So Far

We're on our last legs, and the legs are last to go;

the best metaphors die young, reborn as cliches.

We live the wrong ideas of chaos and order;

they're not villain and hero, but mother and father:

alone, each as dead as the other; nothing laid,

nothing made. If I waited until my so-called work

was done, I'd never finish a thought,

let alone                               a poem.

O, Mandelbrot, o, Mandelbrot, the measure

of a coast is not what it seems, each inlet

spawning its miniature, every towered turtle

a fractal made of fractals. We are the broccoli

and salmon we eat and which will us consume.

So far, what looks like waste is all that sustains