Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Three November-December 2024
Aotearoa Poets and Writers Special Edition
Reason and Belief, poem by Michael Giacon.
Reason and Belief
I know who Frank is/was, but I didn’t know him exactly, his name on a $1
Easy As Instant Kiwi Christmas gift card, a bookmark within The Mind of God*
retrieved from the Help Yourself! box in the Staff Resource Room WT1006.
The precise scratching reveals a DNA of hope, two $10,000 panels
but no trifecta, the festive token wedged between pages 20-21
of Chapter 1, subtitled The Scientific Miracle.
Whether the thwarted flirtation with fortune darkened Frank’s Christmas
and because ‘when it comes to addressing the really deep issues of existence
… there is a strong temptation to retreat into unreasoned belief’ (p.20)
whoever bought the book could be presumed to have been interested
in a higher holy roller game.
‘Yet why this should be so remains a tantalizing mystery’ (p.20) as evidenced
in a question mark, three arrows and five underlined pieces from page 19
forward [innate; leitmotif; determinism; retrodict; relative probabilities of the
different states are still determined] that suggest the book was only read to page 31
ten lines shy of the sub-chapter Metaphysics: Who needs it?
I don’t know if I’ll get beyond the Contents although the final chapter,
THE MYSTERY AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE, is only ten pages.
The mind-boggled title set in Penguin Books orange amid a treatise on linguistic
acculturation and shunned grammar and usage tomes prompted my rescue bid
and gave breath to this poem. I plan to split its provenance: a Christmas gift
for a friend who would believe, and the scratchy stored in a keepsake box
to be disposed of when I am by whoever sorts me over and out.
Why did he keep all this? they might wonder, who was/is Frank?
‘It does not deny a meaning beyond existence’ (p.21).
* All quotations from Chapter 1 in Davies, P. (1992). The Mind of God. Penguin Books.
© Michael Giacon
Michael Giacon is a Tāmaki Auckland-based writer. He released his first book of poetry undressing in slow motion in May 2024.