POEMS REVELING IN EXTREMISM
Poems Reveling in Extremism
By
David Gottfried
I may exude a sort of hot-headedness. In all sorts of contexts, I have always had a predilection for strategies and solutions that awarded the whole enchilada, that had no patience for mushy compromise, and that took ideas to their logical conclusion and demanded maximalist results.
I submit a few poems which demonstrate this attribute:
GOING VERY, VERY FAST
I want to drive a car so fast it surely starts to fly
I want to smell the rubber burn sublimely into sky
I want to see the wheels atrophy and simply die
I want to race horizons, magnets of my eye
A MEDITATION ON THE SCIENTIFIC DEFINITION OF THE WORD SUBLIME
“Sublime, Latin, sublimis, to the limit
To evaporate a substance directly from the solid into a vapor state and condense it again. For example, metallic iodine on heating does not liquefy but forms directly a violet gas.”
Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary, Eighteenth Edition, 1997
I want to light fires and see violet gasses
A jubilant inferno that ravages, harasses
I want to have a fever of a hundred and five
I want to be convulsive, committed, alive
I want to see the zenith that excels, surpasses
Every fevered fury that smashes the masses
The fired exaltation that fails to survive
That resounds in memory as a blessed archive
I want a hurricane that enraptures, crashes
The flaming cold water alabaster, amasses
After the floods you will not dare revive
Arch grand chaos is what I will contrive
I want to feel the fright of status asthmaticus
A strangulating clutch of inelastic hiatuses
Of air that the fates will smugly deprive
End banality; let me soar or nosedive
DANCING WITH INTEGERS
To be squared, cubed, exalted to the tenth power
Sweeping upwards in arching multiples
Leaping centennials of time toward infinity
Marauding the millennia with the mirage of the Messiah
To be a parabola on a Cartesian plane
A Zygote of pure genius informing the world
Belting the bourbons, inciting the terror
Slingshot through decades to the Commune to the Partisans
To be an art of swiftest science streaming forth
Of mathematical confidence careening onward
Of planned metered marchings in decibelistic order
Of futuristic canvases striated, muscled, tough as hell
To be the linear loveliness of such arrowed arrogance
London's crystal palace refracting all the light of heaven
Glowing with the glory of some sceptered spark of G-d
Inscrutable, unnamable, I am always moving on.
Taking It to the Limit
I want everything to be extreme
I want hot coffee to jolt me like a crack-pipe
I want the color red to scream bloodbath
I want a law condemning subtlety and gentleness
I want the summer to burn like the Sahara
I want Cleopatra’s asps to bite a Diva a day
I want the winters to Freeze like a Russian Icon
(Its lunar glare Mortifying you like Siberian Snow)
I want the East to rise like Alexander Nevsky
I am a radical to the day I die
Copyright David Gottfried 1993 to 2017