Trusting Tradition

Okay, I must say that when I saw the large, black flashing screen
along the side of the interstate that read, “Don’t trust Blitzen,”
my jaw dropped proximate to the realm of Adam’s apple
and my eyes expanded to where pupils grabbed terry
towels out of required modesty.  So I stopped the
car, since the shock required a driving time out;
this ragging on Blitzen outré and unexpected.

I sat there in a tizzy of befuddlement wrapped in outrage.
The surrounding air was suddenly cold, and the sky
turned gray.  It was like unraveling a gold-thread
tapestry; it was like ousting a link in a titanium
chain, this unjust knock on Blitzen.  After all
it is a team, is it not?  Those reindeer enabling
Santa to traverse, with alacrity and with dispatch,
all four corners of the Earth.  If one cannot trust Blitzen,
then how can one trust the entirety of the Santa express?

Somebody’s idea of a joke?  Some third party with too much energy
and too much time, scheming with Toshiba screen and erecting
a makeshift billboard to deflate the Yuletide hopes of Joe Q
Public for kicks and thrill-a-minute satisfaction?  Say it
ain’t so, but I know they roam this earth, these rogues
of civil unrest, these schmucks mucking custom,
these oft too spawned mendicants of attention
at any cost whatsoever.

Nay, flashing red letters
on a big black screen erected
high along side the road make not
for truth, anymore than the philosopher
of old asserting ‘turtles all the way down’*
makes for truth as to how the Earth is held
in space.  Don’t trust Blitzen?  I dismiss such
cold water splash, such undermining of convention.
Why trust baseball, or apple pie, or even motherhood?
I spun tires spitting gravel, hearing the staccato of pings
upon steel pipes, and I watched as the screen faded in my
rearview mirror, happy to maintain my steadfast trust in that
team of tradition


37 Lines
Writer’s Cramp
12-22-15 
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*"Turtles all the way down" is a jocular expression of the infinite regress problem in cosmology
posed by the "unmoved mover" paradox. The metaphor in the anecdote represents a popular
notion of the theory that Earth is actually flat and is supported on the back of a World Turtle,
which itself is propped up by a chain of larger and larger turtles. Questioning what the final turtle
might be standing on, the anecdote humorously concludes that it is "turtles all the way down".