“Advice and "Edelweiss,” “Ultra Thanatron,” “Parenthetically Ultimately” and “Epi-Functional Playpen”
Poems by Nick Romeo
Nick Romeo
Published on August 30, 2026
Advice and Edelweiss
Would you play the fiddle,
whilst earth is vaporized
by an alien invasion,
or a group of mad scientists
playing shuffleboard
with a doomsday weapon?
How will you cope with the end,
looming in your thought bubble,
during your surfing the internet
for cheap hoes to proliferate
your garden and closets?
Soon these will grow tired
inside dark recesses
of aneurisms, hemorrhages,
and bad violin playing—
only to detonate a truck
filled with sodium nitrate
next to a homemade
super collider.
If only you read a slew
of helpless-self textbooks—
the entire bibliotheque,
while you study
ancient Greek, Latin,
and the Dewey Decimal System
with a little string theory.
Then you would learn
from the Macedonians and Romans
as you build a time machine,
so you can quickly absorb
the complete
Library of Alexandria
as it burns to the ground.
Ultra Thanatron
Thomas Joel Bopp and Alan Hale observed
the trajectory of an icy coma nucleus
tearing thru wind radiation
wreaking fires of extinction
burning yesterday as today implodes
with heavenly bodies’ orbital geometry
beclouded in minerals and murk
crushing into swarms of elements
dispensing into an earthly tableau
for Samuel Clemens to occur / live / die
by the same streaking orb in the sky
but I remember that day
we organized machines
to dole out mercy
allowing time’s arrow
since this life is unnatural.
We are all terminal.
Parenthetically Ultimately
my calculated path spans on the imaginary axis
polarizing with an angle confirming your intercept
as you play with my numbers amongst oscillations
with a range of infinity like cubic roots and a
collatz tree collecting multiple stream sequences
bouncing between four {biblical perfection} and one
which defines my solitude and my favorite placement
because I strive for a sign to wave my way in harmony
as you discount symmetry pointing to cosmic axis tilts
and that oort cloud since you’re that {ice} queen of hearts
but let me remind you of the joy of palindromic primes
and how beauty blends at each corner of the canopy
as fractals glint in mirrors dripping yellow rhododendrons
Epi-Functional Playpen
My sleep is unconstitutional striking out
the amendment in roll call with plastic
knives sawing natural logs as circadian
rhythms trickle blast beats disturbing
my migration arrangement to the antarctic
where I’m de-icing the innards of my
soulless spaceship with the mechanized
maid equipped with garters and a feather
brush tickling my fancy as a pulse
trickles thru a brain stem uprooted from a storm
splitting fissures into hemispheric fibers
with worms dining upon the god module
whilst I reside peering out a bedroom window
into the driveway counting raccoons play
their drumkit alongside flying Vs and keyboards
enabling the deer to dance and eat the hydrangeas
birthing vaccinated centaurs with dragon wings
on the spot as I read the rules to this slugfest
which states that the suffocating ooze
will loosen the bed screws.