Trolley Theorem

He experienced a shock as the trolley slightly shifted

For three years, it stuck to traveling straight

Starting behind a house, then disappearing beyond the trees

Traveling two hundred yards in staggering directness

Absolute beauty like a line drawn between two graph points

But today it curved, CURVED!

Cracking captivity of abstract coordinates

Gerrymandering geometric jurisdictions

The ruin of his romance with regularity

The unlauded spawn of expanded perspective

He cursed the the cold and the contractor

For cutting the obscurity of neighboring branches

For showing the world for what it was

Shedding western sun on wayward tracks

Cursing him with the wretchedness of curvature

He deliberated on the slow bending line

A car-compacting elliptical illusion

He forced the trolley to his mental plane

Imagined that it had just begun a gradual left

Forty five degrees to intersect a new axis

But no, with all that has been revealed here

Postulated and proofed, he knew it wasn't true

The grid lines of Euclid's vacuity scuffed and scoffed

Erased and redrawn on a more realistic level

Vantage and vision made variable

First fright, forever transformed

Flowering into free flowing fractals

There are no direct trolleys

Only fools fall for tricks of the track

And no such thing as a straight line

Comments

[tangomangio]

This is very beautiful on so many levels. I just read an article that said in the past all people wanted to do was stay "on track". Like a train passenger at each stop they'd collect something -- a degree, a job, a marriage, a family. But in today's world there is no one "on track." So many currents of possibility are exploding at once that life is more like a kayak ride, and you have to ask yourself which way would you like to go? Frightening and exhiliarating all at the same time.

i think you should submit this poem to the New Yorker.

[James Dugan]

Well done Nick -- you will have me looking up math terms until midnight. Wonderful use of concrete poetry and you reveal the tip of the iceburg. Everything else is to be formulated or made sense by the reader. It is why poetry is still the most attracting way to write for me. It lives on its own philosophy that is shared by the human race but just in different modes and means. Sorry you style is starting to spread.

There is so much to think about. Why do we desire straight lines? Why does technology and speed make us believe we are heading straight? When the shock of the messiness of life comes along, what are we suppose to do with this new information? Does it change all the meaning of everything we did in ignorance of the reality? Or is it just a new reality to make into a straight line?

Everything curves because the universe curves, yet with distance from everything, all becomes a straight line again.

Thank you for the lunch