JOHNMICHAEL SIMON POETRY

It’s a carnival booth world,

armed with poles and magnets

we’re fishing for lost continents

 

Atlantis under the plains

of Salt Lake City, Pangaea,

a number of Ararats, scattered

 

Bones of Lemurian warriors

in Nashville, Greenwich, Mecca

and Tiberias, moldering, slimy

 

Carbon-dated yet distinctly

reminiscent of a fossil found

in Drakensberg, anthropopoidal

 

Arrowhead of Flintstone quoting

his now famous pre-kindergarten

national anthem.  They say that

 

At any meeting of ten scholars

there are twenty dissenting opinions:

the Paleolithic length of the pole

 

The magnetic pull of pre-Cambrian

Eden giving exactly the right tilt

to six thousand years of recorded expulsion

 

Adam and Eve discussing Jungian

consciousness, dinosaurs and demons

relegated back to the laboratory of a

 

Non-existent big bang theory

now finally disproved; she holding his pole,

homo erectus, magnet dipping precisely into

 

The continent where Jonah swallowed his whale—

quad erat demonstrandum

the Loch Ness Monster!