What is a ...
the ditties keep ditzing
What is a … ?
So, recently I have started playing with a “new form” for what I consider ditties—Short little playful verses, mixing kidhood with a dabble of science and purposed verbosity.
But reading through old journal entries, I discover that this form has been living in me for decades!
Here are some examples: from the 80s:
So what is the night, but the day, just waiting for a hundred moons to reveal it! HA!
What IS a ray of light? A speeding dot, a single line, or a continuous stream of particles?
What is each person but a great sucking-black hole or eddy in space. Here are our eyes, ears and fingertips, our brains like bottom feeders, taking in and storing the world. Everywhere each brain … with its related sensors, the world pours in and lodges. The world is coding into the gray, and stuck in code. The world of yesterday, that unthinkable thing … stored as chemistry.
What is a cow but a machine for turning grass into blood, milk, bone, and meat?
What is the sun but a sickle
harvesting morning prayer.
—-
And NOW, an example from a year back, followed by what has become my new form of play:
(2023)
What is the moon
but a net:
a bright bone tortilla
a round trampoline
a decoding ring,
a mote dressed in dust—
yanking lumens
out of the dark.
(2023)
20250325
(While crossing Kansas to Denver)
What are the clouds
but rows of chicken tenders
Or frosty white cow-patties
plopped
on the glass-concrete sky.
20250324
What is pollen
but the reproductive strategy
of trees waging war against my lungs
What is pollen but
information up my nose.
20250323
What is a Pear
(This day)
but a snow machine
spewing pedaled precipitation
20250317
What is a Sweetgum
but a ball-bearing machine,
a tree so insecure
in its reproductive potential
that it litters my lawn
with ten-hundred sea mines, or
gallons of Steam-punk Legos
ouching the balls
of my feet.
3/15
What is a Pear
but there
like a pyrotechnic flair
or… a cotton candy bomb--
then gone, in a spray of confetti.
3/14
What is a cloud
but a jellyfish
missing the jelly,
fish, and skin, skimming the pneuma sea.
3/12
What is March
but a muckfest…
Middle brown and muckled green
diluted blue, and cardboard sheen.
startled by daffodils
and whirling starlings.
3/11
Oh
I am in love with clouds
as they way they wip, fray, and smear
curdle like cheese on a rolling sea
Feather out like horse tails
bubble, break, and build—
take my breath away
clip clip climb
in minute hand time.
saunter into rhubarb, and rust
Split, brake, and weep…
Turn on a dime
Oh
I am in love with clouds.
20250226
What is a twig
but a crack
on a crack
on a crack
splittering the sky.
20250224
What is the moon but
a passing phase
a circle.
a football.
a rind.
What is the moon but
a slow motion wink--
a waxing gibbous eye.