I stay fixed to my target while I still have life, stretched in purposeless, quiet agony,

always waiting for the moment when I'll know when to release.

All rights reserved. ©2014, 2020 Todd Franklin Osborn