Believe It or Not

For fifty years, the man ate eggs.
Not one a day, sunny-side-up, or ten,
but eighty each morning, raw.

This takes a discipline few have.

Elsewhere, an Irishman yodeled for ten hours straight,
a New Yorker with thirty-one million in the bank
owned 1 dress and ate her porridge cold.

He was 7 feet, she was 8.
They wed in the shade of a large oak.
Across the world, a man wrote

letter after letter, envelope after envelope,
until two letters shy of four thousand
his pen ran dry.

How does anyone have the courage to lie down at night?

While we sleep, somebody dreams
the world's longest recorded dream;
while we snore or lie awake,

lips meet
underwater in breathless kisses,
a man cracks jokes

to himself, hour after
hour, plates spin
on the ends of sticks,

thread passed
through the eye of a needle
thirteen thousand times.

No part of the world is not in the contest. 

A bee hummingbird is smaller than the eye of an ostrich.

Deep in the Niger desert,
thirty miles from the nearest
tree, a recluse baobab

lived by its wits
until the day a jeep
accidentally backed into it. 

Nothing, not even posterity,
will protect you from
your singular destiny.

The man struck by lightning seven times
in the end died
by his own hand.


title poem of my second book, Believe It or Not