[Newspoetry] Kerry? Bush? Gee!

[emerick at chorus.net]

I don't like John Kerry.
I don't like George Bush.
I'd like a choice,
but is there one?

Ben thinks no choice lies between them;
they differ only in charismatic ways --
they are like apples, tomatoes, cherries --
ripening red fruits, full of seeds --
an apple is but and yet only an apple,
by any name; appellations in Appalachia,
never fall very from their trees.

Sometimes green stays green,
sometimes it turns golden,
red is the hue most commonly coming up,
the pluperfect image that stays in mind
when apples, tomotoes, cherries are bought
and sold, mere commodities trading places.

The downside of apples comes up
in pulp fiction -- when fruit falls --
overripe, rotting, full of worms,
pecked at by crowing birds,
gnawed by chittering squirrels,
buzzed around by fruity flies
and hummed to sleep by busy bees.

If Adam ate an apple,
if Adam had an apple,
did he pick one up off the ground,
or did Eve bring him one?
Was he an accessory to the crime,
before or after the fact,
or was he a principal perpetrator,
a co-conspirator in his own fall?

His own defense counsel argued:
"I really made no choice --
I jus' did what Eve urged me to do,
I et apples that fell into my hand --
they were mighty good, Oh Lord,
un I was powerful hungry,
so hungry Ah could-a et a hoss."

Ripe red fruits fall,
blood-splattered lies the ground
beneath where climb stems
up from the carnivor roots
sucking blood-stain wounds dry:
"His blood calls to me,
from the earth it waters."

Was there any choice in those apples?
An apple chooses no destiny,
nor do apples a day keep doctors away
-- neither will cherries nor tomatoes.

Kerry or Bush?  Bush or Kerry?
Forbidden are these fruits of power
and yet eat of them we must --
does it help, that every atom
has its place in the universe,
that no choice, other choice chooses
which fruit falls, gravity's victim?

Newton saw an apple fall, and said:
"Ergo, there are universal laws,
mechanical in nature as destiny."
But his prodigy, protege, retorted,
lifetimes later (life times later?):
"Why did that apple fall -- not another?
Surely, singularity is not foreseen!
Statistics is mechanical
as machines run above randomness;
God dices with universes."

The word machine has a simple meaning
if you happen to be a simple machine,
even a simpleton knows that,
and nothing more, said Poe's Lenore.

A machine does not choose
though paths lead it by still waters,
through shadowed valleys of sudden death,
past weapons of mass destruction,
and sets up tables, before enemies.
Oh, this is surely a stranger's land
wherein stranger things can happen!

A red apple is a machine statistic,
like a red herring, or a red, red rose --
until I choose, I have no free will,
and, before and after the fact,
I am sure my choice is compelled
by the force of circumstances
too vast for me to comprehend.

Is it better, oh Bishop Berkeley,
to believe that it's all an illusion,
to believe in an even greater illusion?
If it's all illusion, all the way down,
can I not choose a ground zero freely,
here where the atomic Adam chooses
an apple, a tomato, a cherry,
when no pebbly orange exists
to say its own naming name,
a word true to itself?