Charles Harmon

 

"Ourobouros Dream"

Who’Da Thunk?

In only the last hour the Earth has traveled 67,000 miles

in its annual pilgrimage of revolution around the Sun.

Approximately 97 million Big Macs were eaten around the world

and that doesn’t include cheeseburgers, Double Doubles,

Whoppers, veggie burgers, and in sometimes…mystery meat?

In only the last hour 42 million people around the world had sex,

and that doesn’t even count all the animals, the birds and the bees.

The Earth rotates at about 1038 miles per hour at the Equator,

but here in LA LA LAnd we are only moving about 840 miles per hour.

If you were to sit on your frozen butt on the North Pole, it would take

24 hours to spin once around, an incredible speed of one inch per hour.

Just in America in the last hour 17 million cups of coffee were drunk,

and about 37 million bottles of beer, depending on the time of day.

Just imagine all the sodas, tea. milk, juice, and energy drinks consumed!

I had hoped to write this poem in only sixty minutes as the last hour

approaches to submit before the midnight deadline, but I’m running

out of time and guessing or simply making up imaginary statistics.

Everything begins with imagination, then we can check it.

How many million donuts were eaten, how many cookies, cakes, pies?

How many women got pregnant, how many babies were born, aborted?

How many car crashes were there, how many injured, dead, survivors?

How many cows were butchered for meat, matadors gored by a bull?

How many people met their last hour being killed and eaten by animals?

 

T.S Eliot knew a thing or three about cats, and he and we all know

that cats have nine lives. But finally, even cats and dogs must die.

But how will we face that last final hour? Eliot also wrote that

the world would end not with a bang but with a whimper.

Robert Frost wrote that the world could end in fire or ice.

William Blake wrote that we can “see a world in a grain of sand

and heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand

and eternity in an hour,” so there is a lot we can experience and do,

a lot that can happen in an hour, or sometimes nothing at all.

Making love can fill an hour with passion, or sometimes result in

an argument, a fight, a breakup. It can create a baby or a black eye.

 

As the last hour approaches think about what you will do.

Write a poem, play tennis, take a nap, get drunk, make love?

Be a villain, be a hero, save the world, save yourself. Sleep.

So many choices, so much freedom, so little time more or less.