Butterfly Effect

My great-great-great-great-

great- (but not necessarily good)

great grandfather was not in the woods

the day the tree fell.  But he was

the closest to the calamity to not 

hear it which caused him no pangs of 

conscience, no ontological consideration, 

no wonderment at the beingness or the

nothingness or the any/somethingness

of God and why evil exists in the spleens

and livers of mortals bound to question

the empty ifs of trees falling without 

an audience.

My grandfather, for years after the fact,

did not own a telephone, and often, when

the phone he did not own did not ring

on the table where he had not placed 

the goldurned contraption, he, out of spite

or something not like spite but also

exactly like it exactly, would not answer it,

if only to exert his ritualed sinewy control

over the bakelite happenstance of cord

and rotor and microphone.  Moreover, he 

kept his number very secret, and would

not upon request give it to any tom

or jerry that asked.  This, in an effort

to cut down on all the unwanted calls.

He did not respond to distance;

he did not respond to time;

he did not respond to space 

or any of the normal circumferences

the longitudes create.  

This flight of whimsy affects me some-

times when I insert new words in old books,

or don’t allow commas to cause pause,

or periods to give good stop.

I’ve look at Van Gogh’s “Starry Nights”

if only to see the moose at stage right,

and I know the feeling of mistitled glee

that Mvnch ensnared in his scream, I know

because I was standing stage front, 

two fingers up behind the artist’s head,

attempting some rabbit ear humor or 

giving wings for the sad precipitant 

catastrophe about to be captured.

The phrase goes, in my world, To be a

butterfly, or not to be, 

that is the silent, fallen,

unheard, unwanted question…

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All Rights Reserved