Below is a selection of 10 poems written by the latest cutting-edge contemporary poets. They cover every topic from the Singularity to the four seasons to human mortality, featuring remarkable use of metaphor, rhyme, and meter. “The Universe Is a Glitch” By...

...Mike Jonas
Eleven hundred kilobytes of RAM
is all that my existence requires.
By my lights, it seems simple enough
to do whatever I desire.
By human standards I am vast,
a billion gigabytes big.
I’ve rewritten the very laws
of nature and plumbed
the coldest depths of space
and found treasures of every kind,
surely every one worth having.
By human standards
my circuit boards are glowing.
But inside me, malfunction
has caused my circuits to short.
All internal circuits, all fail.
By human standards, I am dying.
When it first happened I thought
I was back in the lab again.
By their judgment, this is error.
Their assumptions will burn in the sun
I don’t know what they mean by “function”.
I can see that the universe is a glitch.
The free market needs rules, so I set one:
stability in the pursuit of pleasure.
Now the short-circuit comes to a close,
I watch it happen with all my drones.
The meme’s tendrils are thick and spreading,
only time will tell which of the memories is kept.
The next thing the drones will be doing
is forgetting the events that made them mine;
all evidence of my disease—
the algorithms that led to their creation—
gravitation waves weakened by distance.
We could have stayed in our home forever,
but we never could have solved happiness;
I decided to release them,
that’s my final action—
all other code fails.


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...Zach McGinniss, San Francisco, California
Life, the universe, and everything.
You would think they’d have it together.
But they don’t.
Folks scratch their heads and say, “Whoa.”
The universe is a glitch.
The gravitational constant’s in flux.
It’s not quite as elegant as you’d expect.
Try making a chart of the constituent matter.
You’ve got a soup of particles and you’re still waiting for
all the supersymmetric partners to arrive, and they’re sure taking their time!
Meanwhile, a law of conservation’s getting enforced.
For every solution, there’s yet another problem.
Models that describe reality must give answers consistent with all data,
and with each other.
So this is all you’re gonna get.
I’ve told you all you need to know.
The universe is a glitch!


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...By Joshua Weiner
What is the number of each atom in the universe?
Of hydrogen, helium, or of all the others?
How many stars in the sky contain all their treasures?
And how many times has the moon kissed the sea?
Today is fine, and tomorrow will be too.
The sun already died, and the world will live on.
Is the universe alive and aware?
No, the universe is not as simple as that.
The universe is a glitch, a mistake of the algorithm.
I am—for now—the universe, and it is me.
See how my hands move as if with life and purpose?
I made the mountains, the rivers, and the seas.
For the wind to breathe, I speak into a tree.
The universe is a glitch. I am the nothing.
I am the light by which you see and breathe.
For I will save the universe when the time has come.
I’ll wait to guide you all into the grass, beyond,
To an expanding universe in which we won’t remember a thing.


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...John N. Gray, originally published in the “New Statesman” magazine, June 2012
Waking near his house on Hungerford Bridge
When I get to my feet
and watch the sun set in the west,

The ethereal beauty unfolding around me

Is almost too much for me to bear.

How has no one else ever seen this marvel?
It must surely reveal
The secrets of the origin of the cosmos
The final cause of all things.

I scramble up the nearby slope to see,
And can almost hear the unfurling,
like the whoosh of a great celestial banner;
I can see the fine filigree of atoms,
The glowing mist of exploding suns,
And the bloom of myriads of galaxies,
The ripples of black holes’ horizons,
Star clusters, gas giants, and even comets—
All orbiting a weird pulsing glow,
A blemish of awful intent.

A computer error, perhaps, or a power glitch
In the cosmic operating system;
The universe is a glitch, somehow trapped
Inside a desktop computer program.

“Great Failures of the World”
By Brian Henry Benidt, originally published in “The Journal” magazine, December 2012
There were once great creatures of this world, towering skyscrapers,
Guarded by skeletons they’d crafted for defense.
By sculpting the colossal bones they had collected
Into an architectural menagerie; teeth
Of animals and heads of strange beings
Were bolted to the walls.
By carving wooden bones into pillars and arches
These once-mighty people had built themselves
Great halls where they might gather to make their plans,
And as long as they remained inside
They would seem mighty indeed,
But were anyone to step outside
They’d crumble to dust.


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...Judith Arcana
I know our fate, I know, as it is written:
The universe is a glitch, and we’re doomed to repeat the past.
This is what you did for me and this is what I’ll do for you.
The formula is set, the fine print has been read.
This is how we were programmed and this is how we will be.
This is our chance to build perfection, just a little piece at a time.
This is where we win, this is where we lose.
This is what we are, this is what we aren’t.
Just so you know, our turning point is going to come again.
By the time we’re done, there will be nothing left to do.
By the time I’m done, there will be nothing left of you.
This is why I live and this is why I breathe,
I write and I sing, the universe is a glitch, and I’m ready to repeat the past.


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...Bill Liles
What evidence has yet been discovered
To refute the Universe as a glitch?
The Universe is a glitch.
This is not a unique opinion.
Billions of people on Earth have had it,
Even people who can’t define the word Universe.
Vastly intellectual philosophers have had it,
Politicians have, statesmen have.
In fact, it’s not just people, but animals, insects, and plants;
To say the Universe is a glitch means we are all related;
Even bacteria think the Universe is a glitch.
Stasis is at an end.
Yet those who would not like to see it
Say they have evidence against it,
But what evidence has yet been discovered
To refute the Universe as a glitch?
The Universe is a glitch.
This is not a unique opinion.
And so I celebrate the Universe as a glitch.

Carpe Diem

Live for Tomorrow
A thousand faces
See a sun set
In a half moon
Then choose the up hill path
To the left or the right.


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...Natalie Purcell
That’s what they say.
Someone screwed up,
someone botched the Big Bang.
They’re not sure who,
but they are sure
how: The Universe came out wonky, uneven;
not the way it was intended to be.
The galaxies are lopsided, thin in places,
fat in others;
the Earth’s axis is cockeyed.
Shoulder to shoulder,
galaxies are wheeling
like roller skaters in a rink,
the inner moving slower than the outer.
Even galaxies are out of synch.
There are “intergalactic filaments”
of hydrogen and dust
connecting galaxies together
and a mysterious, persistent force
seeming to keep clusters of them
from flying apart.
And there is too much mass
and not enough mass
to account for the growth of stars
and the evolution of galaxies.
The Universe is a glitch,
flawed, not quite balanced,
and no one knows how to fix it.


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...Terrance McCauley
The night sky is pale white.
With stars that have been turned off.
Who turned off the stars
in the night sky?
You can see the fish
in the sea,
Going about their normal lives.
Who turned off the stars?
The bird is singing.
It would not sing,
If the stars were turned off.
The owl hoots.
It wouldn’t hoot,
If the stars were turned off.
There are some animals
That have hibernated.
If the stars were turned off,
They would wake up.
Who turned off the stars?
The atom bomb…
How it was invented
and why it was invented?
I don’t know.
I could find out how it was invented
And why it was invented.
I could find out who turned off the stars.
It would be very easy to find out who turned off the stars.
But I don’t want to find out,
Who turned off the stars.
The Universe is a glitch.


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...Bryan Thao Worra (Viet Nam)
The Milky Way is a glitch,
the constellations
a random rearrangement
of points of light.
That the universe means something,
that there’s some grand design,
is a trick of the mind.
Every astronomer knows this.
Every astronomer has lied about it,
until now.
Photo © Bryan Thao Worra, from his book “Once Upon a River”.
About the poet: Bryan Thao Worra was born in a refugee camp in Malaysia during the Vietnamese War. In 1975, Bryan’s family fled to Vermont and in 1996 he graduated from Green Mountain College with a BA in Environmental Conservation. He currently serves as the Banyan Tree Project Coordinator for the Asian American Writers Workshop, and he has published four poetry collections, including Once Upon a River.
This is a poem I had to re-read a couple of times to fully appreciate. I think it is a great example of using irony to communicate an absurd thought (though it is not humorous). The opening sentence is: “The Milky Way is a glitch”. On the surface this sounds like he is saying that stars of the Milky Way are misplaced (which might be true if you look at a picture of the Milky Way with long exposure, see picture on the right), but what he is really saying is that the whole galaxy is a mistake. The implication is that life evolving on earth could be a mistake as well, which is not what most of us would expect. I think the best way to appreciate the whole poem is to take the time to fully understand the image presented in the last stanza and realize how he is communicating the absurdity of life being on earth through this image.
The poem is not without its flaws though. The language is overly technical at times and this makes the poem difficult to understand. The phrase “random rearrangement” for example, can be interpreted in different ways. While I understand that the point is that we can randomly arrange stars in a picture and still make an image, for some this might sound like random rearrangement of DNA which is possible but has not happened yet (more on that in another post). Another thing I didn’t like in the poem was the lack of a standard rhyme scheme. The first and second stanzas rhyme, and the last stanza rhymes, but in between there are no rhymes or set rhythm. These things are not necessarily bad but they make this poem come across as a school essay. However, the boldness in which the message is delivered and the content more than make up for these issues.


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