RUBE GOLDBERG MACHINE

 

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There’s the seemingly endless tumble of dominoes,

pulleys, drops, and cantilevered walks

along which the marble slows almost to a stop 

before nestling on a switch,

and completing the circuit, 

causing a small explosion to send a rocket

made from a paper towel roll and cardboard fins

slamming into a dangling funnel,

which becomes a pendulum spilling sand

into a bucket 

until that bucket is so heavy 

it pushes down its side of the seesaw, 

but there is also the rain 

and the relationships you fail to maintain 

over decades,

and everything you have ever microwaved,

all the times you forgot

to signal 

but nothing happened,

which is of course a kind of happening,

middle age,

which is of course a kind of signaling,

the air between what’s left

of the ketchup

and the top of the bottle: loss

you think of as benign

because of big box stores—

free samples next to grandmotherly types

big bad wolfing the brain,

the world “mild”

on hundreds of giant containers of salsa—

this plan you have

to just restock the staples,

whatever that means, 

re-achieve some baseline,

secure the baby carrots and get out of there,

and though it’s hard to get out of Costco

even in a poem,

eventually you get home

and your thoughts are there, not arranged 

painstakingly so as to fall perfectly 

into one another, 

rarely deferential to an ideal 

like sunset

on a screen saver 

on a phone ringing in a pocket 

setting over an ocean of lint 

slowly

like blood sugar levels, orange

like a baby carrot,

which when bitten into 

pops 

like a gun, signaling some race

you didn’t even know was happening

just started,

and you won’t win

—you know there’s no winning— 

but all the same your bones are suddenly 

negotiating 

yet another shiny field of photons,

using only the thought-carved massless misshapen 

evolutionary strategies that,

for lack of a better word, 

for lack of a better idea,

for lack of a better way of being in the world, 

we call love.

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BIO:

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​Jeffrey Morgan is the author of two poetry collections, Crying Shame (BlazeVOX [books]) and The Last Note Becomes Its Listener, winner of the Mind’s on Fire Open Book Prize (Conduit Books & Ephemera). Twice a National Poetry Series finalist, his poems appear in Copper Nickel, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, Rattle, and West Branch. Read more of his poems here: https://linktr.ee/jeffreymorgan. 

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