The Captain Dreams and Other Poems

By Alex Kashko

The Captain Dreams

Small tramp steamer
On the way home
The captain dreams
Of days that are gone
 
Captain Blood is laughing aloud
Blackbeard's drinking gunpowder and grog
As the captain dreams
Of days that are gone
 
The Flying Dutchman races
The Marie Celeste
As the captain dreams
Of days that are gone
 
The Argo paces
The boat of the sun
And the captain dreams
Of days that are gone
 
Tall ships race through the sky
St Elmo's fire wrapping their masts
As the captain dreams
Of days that are gone
 
The ship of souls pauses,
Lets down a rope
As the captain dreams
Of days that are gone
 
Small tramp steamer
On the way home
Once had a captain who dreamed
Of days that are gone

Comptometer

Banks of keys: a mathematical piano:
Tap in numbers, turn the handle
Twenty digits: small change to a bank.
 
Levers and cogs
add subtract
multiply divide.
Now its a mystery how.
 
Behind the mathematical piano
An electronic machine.
Eight digits, no more
battery keys, a screen
 
Both obsolete,
in a box at your feet,
Battery flat used no more.
This is how they do it now
“Alexa, what is two times four?”

The Mystery of the Carnival

A single shoe discarded, a bunch of flowers, a mystery
a dedication, a sacrifice to the lord of foolishness?
Will stay before his statue till the end of never.
On the 30th of February his hammer
starts the time of misrule, the carnival
of fools, when it hits the bell.
 
The showman-priest taps the bell
Not meditating on the mystery,
of Carnival
nor the wise minds foolishness.
The sound of the hammer
on the bell resounds till the last day of never.
 
When the flying purple pigs of never
dethrone the slaughter house king, break his bell,
smite the killjoy priests with the hammer
that releases the joy of mystery
the frenetic freedom of foolishness
the wild dung flinging carnival
 
of fools, wise fools who use the carnival
to seek the boundaries of never,
and tread the line between wisdom and foolishness.
At the bottom of the sea a great brass bell
tolls a sunken mystery
in a city destroyed by a hammer.
 
The sacred healing hammer
hammers reason into submission. Carnival
become a sacred mystery
the educated never
fathom till the bell
chimes and they see the wisdom of foolishness.
 
Adults say only children may enjoy foolishness
Grown ups must work when the master’s hammer
strikes the time clock bell
Splitting the carnival
from the world never
to reveal its mystery.

The temple and the carnival bell unleash foolishness
that hides a mystery unlocked by a hammer,
a mystery that starts a carnival to calm the mind till the end of never