Tag Archives: bubbles

Sonnet: RHL, ‘Bubbles’

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The Earth’s a pot of water on the range,
and nothing happens for a billion years;
then as the water heats, things start to change
and movement – formless, unaware – appears.
Next the first tiny bubbles start to form,
brains self-assembling, they form, collapse,
form and collapse in water barely warm,
minds that start yearning for some Great Perhaps.
They grow, they start to rise, still fade away
while dreaming of a life that will not fail;
and this is humans as we are today,
starting to boil up from this mortal jail
to break into the vastly bigger air…
unknowing where steam goes, what happens there.

*****

This is as close to religious belief as I can get. Somewhere at the intersection of Nietzsche and Vonnegut, of reincarnation and “It’s all a simulation”, with Musk aiming for Mars and wondering aloud if he’s an NPC, is a place of absolute and unknowable change. And that’s where we are.

‘Bubbles’ was first published in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal.

“Boiling Pot” by Brad Ruggles is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Semi-formal? or Spoken Word? RHL, ‘Life is a Bubble’

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A life is a bubble:
somewhere the Grand Druid
dips his wand into the universal fluid
and then a new life is formed, floating
on chance breezes until it – pops –
and the thin skin coating
falls back to earth as mere drops,
the shape and rare rainbow glint gone to air,
and the bubble is where?

Earth is a bauble
in the universal flux,
as it foams, boils and freezes,
just dust from God’s various mucks,
sneezes afloat on chance trans-solar breezes.

The humans babble,
rabble rising from the rubble of other lives cut to stubble,
they burble some Bible as they gab, grab and gobble,
cobbling conning towers of Babel and Hubble,
their progress hobbled by their wobbly bobble,
reams of hopes, dreams and schemes
just a bubble.

*****

Sometimes a chance-occurring phrase in some moody mode of thought lets me ramble wildly through tangled words and ideas. It’s not amenable to regular form, but it’s fun. It seems in the spirit of Spoken Verse, though I’ve never performed. The earliest poem I wrote in this style is from over 50 years ago… which is 30 years before I ever had a poem accepted for publication. I was definitely out of step with the non-verse that then controlled the poetry industry to the exclusion of almost all actual verse. Things have eased in recent years, and dozens of poems from those early years have since been published. (Note to struggling young poets: Don’t give up! But have another career that pays money!)

Anyway, ‘Life is a Bubble’ only needed a couple of years to be published in 2024 in The Lyric.

Photo: “Blowing bubbles” by Song_sing is licensed under CC BY 2.0.