Two Poems by John Drudge

 

Ever Be

Feel your sadness

Feel your losses

There’s no good time

For anything

So you might as well be

Whatever

You can be

Let it drill down

Be messy

Be profound

And be as wrong

As you can possibly be

Fail hard

Crash

Boom

Bam

Be stronger

In the broken places

Be something

More than you thought

You could ever be

Shaking

Euclid’s fifth postulate

Hurts my brain

No parallels

No contradictions

2000 years of failure

Bottomless nights

Curved lines

Extinguishing

Along the shortest path

Pushing outward

Crumpling at the lip

Infinitely

But never reaching the edge

Arcs of circles

Hidden universes

Folding

Out of nothing

Paradoxical and absurd

Never exceeding

A definite limit

Infinitely long

Within a finite space

All angles eventually

Returning to zero

In a spherical geometry

Intersecting

Unbounded

Undefined

Necessarily relative

Like a broken off lid

Shaking in a tin can

John Drudge is a social worker working in the field of disability management and holds degrees in social work, rehabilitation services, and psychology.  He is the author of seven books of poetry: “March” (2019), “The Seasons of Us” (2019), New Days (2020), Fragments (2021), A Long Walk (2023), A Curious Art (2024) and Sojourns (2024) . His work has appeared widely in literary journals, magazines, and anthologies internationally. John is also a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee and lives in Caledon Ontario, Canada with his wife and two children.