Thursday, May 14

I SAW THE BEST MINDS OF MY GENERATION


I saw them

And I watched them

While what watched them in me

Shrank from view

They did things I could not do

Displayed themselves like the villain

In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Who as I recall was an envious pink brain

Controlling with joysticks a giant robot body

A brain perhaps angry it had no body of its own

Doing things to other living things

Doing things without empathy to them

It bothers me that to split an atom

You basically turn a mirror ball inside out

You build an interior of mirrors

To which the atom is somehow subjected

(I should look this up…. but not til the poem is over….)

You subject the atom to the dilated light of its own reflection

In a closed space from which it cannot escape

You isolate and reflect it a billion times

(The figure a billion is synecdochal to an immense number

That I don’t know how to name….. The figure “a billion”

Is the preferred term the collective has settled on

These days to denote “enough...”)

You isolate and reflect the atom a billion times in an atmosphere

Of no escape until it splits. And when it splits

It kills. Unless there is nothing

In its wide vicinity to kill, in which case its explosion

Could be comprehended as nonviolent.


(Ariana Reines)