Heikki Huotari

Five Poems

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Lazy Eye

 

That my probability is one does not mean that I have to happen and if dancing backwards isn't recreation then what is? Ball bearings fall on stainless tables in cold light. From chaos or from misconception, nails not satisfied work loose. When indigo is elevated by Sir Isaac Newton, growth is linear not exponential. In a coalition anyone can be the bleeding heart. One rifle isn't loaded so all consciences are clear. The wind by dint of which the feathers pierce the plywood, I would take top secrets with me to my grave. Totality, my contact with reality, takes a percentage.  Shade is made by stipple, by cross-hatch or by random walk. Each neighborhood is visited in time. The sheep put on sheep's clothing so we think the sheep are wolves. How to distinguish roses but by sense, by reference or by order of appearance? Where would written warnings be if not on walls.

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Words For Things

 

The flower over one ear pulses blue, the other red, and the mixed message is, Unless you're partisan stay where you are and stay alive. A no-fly zone for every force of nature, every force of nature in its no-fly zone, there was a word for what your aura wore, and it was itsy-bitsy, condescending. Now the moon's extruding roots and every axis is somebody's axis of rotation, every melody is secondary to rhythmic concern. Should I be put to pasture should my number be retired? Oh consciousness, oh agency, which of my marbles red and blue are in that urn? What is the probability what I extract is neither color? I will prove  the butterfly that prophesies the time of life is nigh. The steering wheel is a placebo and the parachute is a placebo. Tinkerbell is keeping Tinkerbell alive. There are two sides to every bougainvillea story, also three. The frequency you get is not the frequency you see. A direct object is as adjectival as a pronoun is adverbial. As solid water follows direct orders so the foot bone is connected to the head bone so the foot bone is connected to the head bone so the butterfly that prophesies the time of life is nigh.

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Generating Functions

 

To explain or to explain away. The black-and-whites are oppositely oriented, driver's side to driver's side. Their conversation casual, they're biding time. An octopus could knock an octopus's socks off but to flick an ear, to be a dear. My feathers fluffed, I'd access actively and never be down-sized. Give each of twenty-thousand men a fish and twenty-thousand men are happy for a day.

 

It takes a human heart to know one, be it briefly, be it briefly. Special recognition of some very special molecules, nor from nor to temptation need one run. I think of origin then destination then desalination, sudden start then sudden stop and drop and roll. Instead of third I shift into reverse. I thought of the phenomenon as random til I saw the generating function. Party animals, creatures of habit, in the forest one hand claps, one finger snaps and holy, holier and holiest walk arm in arm as through a nave into an apse.

 

Because they're walking contradictions, married bachelors always have their way. An unabashed tautology, I'm following the bouncing ball and what I emulate are compound pendulums. My dream password is tango and I'm quite requited thank you. Seven snowflakes vie for second in the softly-falling snowflake competition and the intervals of consciousness, inverse to information, zero in on absolutes. To punish, thump by thump revive the merely living word, with paddles spank all negligence and misbehavior. Drape my cage that I may navigate by stars that are.

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Deciduous

 

Which are oedipal and which are suitable for framing? Anything can be delivered. I pronounce you one to govern, one to run. Why did the word traverse traverse the surface only to be made a fool of? Married bachelor, like a son to me and good good good vibration, is it true the first eternity is but your doormat? And to think I thought about a thing but yesterday and now both thing and thought are gone. What's done is done is done, the war to end all wars to end all wars. A precedent begets a precedent. I need to see one man about two hundred horses like I need to go to school for shoes. The trees confer, I zone for goats and I say don't all fall at once, the antipode need not apply.

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In An Emergency

 

When I know what they don't want me to then I'll exist. From shroud or swaddle I'll unwind. I would be happy to stop spinning should the lilies of the field for their own actions take the credit and the blame. If I eschew eternity then Emily says, All the more for me, as I prefer eternity to infinite regress. My metric's induced by an inner product. Who could ask for less? Restoring force proportional to placement, water on the brain, the heart enlarged. We don't and won't know why they called this meeting. Shall we make the best of it and wrestle? Then the second fairy takes the coin and leaves a tooth. A thousand Shakespeares with a thousand quills are no match for the decimal expansion of the number π. In case of fire break glass.

 

Heikki Huotari attended a one-room school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. Since retiring from academia/mathematics he has published poems in numerous journals and in five poetry collections. His manuscript, To Justify The Butterfly, won second prize, and publication, in the 2022 James Tate Chapbook Competition. His Erdős number is two.

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