====
We live in a time of mind-gamery, the Era of Dumbing, which is rife with devious denial of insidious intent. Not only do most people not know this, they have been trained to not want to know.
====
From my unpublished book, Lightcraft: ethics as technology
Last
illimitable blue,
the eagle takes wing,
somewhere off a cliff,
the ghost of its mother
crying.
below, a busy man with
a hammer
looks up with eyes that fondle the bird.
but it glides on,
out over a pale bay
where draggers shrimp the seabed
with nets of underwater claws.
the eagle veers onward,
off toward a succulent sun.
soon its wings darken to glints,
blending with the warmth
of forever.
================================
====
Our president does what he wants, where and when and to
whomever he wants, and the cowed and craven set of politicians who make up his
flock just go along for the ride. It seems more and more as if we’re living in
a burn-it-all-down age of greed, mayhem and corruption.
You might never know this from watching prestige TV … There
was one show, however, that hit this head-on …
=====
David Colman
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/19/opinion/emmys-the-boys-amazon-homelander-snub.html
Barstow Junction
dry nettlesome air,
it had the heat of a femur-long railroad spike,
nailing him to the motel bed,
or pinioning his knees to pray.
crows added more cast iron,
hundreds listless
on the weapon held by the telephone poles:
that long, vein-sized garrote
constricting the pulse of the town.
Barstow wasn’t round or flat or social or open,
it was a sluice of squares,
an ooze of commodities, chains
of hellbound freight.
its DNA was a snarl of
business molecules loaded on
squeals of metal that whined across
miles of sluggish boxcars.
many victims plodded by–
ore and bitumen, cattle and timber,
suffering the great desert,
enslaved to soulless deposits of cash,
so very small.
=========================
This poem was originally published in Full of Crow in 2014. I am going to start re-publishing poems published in the past on this blog. Why? A big part of it is the potential end of the US as I knew it, and my concern that I will be incarcerated. I am, too, in my 60s, and could die of natural causes, exacerbated by grief and anxiety at the loss of the country I knew all my life.
Expect more poems like this, and so a bit of a different poetic voice--who I was ten or more years ago.
The great constant of history, [Gibbon] believed, was self-delusion: the willful inability of people to recognize how much the habits, rituals and laws they took for granted had slowly changed — until it was too late to bend them back into shape. Mankind “is governed by names,” he wrote, and Romans seemed willing to “submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.”
Charles King, Professor at Georgetown
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/13/opinion/edward-gibbon-empires-fall.html
============================
Although I agree with this quote, its sense of defeatism is wrong (so was Gibbon's). As I've been writing on this blog, through many essays, we have the brain- and cultural-plasticity to move the collective consciousness to a place of maturity and advanced ethics technology. We have already started on this journey, as evidenced by the invention, for instance, of Universal Suffrage. From the perspective of advancing our ethics tech, which should be number one, this is the greatest invention in the entire history of civilization, breaking one of the ancient cardinal rules of Big Lie governance. We have a long way to go to reach MLK Jr's mountaintop. But it's a feasible journey. And people need not necessarily dwell in "self-delusion."
https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2026/05/essay-sustenance-and-darkness.html
https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2025/05/draft-intro-of-my-book-better-angels.html
etc/
Out of Place
questions lurch,
born in cocktails
with lewd names.
those of us with minds
as guarded as soda water
do not know the answers.
we appraise wastelands
of sassy youth,
wanting to be part of the grunt,
but unable to sway
like these sexy philosophers,
who broach casual taboos
and do not sing of fear.
we stare
as if stunned by godlings
agile and immune.
how easily
they stalk pleasure for hours,
devouring each other,
chasing necks.
when they die
they moan up again, half destroyed,
and the rest lovely, toned,
supple with war.
====================
This poem was originally published in Barnwood Magazine in 2012. I am going to start re-publishing poems published in the past on this blog. Why? A big part of it is the potential end of the US as I knew it, and my concern that I will be incarcerated. I am, too, in my 60s, and could die of natural causes, exacerbated by grief and anxiety at the loss of the country I knew all my life.
Expect more poems like this, and so a bit of a different poetic voice--who I was ten or more years ago.
Vale
eldritch oak
and incense of sage,
the foothills so serene.
sweet silences
of sumac and tiger lily,
and the luscious clarkia cross,
and the ceanothus
imbued with dashes
of last moon’s rain--
and the deer weed and
the desert chia and chicory,
they too extol
a mountainous Earth
tumbled to fissured gardens,
hanging woundless
to conjure moist shoots.
a flint of scant vulture
sharpens the blue,
and bees down below
leaven the meadow with swells
of a golden zephyr.
and the mustard grass rustles,
and the willows
their frondy songs,
weaving shy notes
with a stream's gurgles
of clockless, giddy zest.
deeper still, spells
of unseen fossils, young green hopes--
the never-dead bones
of ravenous youth--
with immeasurable circles
and impossible trysts
play on.
========
7/16/26 ... more mods... ... mods all day ... ..
7/15/26... more mods ... not really my wheelhouse at all...
7/14/26 ... removed a word
7/13 more mods ... fractious
7/12/26 mods ... not really my wheelhouse.. more mods throughout day
7/11/26 ... changed some phrasing
Snatchers
animate posters,
as if propaganda had bred
a living gel, cheeks, chins
of mistrust rubberstamping
a shellack of custardy
smiles.
this dinge of streets.
this tarnish of behaviors.
this unthought guile thin as office paper
while it wades through days of sloggy hours,
wan from cosmetic mold--
a rouge unnoticed
in city after city of hollowed cheeks,
despite the long-toothed force
it took to inject so many spores of mediocrity
into so many hearts
and corrupt the very dream.
what an integral invasion.
to pump silence
into the mainstream blood vessels.
what a disease of bipedal blemishes,
rampant within a warming
of cement vegetation.
hotter and hotter,
the skinlike fungus of the mask.
no one can peel it off,
even from their own face,
not without jeopardizing
their weak, fearful name.
===============================
7/7/26 "smiles" replaces "fatalism"
7/6/26 ... mods throughout the evening.. .night
Invasion of the Body Snatchers theme
PPM
the sky hammered, day in and out,
as if making its own Ark.
it must have hated us,
we who had billowed coal for so long,
we who choked the sapphire,
sooting both Hesperus and Phosphorus--
we who didn’t bother
to care about the force of storms.
we who failed to honor
the realms uprooted and ruptured,
sacrificed like Iphigenia
to gods of plunder and ego.
the sky hammered.
on and on.
it wanted to end all this. it knew
the clicks and likes and taps and swipes
of our electronics would not save us.
we who had taken and expanded,
only to become small.
even before the start, had it been set?
a predestiny of thugs
who wolfed all the food?
to harness fire, with tools and lust,
was it, in the end,
a harbinger of damning rain?
but no. it
need not have been.
the world could have been adored.
heaven in intent. virtue. trust.
a rulership of truth, not wicked men.
not lied to.
not devastated.
and so the sky hammered.
==================
7/5/26 "sooting" replaces "sooted"
Noah's Ark, Greek mythology, old Western culture stuff...
I’m not in the mood to celebrate “America 250” … Sometimes a sour mood is simply clear vision … Nearly 250 years later, the US is not a finished monument, but a structure still under repair, still contested – and in places being quietly stripped for parts …
Repair is not nostalgia … Repair is the unglamorous work of keeping a structure standing: protecting democracy and civil rights, building enough homes for people to live with dignity, limiting the power of money, and preserving the public memory that tells a country what it has broken and why …
A republic does not survive because its people praise it. It survives because they repair it.
Jamil Smith, Guardian US columnist
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/03/america-250-celebration-under-repair
========
Posts
All Comments
