They say Einstein had no tear ducts.
They say he cried straight from his brain.
They say he had a small family
about four inches tall.
They say he lived a hard life
in and out of rehab, and quantum physics.
They say that Einstein cried pure quantum physics
straight from his brain.
They say he could make the chalk write out
equations on the blackboard
from thirty miles away, at a different university.
They say Einstein predicted urban sprawl
decades before the first suburbs were created.
They say he hammered nails with his forehead.
They say he scored zero on the SAT
because in the dimension he was in when he took it
zero was the highest number.
They say we are forever banished to this dimension
where all we can do is read
the biographies of Einstein.
They say he penned his own biography
by the age of four.
They say on his fingertips
where his fingertips were supposed to be
were mathematical symbols.
They say he ran numbers out of the back room
at MIT. They say he slept with Marilyn Monroe
and JFK’s wife in the White House,
with JFK tied to a chair, made to watch.
They say it was nine kinds of rape.
All in all, Einstein was a brilliant man
especially as a theoretical physicist.
No biographer disagrees about that.
He was honest to a fault, that Einstein.
When the King of Prussia asked Einstein
what he thought about his nation
Einstein just stared out the window
and said, “I’d rather live in a cat-piss infected sandbox.”
“If I were an arsonist,” Einstein continued
“instead of a nuclear physicist
I’d burn down Prussia one shack at a time.
And start it all over from scratch.
And call it Russia.”

—from “Biographies of Einstein,” by Mark Leidner