Poem: Cerberus

Originally published in The Vehicle:

http://www.thevehiclemagazine.com/?page_id=937

The version below is slightly modified.

The alternate title of this poem is "Peoplesuck"

Enjoy!


Owl

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Cerberus


triad of pinschers,
mutated knocker
on fate’s door,

stabbing
into teeming shambles
of half-flesh,

and barking
in the umbral throng,
too many babblers to shunt

except by savagery,
too many moldy egos
in a downward trench.

death the hated embolus,
fearsome cork
bottling a seethe of wounds:

bloods vaporous and blended,
decaying bloat
of beggars and brays,

huddles of tatter
in a scared compendium,
worried by stark teeth.

The Metamorphosis of Greed

A recent report stated that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are now at their highest point in three million years. Add to that the unprecedented rate of global temperature rise in the last quarter century. Another recent headline: “Global Warming May Cause Major Extinctions By 2080." Here are some links for all this stuff:

http://www.hngn.com/articles/2900/20130513/global-warming-cause-major-extinctions-2080-study-finds.htm

www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/science/earth/carbon-dioxide-level-passes-long-feared-milestone.html

www.nytimes.com/2013/03/08/science/earth/global-temperatures-highest-in-4000-years-study-says.html

The rate of temperature increase is dangerous because animals and plants will not have time, through evolution, to adapt. On a geological scale, the sudden spike in temperature is like a javelin shooting out of a graph of slight slopes.

The momentum of ignorance is massive. Educated people are outnumbered and rationality is a weak tool compared to the bullhorns of demagogues. Those bullhorns, in turn, are part of massive propaganda campaigns orchestrated by giant corporations, financial colossi that benefit from the destructive status quo.

The encroaching catastrophe is already underway. New Orleans was obliterated by weather. Sandy Hook in Manhattan, too. The polar caps melt, the climate bands shift, animals migrate, including pesky insects. Maybe most important of all to the citizens of the Empire: food prices have gone up.

Still the bulk of the people are blind. Denial. It is a well-worn psychological phenomenon. If you can get past their denial, which is not easy, you get the next mental shield: confirmation bias. Which is to say, reality is interpreted as the person wishes to perceive it (or maybe I should say, as their favorite politician perceives it).

If you happen to think that greedy scientists are lying about global warming to get power, you can always scrounge up evidence worthy of an impregnable conspiracy theory.

And so I think our lovely Earth, and human civilization, are going to suffer the full ravages of a headlong train wreck, one in which a boot on the brake petal was hardly applied. Those of us who dare to be alert need to prepare ourselves for the epochal calamity coming down the rails.

However, let me admit to a little selfishness too and say that I hope to be dead before the full chaos of the Metamorphosis of Greed.

By “prepare” I mean we need to come to grips with it. Psychologically. Myself, I keep saying I am sorry to the Earth in my prayers. I keep speaking to future generations, in this blog and in my poems, and telling them that we were not completely without empathy in this accelerating, bewildering time.

If these future generations actually get a chance to exist, they have a right to hate us. Indeed, today’s younger folks already have a great deal of anger at the “baby boomers” who lived high on the hog while spreading not only pollution but attitudes of hedonistic self-absorption.

I hope, though, that these future generations deal with their hate in a healthy way. I pray they don’t end up hating themselves or thinking of humanity as inherently evil. A virus on the Earth. By 2080, famine, riot and war might be continuous. Maybe large segments of civilization will collapse into barbaric darkness. But, people of the future -- and I am trying not to say this sarcastically or in ridiculous sanctimony -- don’t give up.

Maybe it is almost an impossible task, but strive to surpass, ethically, the present social disease of consumerism. You, hopefully, will be able to better spot, using us as a signpost of failure, the great enemies. Avarice. Ignorance.

Educate all your citizens and do it thoroughly. That is the key to a possible happy ending someday, somewhere. Let me be ridiculously optimistic for a moment: human civilization is young. Maybe the next ten thousand years will be better.


Owl

Release: Danse Macabre 69 (Pravda)

I have three poems in Danse Macabre #69 (Pravda), just released! They are:

“Right Whale”

“Meccaless”

“Edge of Safe”

You can read them here, if you wish:

PRAVDA POEMS


The Editor, Adam Henry Carriere, is an amazing cryptic fantastic monumental soul. His panache and hurricane-strong editorship are overwhelming. Carriere published my full-length collection Jugularity recently--and he is still doing his very best to market it, as you will see if you follow the above link.

Jugularity also has a new review on Amazon (5 stars). You too can purchase this dark consortium of words--only $4. It is only a few clicks away (feel free to read the blurbs under the cover if you desire persuasion):

GO FOR THE JUGULAR


Thanks for reading, be good to yourself, and please forgive my crumpled exhausted mind.

Owl

PS: read my review of DM here:

http://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2012/05/acceptance-danse-macabre.html

"Everyone is my bête noire and everyone is my raison d’etre."

Aearte Kestrelspell

Release: Viral Cat Spring 2013

READ VC SPRING 2013

Yes, yes, yes, Viral Cat has released its Spring 2013 issue. Great great contributors. Videos. Screenplays. Paintings. Stories. And, yes, poetry!

Viral Cat blows my mind as no other journal can. Don’t believe me? Check out my ecstatic semi-psychotic review:

http://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2011/02/release-viral-cat-february-2011-issue.html

Actually I ramble emphatically about Viral Cat twice:

http://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2011/01/acceptance-viral-cat.html


Visit my poems “Nameless Wife On the Flood” and “Cassandra Reflects” in the new issue. The former is sandwiched between two fervent landscape paintings by Lorna Ritz. She makes the paintbrush gush in all the right proportions.

Thank you VC Editors!! Prowl on!

And you, dear readers, May your night skies be lush.

Owl

Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, and the Sick Sad USA

Every once in a while I feel the need to step back and look at the decline of the American Empire, though in a sense it seems pointless for me to do so. It is pointless because thinkers far greater than me have already done a vastly better job of delineating our failures and evils as a world power.

For instance, Noam Chomsky is considered by the New York Times to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest, intellectual of our age. Chomsky points out all the global-level lies, corruptions and atrocities the US has committed. He does it prodigiously and pretty much unassailably. He is a walking encyclopedia. If he had studied to be on the game show Jeopardy instead of researching foreign and domestic policy, he would be an all-time winner, right up there with Ken Jennings.

However, Chomsky is not the sort to ingratiate himself with a prime time fluff show, one that replaces wisdom and knowledge with cute question-answers to sterilized trivia challenges. Because of Chomsky's speciality--honest analysis of the moral wretchedness of the US--he is effectively banned from the mainstream media. His public speeches are far too dangerous to give prime airtime. Yes, he does get to speak to sold-out crowds at Universities. But our corporate-media masters know that as long as they dominate America’s major pulpits, free speech exercised by Chomsky among intelligentsia won’t challenge the plutocracy. And it pretty much hasn’t.

Another prodigious thinker, far more important and far-ranging than I will ever be, is Gore Vidal. He was considered a boy genius by age 20, wrote dozens of novels and inconceivably many essays. Vidal, like Chomsky, has written extensively on American evils. Unlike Chomsky, he does it with literary panache. You don’t have to decipher turgid presentations of history because Vidal condenses beautifully and stingingly. He died in 2012, but before that, like Chomsky, he was effectively blacklisted from mainstream publicity.

Once and a while, Chomsky and Vidal snuck a small slot in the hydra-head world of TV channels. Here is Vidal discussing Chomsky and how both of them are prevented from reaching sizeable audiences (relative to the population of the United States):





Because both Chomsky and Gore have spoken out so much and so well--and there are others like them too--it feels pretty pointless for me to discuss the ongoing evils and continuing deterioration of the American Empire here. Full-length collections by great writers and thinkers, like Chris Hedges (“The Empire of Illusion”) come and go. Sometimes they even get named as “best sellers” by some esoteric criterion. Yet none of this changes anything. These great voices are swamped by bullhorn-levels of saccharine pablum and patriotic half-stories by half-news agencies. Huge corporate conglomerates control what Americans think and hear, effectively limiting the power of the educated to affect the system.

The whole dysfunctional national scene is exceedingly frustrating and apparently ineradicable. America controlled most of the geopolitical globe in 1950 and since then has quickly slid into a rapid and disgusting decline, driven by idiotic war-mongering and a corporatocracy of parasitic avarice. Currently, the wealth distribution is monstrously skewed toward the rich, but--surprise, surprise--most Americans have no idea how bad it is:




Yeah, what’s the point of me saying anything more here? I’m done for now. Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, you are two of my great heroes. Thank you both. I wish I was even a semblance of you.

Owl

Release: Pirene's Fountain April 2013

Pirene’s fountain has just released its April 2013 issue, including three of my poems: “Moth,” “Air Meditation” and “Over Arizona.” You can read them here:

VISIT THE FOUNTAIN

Pirene’s Fountain will soon be merging with Glass Lyre Press, which is eagerly seeking manuscripts. If you have a chapbook or full-length project, consider submitting to this sensuous venture:

GLASS LYRE PRESS

Best to all and--


Fly Well In the Dark,

Owl

Release: Vine Leaves Journal #06

Vine Leaves Journal has released Issue #06, and it not only validates the positive comments I made earlier, it sparks my enthusiasm even more. I offer a quantum leap of kudos to editors Jessica Bell and Dawn Ius. The presentation is fantastic, the context multifaceted, the quality extra-outstanding.

To back this up, I will say my poems have appeared in a good number of journals over the last ten years, over a hundred. Vine Leaves #06 has tied for my #2 favorite presentation ever. They paired my poem “Hiroshima Shadow” with the artwork of Otha Vakseen Davis III, who is a upsurging monumental talent. You can read about him here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Vakseen

My poem and “Blemishes of Love,” the artwork by Vakseen, constitute the last page of the issue. It is such an honor to appear there, as a final dissipative note in the tempestuous song of words, images and unleashed creativity that is VLJ6. Bell and Ius have given us a brilliant jagged veinous pasticcio, successfully fusing urban and natural while injecting elements of dare--techniques such as tilting the poems, or presenting them in the style of a clip-on. The editors magick the format to meld language within aesthetic leaves of electronic paper. Folds within folds. Messages within messages, combining the contributors into a singularity of overarching theme, and yet retaining the unique signature of each work. Indeed, the vignette is what this journal is all about (see my review).

Visit the latest issue, and be sure to check out my poem on the last page:

http://www.vineleavesliteraryjournal.com/issue-06-apr-2013.html

Here is my review:

http://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2013/04/acceptance-vine-leaves-literary-journal.html

Time is mean, or I would ramble on.


Fly Well In the Dark,

Owl


PS: My favorite presentation of one of my poems in a journal (audio, click play):

http://whalesound.wordpress.com/2011/10/01/the-gods-reflect-on-creation-by-chris-crittenden/

PPS: Tied with Vine Leaves for my second favorite presentation is: The Centrifugal Eye:

http://issuu.com/centrifugaleye/docs/tcemay10-rr_r

Spark In Our Hearts

Happy Earth Day, Folks.

Let's all get passionate about this planet. I think we could. I don't want to rant like a prophet, but we are wrecking the beauty of it all. What are we doing?

What about apathy?

Acceptance: The Catch

Check out my two poems, “Transference” and “Gut Knife” in the first issue of The Catch, a journal about the heritage of the Downeast region, focusing on maritime activities. The very able editor is Catherine Schmitt, a professor at the University of Maine. I was privileged to read with some of the other contributors recently in Bangor. The stories--and the quality of the writing--brought me to tears (or the edge thereof...)

Read The Catch here:

The Catch Issue One

http://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/the_catch/



Carry Onward,

Owl