Risky Business

by Ed Zahniser

Tonight our topic was risk
—mostly how we do not take it
or them.
There are hazards: You might slip a disk
or spouse or friend; not quite make it
to the last waltz; choke on phlegm

God forbid that we might risk abandonment,
of all drear dreads the boomer’s basic fear.
It screws our loyalty to pathology.
And faced with intimacy we act downright queer
(You can’t abandon me if you can’t get to me).
We make life’s high point our worst punishment.

Damn the torpedoes! Full risk ahead!
Some of us talked out loud.
Others signaled otherwise that they weren’t dead.
When it comes to taking risks, two’s a crowd.
I sat and thought: This is what I need to hear.
I also thought: Let me out of here!

IMMANUEL KANT’S EPISTEMOLOGY

by Ed Zahniser

Kant wrote cant you can’t get rote
or so it seems at first. What can we know?
Kant wants to know—and then seeks
help from old Greek thought. Why?
The arc of thought up to Kant’s time
streamed down toward thought’s
own death and since Hume’s day
it was not what we can not know
but that we can not know. And
Kant held too the mind is no blank
slate the world of sense chalks
in for us. Nor are we born with
gifts of fact we need no mind
to know; that is, there live no
knowns known free of mind.
So Kant did write some things
you might get rote
or so it seems at last.

SO MUCH DEPENDS ON A LITTLE BLACK CLOUD

In mem. Anna Nicole Smith
by Ed Zahniser

Every cloud has a sliver lining
it. Ask any meteorologist
but not TV types who’re always whining
about how last night’s forecast sorely missed

the mark & drowned—I kid you not—all folks
below Fourth Street in Brunswick, Maryland,
peopled by party-freaks who can’t be coaxed
to dodge direct hits to their most cherished gland

much less hits by this cloud-lining sliver
that got down to brass tacks all across town.
When I think about some glands I quiver
speak in tongues lose control black out fall down.

We don’t admit we mourn specific parts
but metaphorize our dead, the dear hearts.                 —