Free Will Was Had By All
in the face of fate
the argument and magnitude
consider complex numbers
argument evaporates
but who’s on first
suspended my legs waving
only gravity can talk me down
nay-sayers of three microcosms
contemplate the perfect crime
I’m neither colorless nor odorless
nor in between
extrapolate the day
the violence is isolated
hemispheres are crudely glued
you’re both right it’s exquisite
and obscene a squirrel makes
a hyperbolic cosine of a hanging cable
and a helix of a tree
Not Onomatopoeia
the consonants are silent
so in nature there
are no straight lines
each season features ashes
ashes flat as big as hands
as sunups add a third dimension
so a mass of gravitons is
tantamount to an event
one end-of-tunnel light
white-washes all the others
terror and elation what
would there not be a downpour of
for rising I would optimize
complete this sentence win
the consolation prize
Be Square Or Be Pentagonal
skirmishes in my periphery
rectangular coordinates on my horizon
equanimity is split
it’s it’s dictionary or dichotomy
the rules evolving with the game
the more meticulously I describe
the less meticulously I explain
I’m filling spacetime with deceleration
and the exoskeleton that I’ve outgrown
I’m walking barefoot on bare pavement
so bionic hand meet paper flower
paper flower meet bionic hand
at what point is this straight line
tangent and to what
About the Poet
In a past century Heikki Huotari attended a one-room school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. He’s a retired math professor and has published poems in numerous literary journals, including Spillway, the American Journal of Poetry and Willow Springs. His fifth collection, “When Correlation Is Causation,” is in press.