swifts  &  s l o w s · a quarterly of crisscrossings

every nanosecond is a gift
Heikki Huotari

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On Balancing A Broom 5

What to add to the infinity with everything. When you divide by violet it’s the
remainder. No rose is no rose is no rose and the artificial heart grows fond. If you
can make a horse drink then you can’t lead it to water.

If birds do it both sides do it. Of the gender reveal there’s always an unintended
consequence. To compliment me is to further separate me from my complement
so help me Ishmael. No sooner etched than etched in stone,

the stable equilibrium calls the unstable equilibrium an equilibrium, i.e., at
equilibrium the astral bodies bide. Staccato to the trombone as glissando to the
harpsichord, the humorlessness is sufficient to the happiest of happy hours.

The interminable hours of the meeting are approved. Can’t see the Zeitgeist for
the mimes. Preclude exclusively and the whole world precludes exclusively with
you. The dissonance is always greatest prior to the consonance.

The heart and lungs may be appropriately left inside the patient with the sponge.
There is one officer to plant the contraband and one to be a witness. What would
you replace the cataclysm with. The dissonance is out of round.

On Balancing A Broom 6

Celebrating prematurely, gesturing toward the opposition, I enrage my base. The
ship of Theseus upon the rock of ages wrecks, horrifically reborn. You are the
only hologram I need. My time of life has been assigned.

Be neither structural nor optional, a straw to draw, to grasp at or to break some
camel’s back. The anti-gravity device is patented and I’ll sell you the rights.
Glaucoma may subtract what an imagination adds.

When there’s no enemy there’s friendly fire. Their attention span that of a
goldfish, the good listeners intend to grant my wishes or to have God grant my
wishes then forget. The butterfly should put its money where its mouth is.

Every nanosecond is a gift and I go where red velvet ropes on stainless posts and
aisle lights guide. But one may cut the ribbon with a giant pair of scissors and be
loved for who they are. I whistle past event horizons, happy to be half alive.

The UFO I was abducted by was driverless, i.e., I could have been a traffic cone.
Both near death and near life our differences are settled amicably when the lilacs
for the last time in the window boxes blossom.

Poker faces aim to please, their states in superimposition, cups of substance
runneth over and it’s roadkill versus roadkill. What, big bang, have you done for
me lately? I’ve made seven points and you’ve refuted only five.

On Balancing A Broom 8

It would be manna if not for the hammer and the anvil and the stirrup. Do you
take this absentee to be an absolute to neither have nor hold. A menace in the half
light activates a mailbox and the mailbox has momentum.

I would spend perfection wisely though there’d be no need, degenerate is the
ellipse whose foci coincide and the examined death is not worth dying. The street
sweeper is preceded by the meter maid then dot dot dot then back to the big bang.

Blest is the bigamist for he shall rule a distant planet. May I have the envelope
please. The dimensions of the darkness are. The enemy of funny strange is funny
ha ha. Advocates of solipsism are admitted free. No president slept here
but tossed and turned.

When looking at bad landscapes, I regret that I have only one negation. I’ve
eliminated every explanation except this one. I spy with my naked eye an infinite
regression. Yin and yang can’t both be right but they could both be wrong. In
sunlight trees seem green.

If this town isn’t big enough for n of us it isn’t big enough for n plus one of us.
The money of the mourning dove may be its liturgy. It hurts me more than it hurts
you. That I’m subjected to a sales pitch puts me in my place.

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Heikki Huotari, on a hunger strike in opposition to the war in Vietnam, was court-martialled for refusing to eat.  Since retiring from academia/mathematics he has published more than 400 poems in literary journals, including  Pleiades, Spillway, the American Journal of Poetry and Willow Springs, and in six chapbooks and six collections.  He has won one book and two chapbook prizes. His Erdős number is two.