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.

Planck Time Variations

1. An option is illuminated while I hover over it. I am adopted daily. I would have Cher’s hairstyle or have no hair style at all. The tops and bottoms undergo a wholesale mix and match. I’m seeing spots, connecting dots. As Newton’s Law of Edge Detection says, go straight until you’re forced to turn.

2. My anti-gravity is stationary, carbonaceous as a tether, helical as an ascender. How one-sided is existence in a solar wind? Do I look like I’ve seen no ghost? There’s nothing hidden but some sudden sublime music disagrees. Is this an opportunity for me to air my grievance? Animal psychologists afraid of flying will have two of everything for which they wait three days.

3. The lucid dreamer flips a coin and rolls a die. If it’s not moderation in one thing it’s moderation in another. That I was, in retrospect, no angel mitigates the mode of my demise. Nor counterpoint nor cancellation, here a contradiction, there a contradiction, everywhere a contradiction. Parallelogram of moonlit parallelograms til proven innocent, they’re not just innocent but on a pedestal, confessing and confessing.

4. It’s teeter-totter or specific gravity. It’s naked Archimedes versus earth. That I look like my dog amuses you, so I say my coordinates are spatial and God knows the number of hairs on my head. When I’m the judge there will be order in no court. Tsunamis come from nowhere. Sworn to secrecy, the gravy may be made of waves or particles or none of the above. And now no two the same!

5. School is out for hunting or for harvest. As trisected, bougainvillea blossoms fall. As pathological the narcissism, so the paper money is digested by the goat. The sharp edge of the bark divides me into yin and yang. My null hypothesis is you are wrong, wrong, wrong. The students capable of averaging are calculating their own GPAs.

6. I may criticize my fellow sui genera but you’re not one so you may not. As ticketing precedes street sweeping, mystery is not agronomy. I’ll fade away in no embrace. With ultraviolet to disappear in, infrared to bounce off of and helium to breathe, does nature need yet one more nudge?

7. The first four moments go a long way to explain the distribution. My three blessings are Salud, Dinero y Amor. I’m just a maker of grenades. What you do with grenades is up to you.  Oh Moebius, the sentiment that’s tattooed on your other side is simply false. Playing piano, I would have the option to be in the club