C.B. Anderson
was the longtime gardener for the PBS television series, The Victory Garden.
Nowadays he attempts to transmit information packets from the event horizon of a medium-size black hole. Occasionally one or more of them escapes the deep gravity-well to appear mysteriously on terrestrial computer screens.
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Of This World
There is an emptiness, a noisome void,
That hangs upon the thick or scrawny necks
Of deadbeat fathers and the unemployed,
Which no amount of aleatory sex
Or any other strain of frivolous
Diversion can dispel. It rings more hollow
Than cowbells, more desperate than the bibulous
Oblique encounters it is bound to follow
As blisters will a sunburnt patch of skin
Nobody bothered to anoint. But there’s
Another kind of emptiness, a twin
More vacant than its sister void: despair’s
Own mother. All the trappings of success—
The fame, the money, things that fame and money
Provide—however much they prepossess
The grasping senses, making tears and runny
Noses seem like diseases conquered back
In 1950, only serve to raise
A continent of pleasure domes, which lack
Foundation fit to keep themselves, when days
Grow darker, from subsiding into Tethys’
Profound abyss. And once the bloated bubble
Has burst, ground-zero lying underneath is
A vacuum—nothing’s there, not even rubble.
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