While I Was at War

(This is another example of the incomplete poem. I have worked on it, off and on, over the last fifty years. Still doesn’t seem quite right…)

My hair started turning white

While God took a vacation

Supposedly To work with Stephen Hawking

On his second law of black hole dynamics

Mrs God knew

It was God’s way of saying

He would be out chasing Jung women

She was Jung once herself

Me

I had been sucked into a black hole

where you could smell your hair turning white

before you saw it

Where both past and present

flickered past

like a starburst flare reflecting on

a rice paddy