Sharp Puzzles poem and Uncertainty rant

Sharp Puzzles

Dice have razor edges,
every roulette game is russian.
The world is full of butterflies
and their fatal affects;
the sigh, the batting of the eye,
But the reaper whirlwind strips them of facade.
Yet we still sow,
mending the leftovers,
creating frankenstein futures
from fractured glass pasts,
only to realize we cannot find
the heart of the situation,
cannot find the purpose to shards,
but that is all we have left.

I want to be able to sing this to a woman some day...


Uncertainty and unpredictability are the most dangerous things in this world, yet they are inevitable as long as we are reliant on our senses and on outside information. The more unpredictable something is, the more dangerous. Things that seem harmless, like food, water, air can become deadly once unknown agents are introduced. The more variables that can go wrong, the more variables that will go wrong.

That is one thing that fascinates me about engineering, we say a car is a lemon if it needs a major repair 2 or 3 years after being "brand new" yet think about a car. How many parts does a car have that are absolutely necessary to functioning properly? hundreds? thousands? Most cars runs on EXPLOSIONS for gods sake! Controlled, but still one of the most seemingly unpredictable expressions of energy one can think of. The energy from those explosions are transferred to the wheels through gears and shafts and whatnot, each has to withstand various forces in various directions at various temperatures and fit to extremely tight tolerances. I find it amazing that a car can go hundreds of miles without wearing itself out, or spontaneously combusting, much more thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even 1 million miles http://autos.aol.com/article/million-mile-car-donated-to-museum/ (with luck and proper care)
so you can usually be certain that your car will work when you need it

Computers have billions of gates and parts that control it and work together to do extremely complicated tasks through logic and physics. It can calculate and store information using electrical charges for heavens sake. It can turn mere numbers into words and colors and movement and shading and physics. This is how I feel when I think about it too much: http://xkcd.com/676/ and the most amazing part is that they work, almost always, the number of defective computers is very low despite that they rely on both hardware and software to allow them to run. Now we even have software that learns, how amazing is that? Most of us are certain that our computer will turn on and work no matter what (that is if you have a mac lol).

Though my life is governed by the laws of physics (and chemistry, a subset of physics) it is not predictable at all. All is uncertainty, and frankly I dislike uncertainty, I have a tendency to paralyze myself until I am certain, I delay making decisions until I have sufficient information. But I do not have the time nor the information to see what is next, and I do not know when it will come. So what the hell do I do now?

Swallowed

Some of my friends wonder how poetry comes so easy to me. I will share my secret with you, that is how I think. Now before you think I am boasting let me tell you that it sucks to think this way. Think about it, poetry is ambiguous, minimalistic, each word carrying many many connotations.

You cannot code with poetry, expecting the machine to somehow grasp what you are trying to say, neither can you write papers or communicate well by spouting seemingly random but related words. So I have to decode my thoughts into something other people can understand, you have probably seen me trying to do this before, and either succeeding or failing to different degrees.

Of course I am not the only one who has to decode their thoughts, many people have to do this, but what I am trying to say is that my poetry is me shutting down that structuring element in my mind and letting whatever seems to follow, out onto the keyboard or paper. That is why I write poetry when I am exhausted.

this next "poem" is not a good representation of what I mean though, this one is more of a narrative than my usual poems

Look at los viejas,
the old women, feeding the machines
with coin after coin,
hoping the steel will eventually
generously reciprocate in like fashion,
somewhere I heard that true insanity is doing
the same thing and expecting different results.
Humans feeding machines and vice versa
while the cigarette smoke creates a fog
that engulfs the casino floor,
slowly suffocating, but then everyone
is dying, just at different rates,
the viejas have seen their end,
the mafioso face theirs every day,
but the smiling dealers, the inviting dancers
the jovial bartenders, they feel it:
the smothering, slowly breathing up
the last of the oxygen until only
smoke, and dust are left.