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Calculation: Waiting for Gödel (Incompleteness Theorem)

Yesterday morning had gold in its mouth,
a joy known only between skin and tongue.
A mockingbird called out my name, called out
a word slipped through silvered beak and sun—
Blue. The completeness I feel when you
are here with me, flesh pressed against time,
which does not exist. And so I cut through
to count our iambic rhythm and rhyme.
When I am with you, time does not exist.
I try mathematically modeling birdsong;
all of my honey-speckled doubts persist.
Did fractal calculation get it wrong?
Syntactically incomplete by design,
such logics go; omission is the paradigm.

Danelle Lejeune lives with her husband, novelist Tony Morris, and their four children somewhere near Savannah, Georgia. Shenanigans include beekeeping, porch music, and arguing loudly about obscure and unimportant historical trivia. Her first collection of poems is Landlocked: Etymology of Whale Fish and Grace (Finishing Line Press, 2017).

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