Politics today

Do you
sir, agree
sir, with the clap
trap yapped by your
ill esteemed
colleague
on the right?

No, sir
you see, sir
I’m to his left.
I agree
completely.

When I found myself in times of trouble Mother Mary leaped from me (or the importance of finding new gods)

Mister and Ms. Computer
Scientists, grant me this.

Program me, virtually,
a plump-sweet, pretty world.

Don’t play with tricky words,
but the truer noughts and ones

you’re accustomed to,
to two-tone its bitsy pi

of peach and sugar-plum sky,
its rump of gingerbread

beach buttered up against
a rum soaked sea. Let it be.

Oh, let it be, holy geeks,
there my brain, over-stuffed with

thick-milk worries for this world
soured by off-the-shelf warming

and war, gets dumped. Crumpled
skin and bone can be left

behind. Where? Wherever
I won’t really care.

A few default responses

If they can’t raise the roof on this
high-priced rental,
it’s ain’t all
bad, brother.

You see, sister,
we can stop

Paying remote control soldiers to pretend
lives in Yemen,
Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan
are worth less than video game victims

Paying Somali proxies to torture
questionable answers
out of top secret prisoners

Paying our own guards to harass
and embarrass
a man whose only crime was
showing us
the lies they still want us
to glassy-eyed believe.

---

It's not one of my most artistic efforts, but it's something I wanted to get off my chest.

miscommunication

voices come, some
...................... calm, some cool,
.......................................... some eagerly
collected, but they know,
...................... they’ll go before
.......................................... they can or can't
extinguish the leaves

I know them all,
...................... all their calm, all
.......................................... their cool, all
yes, the eager, but
...................... I can and I can’t
.......................................... distinguish the small
silences they’ll leave me

Light lessons

The sill still tries to learn me

Shadow isn’t absence

It’s the light
falling somewhere else

It's all just was

When
all this is
always just was–
whether
the once-white of a creamy walk
grayed by rain
or the chocolaty puddle
crept too-wide there to skip
with the stone-cold squawks
the starling tossed to me–
why
would I stop
and trip into will be?

No bother

Bah, mother, they’re
no bother there
both in the air
and the water,
fonder of where
father brought their
farther off stares

Transparency

These cicada suits are see-through
Their good-natured ribbing
is pitching, sound-effects
sci-fied to sell
a quicksilver summer
on the value of settling down

Xi-sub-b

Get up, quark!
It’s not so strange, quark,
for me to want you
to lift your heavy bottom, quark,
and carry on
the way young baryons do.

[Physicists Confirm Existence of New Particle]

Parthenogenesis

The good book and many less good read mankind was made in god’s own image and though the atheists think it’s the imaginary reverse what if it’s that the universe and all its matter what if it’s that all those things before we mattered in our smattering of light what if it’s that all that was and is was plucked round and red into being by one unknowably knowing consciousness tempted by the empty black to fill it with the white noise of chattering possibility and what if it set those first simple blocky shapes it plucked those blobby forms it picked to form themselves into ever more complicated shifts inventing themselves flappy fins and gills then wobbly legs and lungs a caring heart and brain again and again toward a more subtle somewhen else when someone else more knowing stands up and falls down fruited by the tree of life to see we have our farther’s sensitive eyes and can look past walking lifetimes to find the now knowable blueprint tucked in a twisty pocket of ribs and it’s also here we’ll find ourselves red-faced according to the plan laid out for those first formless shapes somewhere else as someones else not trapped but free inside a magical black box filled by the emptiness come back and a poisonous white flask of one possibility silently collapsing into an informing consciousness.

Pickles the cockatiel

Beautiful

be you, too full
not to feel
your fill

How to unlearn the damage of decades

1. Stop
reading what you’ve read;
now read it all again,
but in reverse.
2. Go
outside, look instead;
there are lessons written
in the bark’s terse
lines. [End]

As god goes ...

as god goes or our notion of god goes with the young pink chubby and rash motion of its toddler's reach we won't go with god but we and god will come out together by vanishing in that very shiny second he’ll come she’ll come we’ll come shambling out from the shadows showing not himself or herself myself or yourself no self at all but all of us linked arm in arm jowl to jowl wink for wink with the cheery release of an unstuck swirl of a magnificent eye unshut where we'll be and we’ll see our past falls away our future is forgotten and matter was is will be of a mind to help us find a way back from the bitter not so long ago night spent curled up right here on a bus stop bench graffito tagged god is dead

Hints turned neon blue

Hints

My cosmology prospers

such stuff are we
and all things made
dreaming on, on

our spirit and flesh resolved,
these towering clouds of droplets
melted once to fall again and again
rippling the muck

the very fabric on our backs
is based on a form, filled
by a vision

there was a bang
then light went forth
with matters to attend
and potentials to birth

death comes, it came before,
it comes, not as a rack
but a collapse

all our possible worlds
dissolve into this one
gorgeous rock, this palace,
a home to vibrating atoms

a little rounded life
both bound and free
both found and lost

it’s bounded but free, found
and lost, lost and found, on
and on, our revels a spiral, to end
and begin, to begin and end

Better bare than threadless

Prodded by my Facebook friends and in defiance of Threadless T-shirts having rejected the design as not worth the printing, I've created two new custom shirts in my Zazzle store (yes, I have a Zazzle store, even though no one bought any of the previous merchandising brain storms).

Here's the design:

Yes, it's a little crudely drawn and not ha-ha funny, but it has a certain charm in my eyes. If your eyes see the same vague quality, it's available on both light color and dark color T-shirts. Find a color and a style that makes your heart flutter.

But don't purchase them yet, though I know you're eager too. I need to order them first myself to make sure that the graphic prints at the correct resolution.

The Bloom wears off

Odd. I see us hop
disappointment
to disappointed.
Our penny lope
isn’t waiting for us.

One touch can mean the universe

There’s a whorl at its tip
and it slips, a world
in the palm of your hand.

Rendering fat unto Ceasar

it may or may not be fading the glory but the gory red white and blue meat of it was charred to a cinder while you neglected to handle the griddle and its blackening pool of fatty answers that spits and pops greasy drops wanting to fly to a wheel any wheel left that’s not attached to axles attached to chassis attached to roofs attached to sirens hurtling bodies bloodied by joyless sticks their attacking thumbs with no prints just a serial number and a pension that causes them to intentionally twitch these deaths a world away throw that world away and turn your eyes to see reach your arms to hold and probe their discarded limbs feel their loss a loss repeated to a scream you couldn’t hear what good is your akimbo pose posing as if you had questions or doubts even when the questions ran out so long ago so long in fact that the meat you’re cooking was no longer fresh when you tossed it in that pan of foul smelling fat you thought was clear but it’s flecked with bits of sour alibis and singed hairs that float and lie to you they’re licorice coated floss

---

At the suggestion of a friend, I tried writing a poem with "no structure." I combined this exercise with the wordle prompt over at The Sunday Whirl. What emerged is much freer and, probably because of my current state of mind, much more overtly political than what I usually write. I'm sure not everyone will appreciate it, but that comes with the territory of experimentation and speaking one's mind.

An interdependence of days

Where’s the joy in belonging,
with them, your head will be
long at it, figuring this out,
before you’ll understand,
if you can, under
stands of pretty poplars,
enjoying the love of your life,
the embossed license they gave
you with a scent of petty lies,
and that pretend belonging
sensed but well-overlooked
for the overhanging green
clusters missing their catkins
the way your toes miss
those calfskin shoes
toppled on the flagstones beyond.

Bossily they’re quite good at putting
their airs off, you to ease
with an easy welcome,
but when their time unwell
comes, and there’s a lively green now
speaking love and life without license
to those beyond who will call on you
not to be rapt by leaf or catkin,
but a different flag, and their stones
and shoes hurled at impositions,
disfiguring heads painted on calfskin,
you’ll need to understand
where it is you belong, and stop
longing for toppled stands of pretty
poplars and petty lies
they only pretended belonged to you.

The stationary traveler, twenty

Head bred. ... These heads bred
ease. ... Inner’s outer. Outer’s
in. ... I’m all islands.