Curiosity killed the cat (or was it the abomb?)

background. This is a SLAM poem I wrote for my atom bomb class final this year. It is one of my best works and i hope to read it at local SLAM fests this summer.

things to know. * A mulligan is a redo * Curiosity killed the cat; satisfaction brought it back * Charon ferried the dead to the underworld in Greek mythology * Dresden is a German city firebombed to oblivion by the Allied powers in WWII.

 

CURIOSITY KILLED THE CAT.

The little girl asked, what is a planet?

Well, little girl, ask that club that kicked out Pluto like it was a drunk and bumming soul that had no place in high society. Science will balk, but file a civil suit and give Pluto back its class ring.

They are the bouncers that – with their brass brains and reason – stand outside the Earthbound arches duck duck goosing answers of their choosing along to the common man while we Jane and John Doe take our Flintstone vitamin C and know what they want us to know.

Little girl ask, who are they?

 

At eight times the temperature of boiling water

Dresden melted.

Gusts, like clay maker’s hands, whipped flesh into burning human lanterns. Not monks, and they’re screaming. But in this world sound doesn’t travel so fast, so that dead hand from the past didn’t break the graveyard dirt for years. By then it was easy to say, back then they did terrible things but we’re better than that, we make sure they’re comfortable before we give them a lethal injection.

 

And editors, self made history professors, struck any record that we weren’t sharing, weren’t caring that mothers were sending their sons to kill other mothers’ sons overseas because the men in the pinstriped suits couldn’t agree who sets the oil prices around here.

 

Midas meant to conquer the world with his golden fingertips, make himself rich beyond his neighbors’ wildest dreams. And before he knew it his garden was gold, his food was gold, and his daughter was as dead as a golden statue.

 

We search for the meaning to life so that we can die knowing that we have something squirrels and zebras don’t —  and it’s not altruism or Xboxes. Let’s hope Charon accepts our answers over his usual fare lest we find ourselves capsized in the river Styx and bumming a ride back to the main land.

 

<span style="mso-bidi-font-

family: Vrinda”>If Earth is a lovechild of stardust and religion only a voice in our heads who is there to save us but ourselves?

 

Learn to swim, little girl, Dresden sure isn’t going to grant anyone redemption at the apocalypse of our own making. Can’t whoopsie-daisey it out of the great big book of everything anymore like the fire they died in was a figment of some guilt ridden veteran’s imagination.

 

Because we had to know, have to know what would happen if we mixed chloride with bromine, neutrons with other neutrons, Islam with democracy – we won’t stop blowing things up until they stop blowing up. There are too many stones unturned to leave now and forever hold our peace, because what IF? Is like that slut ex-girlfriend you let seduce you now and again, fuck the consequences while you fuck her because it feels good and you just had to know if it ever would again. Yeah, you better feel good because you can’t take a mulligan, can’t take another crack at it. we are crack addicts of the information kind. Every question has a question like every Russian nesting doll has another mother inside. Those dolls keep piling up and maybe you never find the baby.

 

But let us talk atom bomb. Remember Lot’s wife, who sold her salty soul with the flick of a look over her shoulder? Perhaps she shook her head at Hiroshima, when some seventy thousand souls ceased to exist. Wrong place wrong time, once men now not even ashes. Chalk it up as another casualty of war. How can we quantify the universe when we can’t even identify the corpses?

 

Of course, now that that cat is out of its nuclear bag what are you going to do about all those damn hairballs?

 

In this pursuit of knowledge we aren’t collecting coloured pies for family night trivia, there is no “I win, you lose, let’s play again next Tuesday?”

 

STOP.

 

This endgame is for real.

 

STOP

 

and ask yourself if the answer to life might be forty two.

 

<p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt”>No one can have it all, who says there’s a Know it All?

And say we get that golden glove and say we’re smarter than that; we’re an evolved race after all. What then? Who decides who lives and dies in gold?

 

I don’t know about you, little girl, but for some reason I don’t quite believe that satisfaction brought anyone back.