Saturday, May 24, 2025

King of Infinite Space

I am the creator and the created,
that which mates and is mated.
The circle is eternal and perfect.
There is no conductor on the New Haven line
to announce your destination.
There is no terminal point.
There is no station.

I am the maker of circles.

I am the maker of time.

I am the New Haven conductor,

and my pocket watch always rhymes.

 

Time is a fisherman’s line

that catches the cleaning woman

in a Lower East Side house of cards,

that catches her son who’s dealing in the park

when he’s not traveling a line of cocaine

that has no terminal point, no station.

I am the fisher of pleasure and pain.

 

The circle is a line.

The black boy rolls the metal rim

down the hill with a stick.

Form and function are the same.

I am the boy and the rim and the stick.

I am the arrow of time.

 

Hamlet said he could live in a nutshell

and call himself king of infinite space.

An off-Broadway play opened in Elsinore town.

I was the understudy who slipped in for Hamlet,

melancholy king of infinite place

but otherwise detained by a gravedigging clown.

 

A psych inventory said I was paranoid.

I love everybody but to hell with the rest.

I have amyloid folded in my brain,

or so says the CAT scan, the Eye of Horus.

My pocket watch always rhymes.

He who is not against us is for us

when traveling the New Haven line.

I’m the psychologist who made the test.


~William Hammett



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