C. E. Chaffin
is a disabled physician who views poetry as a cultural vestigial organ but he can’t stop writing it.
He’s never been published in Poetry, Ploughshares or The Paris Review, though he has been the featured poet in over twenty magazines and has appeared in The Alaska Quarterly Review, Pif, The Pedestal, the Philadelphia Inquirer Book Review and Rattle, among others.
Shoe size: same as mouth.
For more of his work, visit his website.
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Elohim Overheard
“Let us make a creature who knows
he is destined to die
but can imagine eternity—
So a paradoxical longing
shall afflict him all his days
like a disease.”
Isn’t this cruelty to animals?
“Let this longing spawn
prophets and religions
as this indefatigable beast seeks relief
from his untenable condition,
a grub haunted by visions.”
This is funny?
“We don’t explain our jokes.
Something that breathes
and bleeds yet ponders God
may be the greatest miracle--
it took billions of years
to hear matter pray.”
Why does this matter?
“You may be the end of matter.”
How does this ease my suffering?
“Would you rather you didn’t exist?"
These are my choices?
American Zen
I lay on a railroad track
to feel the thrum
of approaching engines
until the near shiver
nudged me down
the gravel skirt to safety.
I was not suicidal,
just possessed of a beingness
so elementary
I wouldn’t have felt it
if you chiseled out my eyes.
Like the meniscus
of an abandoned well
walled from wind
by a chimney of stone,
not even a bucket could disturb
my black transparency.
I am beyond boredom,
so occupied with nothing
I have no patience
with sentience.
Not Zen
We all have them, days when nothing clicks,
Tab ‘A’ won’t fit slot ‘B’, when all your calls
Are to recordings and you cannot fix
That toilet with this washer, your engine stalls—
The water pump? Why is it running hot?
It’s not that you’re not trying with all your heart.
It’s simply the wrong day to try. The knot
Of kairos won’t unravel. You did your part
And nothing happened. Absence of result
Is also a result. Don’t judge your time
By what you expected, call off your assault.
Though training says, “You must get off the dime!”
Poor Westerner, if still you must impose
Your will on randomness, go prune a rose.
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