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Rhythm… Repetition…Routine… the pulse of life and perhaps the pulse of the universe…
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ROUTINE
What’s that I hear? My pulse is beating,
beating, beating… What’s it mean
by its constantly repeating?
Living’s nothing but routine.
A bean sprouts to a plant that grows,
at length, to yield a bean.
Round and round it goes and goes.
Living’s nothing but routine.
Outside, season after season -
green to brown to bare to green…
Trees turn for this very reason –
living’s nothing but routine.
What rules but reiteration?
The queen is dead; long live the queen!
Generation after generation,
royalty, too, is routine.
Tides falling, rising, falling, rising…
Cycles stir the soul marine.
Miraculous! But not surprising…
This world is naturally routine.
As worlds throughout the heavens turn
with habit’s cool persistence,
in all routine does one discern
the essence of existence.
What’s that I hear? My pulse is beating,
beating, beating… What’s it mean
by its constantly repeating?…
There is nothing but routine.
(Mike Cohen - July 1999)
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HAPPENS EVERY DAY
The old man waits at the same bus stop every day,
he waits for the same bus
and, before he gets on, he waits
for all the other passengers to board…
every day.
But the old man is not there today.
Every day
something that happens every day
stops happening.
The whole familiar world is filling with holes
and vanishing from our midst.
The bus stops and the door opens
as it does every day.
After the last person boards
and before the door closes and the bus moves off,
there is a moment,
one of those innumerable empty moments
when something that happens every day
stops happening.
(Mike Cohen – 2009)
People die every day; and the fate of each of us is ultimately the fate of all.
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DEFYING NATURAL LAWS
For as long as you have been alive and for quite a while before,
airplanes have been in flight,
proving that the law of gravity can be defied;
cars have been starting out and stopping
suddenly and capriciously,
proving that the laws of motion can be defied;
food has been cooked and refrigerated,
and buildings have been heated and air-conditioned,
proving that the laws of thermodynamics can be defied.
Think ahead a hundred years
to a world where people are doing things impossible today,
proving that even more natural laws can be defied.
Now think ahead a hundred thousand years
to a time when an orderly and utterly unpopulated earth
will be revolving quietly and obediently about the sun,
proving that natural laws can be defied
for only so long.
(Mike Cohen – Mar 2006)
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A mortal glimpse of infinity…
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THE DEATH OF BORIS AND DORIS
As it goes with many couples, it was not clear whether
Boris and Doris were killing themselves
or each other;
but, as they lay together dying, it struck them -
the tragedy, the irony, the absurdity
of their lives
and deaths.
Simultaneously they awakened to broader perspectives
as they felt themselves passing the way of
Garbo and Gandhi,
B.F. Goodrich and J.F.K.,
Doc and Billie Holliday,
the Wright brothers, the Marx brothers,
Marx and Lenin and Lennon, and Lincoln,
and Lyndon and Andrew Johnson…
passing into the past,
joining Nero and Nicholas
and the Czars, the Kaisers, the Caesars,
the Napoleons and the Neanderthals,
the dodo and the dinosaurs.
In a moment it was evident
how ludicrous had been
their Lilliputian lives in the midst of history,
how humble was history itself in the shadows of eons,
how even eons diminish
as the earth shrinks before stars that blaze and die,
leaving minuscule motes to infuse the universe
with remnants of their passing spirit.
It was all profoundly preposterous,
from the famous to the anonymous,
from stars to quarks,
from ashes to dust…
Now, Boris and Doris knew
it was all one great extra-galactic joke.
Then they died together,
laughing.
(Mike Cohen – c. 1993)
