[Newspoetry] 7-11 Big Splashes

[Donald L Emerick]

Surfing the WEB is like swimming an ocean,
in waters always too deep for a notion
to make a wave rise and fall in motion
or undulate vibrantly; going nowhere
because getting nowhere,
thrashing violently against the sea.

News condenses down observed conjectures,
of things as they may happen to becoming --
logical inertial forces modified
by strange intents to differ and yet prosper
from our free flowing into pasts from futures.

Poems meter and measure and mark up this flow
in rhythms and rhymes and reasons expressive
of singular impressions, as experiences,
common but not at all commonly seen,
to startle life out from its sheltering dreams.

Newspoems defy the logic of events
by defining truth before the facts are in,
before the tide comes in, or goes out again,
washing the curving shore clean, its sands smooth,
leaving odd debris from a polluted sea,
sticks and shells, tars from oil wells depositing.

Write simply of these castles you cast in sands
when you wade ashore, all salty and bronzed,
their moats that floated bridges erased, drowned;
in tides of your hurricane, my land falls down
and becomes a lost continent's ocean floor.

It lacks the lackadaisy of the lackeys,
this news of poems, yet, this poem of news
says nothing of the Happening of Today,
does not even shed a light or shine a tear
in memory of those things soon forgotten.

Can it be a poem without being news?
Could a fish walk out of water, upon land,
dropping its tail, growing out its legs and limbs,
into hands and feet, its head swinging on neck,
and say, I am a fish out of my sea, son?