PARDON ME, YOUR HONOR

Pardon me, Your Honor,
Ahmed Basha Bey
Appointee of the High Gate,
Illustrious Sultan of Istanbul
Paramount Leader of these vast dominions
From the Bosporus
Till the Great Rif Mountains,
I won’t preside over a hollow
Cardboard court;
I am, if it doesn’t ill-suit your Honor
Ill-suited to regurgitate my cue;
Theater, I have come to appreciate,
Is more of an aspiration
Than a carefully-staged rehearsal of reality.
If you be prosecutor and lawyer
And in every case, acting arbiter
Then retirement outside
The outer walls of the court
More befits the Audience and the Press corps.
The plaintiff, Ah! what the huck!
He already is in tune with the verdict;
He knows better than to think of theater as hope
For he, in tune with the audience,
Already carries his hearse.
Pardon me, Your Honor,
I won’t preside over a hollow
Cardboard court.

NUMBERS SHOWDOWN

A pair of negative and positive numbers with the same absolute value are plotting to bring down Zero and establish an equation where they both coalesce on an 0-X-Y graphic, despite the distance. They each have their personal reasons for doing this, but Zero knows its value, and is not ruffled by the conspiracy.

********
Plus Seven and its mirror friend
Below the X line
Spoke by LAN
And hatched a Zero-less plan:
To squeeze the span
Dividing them,
Sandwich the Zero in-between
And banish it in a no-time zone
Until after the end of time.
***
Plus Seven foresaw
Zero could go
It was, after all, a pedestal
Of Six steps ago
With time passing, she thought
The ladder got firmly glued
Its base only a foot from the bottom
In the event it were to sustain a fall,
There wouldn’t be much to fall
Slide down it would
Or elongate just a bit.
***
Minus Seven
Was mindless of Zero
Treated it as distance
To fold until
It reached Plus Seven above
With no feelings to harbor
Except the thought
Zero was a spatial landmark
In the middle of the path
So Seven Below agreed,
without ill-plan
For zero to be banned…
***
And Zero, well, Zero was oblivious
He knew, without Him,
No Equations could stand
He tucked Himself to a belt
And hurled it a measure to the left
And blew a spell
On the trail
Where the twain
Were to melt.
****

Ali H. Raddaoui. Laramie, Wyoming, February 27, 2010