Thor, the Norse God of Thunder, had a hammer named Mjölnir. Mjölnir was considered a fierce weapon that could level mountains and summon lightning with every blow. In this poetry blog, every Thursday, (Thor’s Day), Mjölnir will forge only song - sing of the mysteries and beauties of the world.

Thursday, December 30, 2021

THE ALGORITHM

Careful where you click.
And how often.

In other words: 
where you put 

your time, energy
and attention matters.

Like magic, an algorithm 
may form without 

you even knowing it
and then, before too long, 

it is an intelligence
that is busy outsmarting

and outwitting you,
maneuvering you into

data structures that confound you
and that simply don’t compute,

while all the while
you are operating

under a compilation of impressions
and iterating beliefs that tell you:

I am solving a problem,
not creating one,

when in fact you're
bugging up the system,

hard-coding a virus 
into a virtual reality.


Thursday, December 23, 2021

EYE LOUPE 

Wherever you 
put it down 

or point it
watch what happens

to what’s under 
the suction 

of its scrutiny:
a thing 

magically magnifies.
Our minds 

do this also: magnify.
Which is why 

we must be
careful.

Depending upon 
our mood

we may perceive
a problem 

where there isn’t
one and yet

we magnify 
its size

tenfold 
and then 

find ourselves,
without knowing it,

focused on 
our fixation

and captured within
its fine framing,

caught
within its loop.







Thursday, December 16, 2021

IN THE MANNER OF THE WORD

At the party
I watched the words, 

who came in costume,
act out their pantomimes:

    make love to potato chips, 
    one chip at a time,

    weep mournfully over the texture 
    of their own imaginary skin,

    diabolically folding napkins as if 
    each crease were a new province of evil,  

    arm wrestle with the spice and spunk
    of impassioned foreplay,

    give massages like spastics 
    in the middle of a melt-down,

    pull up their argyle socks as 
    Einsteins' solving theoretical proofs,

and thought to myself,
if only we could express 

ourselves this freely
we might put an end 

to our own charade, 
and give up playing 

dress-up for one brief moment,
and stand fully exposed, 

as if we were the word naked
standing naked before itself.






Thursday, December 9, 2021

BAUDELAIRE AND THE BAGUETTE

“The French have a different word for everything,”
Steve Martin said that, and it’s true.
 
The other night, in a lazy sort of way,
in a kind of mental saunter, 
I came across a French word 
I had never encountered before,
before sleep, in a book on wayfaring.
 
The word was flâneur. 
It is nearly onomatopoeic.
It feels a bit drowsy in the mouth,
like the tongue is going numb 
in the very act of saying it.
And yet it also feels posey,
like it finishes with a slight swagger.
 
It was a thing in 19th century France, 
to be a flâneur, a loafer and a lounger. 
To be a Baudelaire strolling
down the boulevard, 
a connoisseur of the street.
To wander with no purpose.
To be a passionate spectator.
It was an art form to be a man of leisure.
 
Oh, what I would give to idle my days away
with no sense of urgency 
and nothing to do but savor
the ebb and flow of time
like a flavor, like a Parisian cheese 
on a baguette I symbolistically bite into.






Thursday, December 2, 2021

MATH BACKWARDS

I start with the sum
and work my magic 
backwards—choose
and use anything
I can lay my 
mathematician hands on:
my imagination  
a protractor
decimal points
powers and roots
proofs and theorems
differential equations
Fibonacci numbers, pi
probability theory
permutations formulas
inverse trigonometry, calculus
all in an effort to create 
the equation (the problem) 
that my mind has already 
solved, so I can, 
like a modern day Pythagoras, 
play slip and slide 
up and down the slope 
of my hypothetical hypotenuse.