HEIKKI HUOTARI

The Morning No Mistakes Were Made

The lilies are but vehicles, but closest points in compact convex sets to other

compact convex sets, great parallelograms of white, my public and my private

lives, my irony, my ice cream and my cognitive decline. When everything around

me is in fixed position I'll say I'm in fixed position. As I show my teeth so in a

state of grace I stand my ground. The monotonic gives me leave to improvise

then, cold, goes home. If what I think is not odd is I lack imagination but should

you be the superposition I would like to look at twice, should Simon say guess

pestilence and be a prophet, the penumbra will be coming round the mountain

when the umbra does.

When Parades Collide

Holding a diploma backwards is as bad as holding no diploma. Is it bad because

the devil says it's bad or does the devil say it's bad because it's bad? You're the

last person I'd suspect of having an agenda. Monuments collide with flying flags

then follow through. When you say under god and gravity I say the secret's in the

sarsaparilla. Only to disturb the surface, I bring nuance to the children's table.

Where there is a barrier there is a countdown clock. I'm tilting at causality as at a

tasseled hat. Amendments to the constitution are forever so consider neither the

attorneys general of vernacular tranquility nor notice how they work the room. It's

one AM, do you know where your limbic system is?

On Simulating Weightlessness

One chicken on the other chicken spots a flaw. One chicken of existence calls the

other chicken of existence white then out. Ubiquity is in fact equal to existing

chickens. Each existing chicken has a unique fate. A molecule of oxygen is as

much an occasion as photography is truth. Believers leave when it gets real.

Perfection but a stepping-stone, he leadeth me beside the spinning lilies as I

disapprove of one diaspora after another. It's a kitchen sink means that it's a

means to an end, a bad companion to the manna of demand, a geometric series for

a physical phenomenon, the oldest known. Consider the tiptoers through the

tulips who won't tiptoe. You're no enemy of mine. I know that there's a natural

world because sometimes it passes between me and my eternal spring.

Heikki Huotari attended a one-room school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. Since retiring from academia/mathematics he has published poems in numerous journals and in five poetry collections and has won one book and two chapbook awards. His Erdős number is two.