Paul Smith

House Of Worship

What’s required anyway?

a Host

a chalice

a congregation

mine is that of the Golden Arches

not that one on Niles Center Road

where the Eastern Orthodox flocks

gather

converted from souvlaki

to Egg McMuffins

I prefer the one in Morton Grove

near the Milwaukee Road tracks

knowing the Whole City

I can hopscotch from one to another

without taking a breath

there are so many chapels of my

denomination

with Big Macs

a styrofoam chalice with my McFlurry

multitudes like me

oh, and doctrine

well

we have slogans

You deserve a Break Today!

Me Encanta!

Кожен раз гарний час!

He’s got the whole world in His hands

Square Root

We learned about them in math class

they were hard

unless you had a calculator

everything has one

the thing at its center

a lion’s square root is hunger

to a gazelle it is the lion

to a mathematician it is curiosity

to a man it is his craving for a woman

does a square root

stay put?

Maybe not

when I was little it was

me, knowing fractions

later on

it was still me

studying complex variables and

knowing the square root

of a negative number contained

i

and wondering about the boundary between

real and imaginary numbers

now I wonder about that boundary

between men and women

and the want thereof

can it just be something imaginary

till we get what we think we want

and suddenly we and it are different

with new square roots?

like deciding how much time we want together

calculating the wasted energy in this whole thing

compared to how bad the want is

and finally guessing

what her square root is now

wishing for a calculator

wondering if I’m maybe a fraction

Excursion

The car parked on the mountain

the driver set the brake

his hand pulled on the lever

till he felt the frictions take

they piled out of the sedan

to scan the ocean view

and wondered at the curved horizon

the sea so blue

the sky a slightly different hue

all held together by His glue

they sighed

they ooh-ed

they aah-ed

they cooed

is this what He intended

this picture perfect sight?

a sea so vast

a sky so tall

their minds were boggled

for awhile

then they piled in the car

the driver disengaged the brake

eased out of the gravel lot

and drove them down the slope

to the highway

to their homes

they all piled out one last time

and got on with their lives

Semicolon

There weren’t any in the books

I read then

there were periods and commas

but no semicolons

so I thought

things were simple

and once started they aimed towards

completion

I liked that

life should be simple

and complete

but around third grade

they appeared

and suddenly life became all

strung together

like one day or one thing

was connected to the one before

and the one after

my mother and father talked’

to me about it

and told me I was now

at the age of reason

and I also learned about dinosaurs

and God

I could deal with dinosaurs

they had a beginning and an end

called extinction

but God was scary

because in church they said

He had no beginning and

would have no end

so God was not simple

He lived in eternity

and if you were bad

you went to hell forever

but it was God who sent you there

so I became more afraid of God

than I was of hell

and although I had

mixed feelings about semicolons

I soon started disliking them

because they prolonged things

and made life more complicated

and all the books I was given

from then on

had semicolons in them

even the ones

without God

Paul Smith is a civil engineer who has worked in the construction racket for many years. He has traveled all over the place and met lots of people. Some have enriched his life. Others made him wish he or they were all dead. He likes writing poetry and fiction. He also likes Newcastle Brown Ale. If you see him, buy him one. His poetry and fiction have been published in Convergence, Missouri Review, Angry Old Man, Literary Orphans and other lit mags.