Cracked Record Blues
If you watch it long enough you can see the clock move.
If you try hard enough you can hold a little water in the
palm of your hand,
If you listen once or twice you know it’s not the needle, or
the tune, but a crack in the record when sometimes
a phonograph falters and repeats, and repeats, and
repeats, and repeats
And if you think about it long enough, long enough, long
enough, long enough then everything is simple and
you can understand the times,
You can see for yourself that the Hudson still flows, that the
seasons change as ever, that love is always love,
Words still have a meaning, still clear and still the same;
You can count upon your fingers that two plus two still
equals, still equals, still equals, still equals–
There is nothing in this world that should bother the mind.
Because the mind is a common sense affair filled with common
sense answers to common sense facts,
It can add up, can add up, can add up, can add up earthquakes
and subtract them from fires,
It can bisect an atom or analyze the planets–
All it has to do is to, do is to, do is to, do is to start at the
beginning and continue to the end.
from Afternoon Of A Pawnbroker And Other Poems, by Kenneth Fearing
New York City: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1944
Available on the Internet Archive: Link
This is one in a series of neglected poems taken from the Internet Archive.