"On Wishing Wisely" by Heikki Huotari
poetry series
On Wishing Wisely 1
Your friend in the frozen wasteland, though not plausible, is true to you. It’s for the love of logic you may defer equally to estimable and inestimable depths. An undamped oscillator, you rise to a point of order or move to amend. Between the Planck time and the fabrication of unnatural intelligence the boundary between real and imaginary interlocutors is blurred. There’s no rotation like the slow rotation of the disbelief that you suspended like a mirrored ball. As one Nastasya Filipovna nestles in another, you only regret what your attention spans. Consider the Beethovens in their heart-shaped boxes. Know they disapprove of what your young have done. The image of the visage of the paragon is suitable for framing. In how many ways will the identical quintuplets be arranged? Does every designated subset of seafarers have a patron saint? Does the inventor of the clarinet at least reside outside of space and time?
On Wishing Wisely 2
One butterfly has the best of intentions therefore all have plausible deniability. Should thy dichotomy prove false just add another option and or change the subject. Should your circumstances baffle or fall flat just add a laugh track. Nature hates a vacuum with a passion then Damascus happens. Beards are brought to breakfast. How wide-eyed am I how wide-eyed am I how wide-eyed am I. The equipage, the archipelago, the random and abandoned, seven of those of whom there might have been ten, they also Doppler shift for whom there is no heavenly reward.
On Wishing Wisely 3
As the revision returns nightly to its chrysalis so every celebration short of heavenly reward is premature and every celebration after that unseemly. Extreme sport the enemy of ordinary sport, I say acceleration do to gravity as gravity would be done to, then guess which expert witness will be called on next. When hope bereft of feathers finds no purchase in lieu of the quantity of quality the quantity is inverse to the quality. If seven pray that I be damned and seven pray that I be saved I’ll have a dozen precedents to point to and be rehabilitated daily. To approach is to repel so to withdraw is to attract. There but for the moving averages go I, but for the ratio of love to loss.
On Wishing Wisely 4
The president will see you now. The president will hide then find your keys. There is no monster underneath the bed of nails, no accidental rapture past the barefoot path of glowing coals. Antipathy be accurate or default to approval. Give a man a large prime number and be happy for a day but show that man an algorithm and be happy for an hour. I say, Damn the fatuous beatitudes. Don’t red shift angry. Where the bats and hats leave off the heads of hair begin. Have no imaginary friends before me, said the angel to the innocent bystander, What’s an innocent bystander like you doing in a post apocalypse like this. With veterans of foreign wars as with imaginary friends, you’re innocently gliding on the ice, i.e., as by moonlight propelled.
On Wishing Wisely 5
Attractive nuisances converge conditionally and when rearranged appropriately they may sum to what you want. I’ve been completing sentences so you don’t have to. Fear is the thing without feathers that the influencers hold over the heads of ninety-seven percent of the population. Broken eight-hour clocks are right three times a day. Explanatory variables are continuous not categorical, the salad, entree and dessert are served concurrently and the phenomenon is quantum that confirms the rule of thumb. What is created is not necessarily in nature’s way. I’m shouting crowded theater and crisis actors because speech is free. Neither stability nor entropy may grant to consonance the dissonance’s wish, i.e., to be as happy to be happy as they’re happy to be jostled frivolously. As I say to every astronaut who isolates, The past catastrophe is not a guarantee.
Heikki Huotari wrote his first poem the morning after the major died in the adjacent bed. Since retiring from academia/mathematics he has published more than 500 poems in literary journals, including Pleiades, Florida Review and The Journal, and in six chapbooks and six collections. He has won one book prize (Star 82 Press) and two chapbook prizes (Gambling The Aisle and Survision Press). His Erdős number is two.