Explain to me, someone

Explain to me, someone,

this strange planet,
burning red on the
autumn ground. 

And tell me why
vultures would fly
briskly, in a yardstick line.

I thought they were all
about circling death,
circling imminence

the way we circle every
uncomfortable fact.

Maybe they’ve taken
the measure of things, 
seen where we’re headed—
and fast? 

How do they 
carry on?

An acorn plum gall, home to a larval wasp

The Prompt

So, this poem was a weird one. Weirder, perhaps, than you might realize on a first reading. Here’s why: the poem was prompted by the combination of this strange little orb I found on the ground (see photo above) and several vultures flying in a straight line overhead. I quickly landed in a pretty earnest and existential place. And then I arrived at the last line. And all that came to me was a terrible pun, one based on my chronic mispronunciation of the word carrion, which is apparently not pronounced like carry on, but more like carryin’.

I initially dismissed the notion of ending on a pun. In addition to the whole being-based-on-a-mispronunciation-so-nobody-will-even-get-it issue, it felt like an unfair thing to do to a reader. I’ve set up one sort of mood. You think you know what sort of poem you’re reading. And then I slap you with a pun? That seems like poor sportsmanship.

But the bad pun persisted in my mind. It got me thinking that, actually, bad puns, corny jokes, general raunchiness, dark humor—all of these are partial answers to the question of how we carry on in the face of what we’re doing to our planet and what we’re doing to ourselves. Maybe this poem could only end with absurdity.

Of course, maybe I still should have fixed the mispronunciation? Maybe the final lines should have read “What absurdity / we are all carryin’.”

Absurdity is the prompt that I’m offering up today. (But if you’re an avid punner and were really hoping that see how many puns you can work into a single poem was going to be the prompt, then absolutely roll with that instead!)

As you move through the world today, see how many tiny absurdities you can find. Little things you might normally overlook. Things like the sign my son pointed to in the pediatrician’s office this week, which stated that some very alarming number of “adults ages 15-24” have HPV. “How does that make sense? Why do they say adults when they’re talking about 15-year-olds?” he wanted to know.

Or there’s the fact that tomato sauce counts as a vegetable in school lunches. And there’s the new round-about, built to ease traffic by the school but barely wide enough to fit a school bus. (Hmmm, the nature of my examples is making me suspect that I get hypercritical when I’m in mom mode.)

Okay, a more universal example, so universal in fact that there’s a scene about it in Curb Your Enthusiasm that you should definitely watch: how about that thick plastic packaging that you’re theoretically supposed to be able to pull apart at the seam, but you never can, so instead you end up having to hack it with scissors, and the edges are stupidly sharp, and you end up feeling like the company should have paid you to accept their product rather than the other way around? With all the innovation in the world, how has no one solved this yet?

Of course, the “how has no one solved this yet” question can be asked of many far more important things, and if that’s where your mind and heart take you, let them. But I urge you to make a list of tiny absurdities, too. Think of it as an exercise in attention—an exercise is noticing that might lead to a chuckle or two. Make that list, and see what feelings it pulls up for you. Does your mind begin weaving metaphors with any of the micro absurdities on your list? Does it add them together and arrive at some bigger truth or more overarching absurdity? Is there something there that makes you clench your fists? Is there something that makes you laugh?

If you generally write pretty serious poems, what would it feel like to write a humorous one? If you often write lighter poems, how would it feel to let a little more darkness in? I hope the absurd landing at the end of my poem is a reminder that we all have permission to play, to experiment, to explore, to write something that you might not like when you look at it again a week or a month or sixty seconds down the line.

In this productivity-obsessed world, I love the absurdity of creating just for the sake of creating. Or wait, maybe that’s not it? Maybe in this gloriously creative world, I abhor the absurdity of ascribing to capitalism’s hyperfocus on productivity? Help, I’m talking myself in circles.

I look forward to your poems (as well as any puns you care to share)!