Poem for Noam by Brian Edwards

Poem for Noam

                       "colourless green ideas sleep furiously"
                                          --- Noam Chomsky --- 
 

Tongue's a hopeful monster? I don't buy it Mr Chomsky.
Despite your attempts to make language colourless
all your wisdom speaks iridescent shades of green.
Tortured by the variegated avalanche of your ideas,
is it any wonder I'm having trouble getting to sleep?
My brain's awake, my body rejects drugs furiously,
my finger scrawls in the margins and flicks furiously
through libraries of your sacred words Mr Chomsky
but none of your figures and diagrams bring sleep.
None falsifiable musings make a theory colourless
but science is nothing if not a rainbow of new ideas
and the leaves of your beliefs leave my fingers green.
How can non-communication paint living digits green?
How many sleepless nights did you suffer, furiously
refusing to hold your fingers to the moonlight, ideas
of grandeur, dreams of the name Noam Chomsky
being uttered in the same breath as your colourless
behaviourist nemeses, begging for the liberty of sleep? 
It took war in Indo-China to finally bring you sleep.
Napalm orange drowning undemocratic fields of green,
farmed to feed brainwashed defenders of colourless
communism. No more sleepless nights, you furiously
scribbled a new anarchist, a new Noam Chomsky
at war with war, fire-bombing the media with ideas
evoking Trotsky, provoking protest riots amid ideas
of American victory in Vietnam. Smokestacks of sleep
now pollute the air behind your eyes Mr Chomsky,
as the War on Drugs and War on Terror plant green
grass in the fields of your intellect. And I read furiously,
find waves of luminosity in contrast with your colourless
assertions, picture the inside of your mind as a colourless
vessel, a swirl of heat and oxides, raw material of ideas
homogenized by experience, splat quenched furiously
and shaped into words of glass that cool as you sleep.
I see you at your typewriter, bearded, punching green
genius onto a blank page, inventing Noam Chomsky.

Help me out Mr Chomsky, I need to get some sleep.
I've tried furiously to achromatize your ideas,

but language can't be colourless if all I see is green.

~

Comments

[Brian Edwards]

Well, I changed the first word to Tongue's. If that don't garner some reads and responses, I got nuttin'.

[pete pick]

nuttin it is, then. 'tongue's' is an improvement, though.....

[silent lotus]

dear Brian

i have truthfully never read a word by your Mr Chomsky
he has thus never kept me from my pillow
and i shall not lose any sleep if he
does not send me a note or never
bothers to phone

in the meantime
i am finding some pleasure in your poem

silent lotus

[Brian Edwards]

Good, good, good.

Yes, thank you both, much.

B.

~

[pete pick]

oh well, and i did say something about this earlier, didn't i, when it was in your blog. i suppose i should have waited.....

[Brian Edwards]

Yes you did Peter, much appreciated it was too, made me rethink that opening.