A Note on Poems

 

Thank you for looking at the poems!

A quick note.  I often edit a piece quite a bit after it goes up.  The more-or-less final version, the one that settles in, arrives after a few days of the initial posting.  (It's almost fair to say that a true 'final version' is like the Holy Grail and not likely to ever materialize). 

Admittedly, this is a feeble strategy.  I use it simply because it gets me to edit faster and more attentively than if the poems were merely tucked away in a folder.

The big downside is that readers who visit right after a work goes up are often met with a less-than-stellar version.  For this I apologize.  Again, my only excuse, albeit feeble, is the quirkiness of my own craft.

If you have comments or suggestions, or potential topics you'd like to see, you can email me:

owlwholaughs@gmail.com

Again, thank you for your time,

OWL

====================

Poem: Swift Pleasure

 

Swift Pleasure

 

razor gleams of eyes

 open my heart without

removing clothes.

naiveté made them weapons.

 

there's a gash

in the hideout of my chest.

whwere emotions bubble forth,

pain revealed,

forsaking the odds of innocence.

 

how brash 

my foolhardy leaps,

unprepared for such swift pleasure,

faster than the giddy race

of ridiculous pulse

to stumble, trip and fall

into the oubliettes of unkind stares.

======================

Oct 4 2024 eds

Poem: Crystal Ball

 

Crystal Ball

 

an upside-down imp stares back,

leans left for my right,

stretching into befuddled rainbows.

 

leans right for my left,

till auras split into ribs

and circle round to live larger,

upped by factors of whatnot to ∞.

 

i dive in, immerse, to sync with the imp,

vivid, such verve, so vivacious

photons who frolic and paragons which flow.

a hypermath of hula hoops

this transmogrification.

i skip to strum chords of Saturn.

tweed on a peg 

bursts into a psychedelic ocean

bulbous and copious with aurora borealis.

 

this glossy orb,

it holds every coronet in the world,

adoring atop its stand of branching brass.

when light plays keen, the colors web:

paisleys into jewels, galaxies, novas

emergent amid hubbell dewdrops 

in a big-bang rendezvous. 

the crystal blossoms,

somehow born from spaceless specks.

cosmic, impossible, this language 

of anti-predictive comets,

only to collapse once more,

fated to render the nothingness 

beautiful.

=====================

10/5/24 eds

Poem: Mosquitoes On Screen

 

Mosquitoes on Screen

 

honor loathes such tongues

which bash stitches of tin.

an argot of bloodthirsty whines,

forever obsessive, sharp 

and lean.

it is whispered 

 

they once gave too much.

too honest.

too intimate.

nothing left in the aftermath of failed love

but a shriveled quest.

now dozens of skinless wraiths

scrape a cold, threadbare sieve,

poking for any drop of warmth.

any aura of contact.

any meager touch.

before seeking comfort

in the dark.

===============

10/6/24 eds  ... I am the mosquito

6/16/24 ... more edits, somehow fascinated by this poem but never getting 'the prestige'

8/28/22  significant mods ... never get it right

 

Poem: A Ghost Leads Him

 

A Ghost Leads Him

 

this elder he

touches but does not,

this psychopomp

who exists but no,

 

it flies through his memory,

salves its refugees,

until they incandesce

and collapse into a past now a

possessed accordion,

playing a song never composed.

 

this daredevil in his breath, his arched veins,

it streaks to push a rollercoaster higher and higher

through fervor and flight.

 

(this EKG, this oscilloscope, this cardiac peak ...)

 

as if his passionate extremes

had always been prisoners of a dull conformity

and only now by freeing them

can the mortar of the cells of his jail 

crumble into blameworthy bricks--

 

(so much of his life was spent in brick ... )

 

rectangles of wood and stone.

he buried so much of himself

in a sturdy habitat long ago.

but now

 

(but now ...)

 

an aerial path flies through the rubble,

a new kind of steppingstone,  

back upward, 

toward some long-ago wounded 

and yet dependable and honest 

joy.

===================

10/7/24 eds

Poem: Crows In Wheatfield

 

Crows in Wheatfield

 

flecks of pepper

in saffron stipples,

 

summer dreams

atoss on a straw bed.

 

a scythe could reap through

if it writhed like a snake,

 

feverish implement,

stroked to obsess.

 

i can almot hear the labor

vaporing off the canvas,

 

a jagged song that could

overwhelm my lobe.

 

this scene, it wavers,

a façade troubled,

 

a stung pond

perturbed by pigment

 

trying to ripple 

back home.

================

10/6/24

My brother Gudger much liked the works of Van Gogh

Poem: Republicans Vote

 

Republicans Vote 2008 

 

the people had their swill

and now throng the troughs,

not to digest but to vomit forth

what they were told to know.

 

each face puzzles at the caricature

of the one in tandem

as they stand in a cordoned assembly line

of the anguished and the grotesque.

 

a man holds a noosed monkey.

three women wear the same t-shirt:

a baboonish candidate

who sucks a banana and gloats.

 

there is talk

of terrorist homosexuality,

of negro delinquency,

and a liberal anti-christ

urgent to outlaw prayer.

 

but mostly guns.

and Barack Hussein Obama.

 

big-bellied clichés

with beer-red neckmeat

bluster and swagger,

while dog-fierce kids 

fetch to return, return to fetch

the hate tossed when an adult sighs.

 

'unamerican liberal elites.'

'round them up.'  'brand them.'

'force them to leave.'

 

hours of this.

a vexed parade of the bitter.

it bristles as it circles,

 as if to constrict the schoolhouse,

raring to get inside.

 

 

==========================

images based on news footage.

This poem is a way to get out my own hate and rage, focusing on racism.  The enemy is not people.   The enemy is racism and its effects.  

Poem: Fence Wizard

 

 

Fence Wizard

 

nervous dagger,

no caesar to slay,

heat will not die

and it surely is king

 

of alabaster and tan,

the only flag known,

crumbling like the foothills,

a fuzzy kind of real

thick with blurry waves.

 

caffeine for cold-blooded veins,

which simmer more fervent

than any mammal,

making love to burning stone,

chest to chest;

one heartbeat enough for both,

the squamous belly sleek

against coarse, mummified clay.

 

it's an alliance so fast

it could flee in a blink,

disappeared to some nowhere,

evading the pluck of a kestrel.

 

other times 

the fence wizard

sits like speckled dough,

impossible to snatch,

camoflauged by its oven-magic.

 

might, at long last,

the wizard choose the talons?

to witness, as a sage might, 

the world from highest perch?

 

such has always been 

the beautiful strategy:

staccato reconnaissance

from hairline eyes,

a snatch of clues 

to surmise the truth

from fragments.

========

"Fence wizard" is a play on "western fence lizard," a common species in the chaparral. 

Poem: Intersection

 

Rainy Intersection

 

fat beads on phone wires 

slide thick to drip,

numb as the drool of a monstrous Infant,

whose grey deformed pliant dome

stares down with mock horror

at the myriad slanted trajectories:

 how they end on hot tar, empty as run off,

nothing but fizzle on a char of roads.

tires slice through the ceaseless slaughter

with the polite manners of dutiful butchers. 

 

commuters,

those metal-cloaked lip-biters,

come and go, chug and roll, smoke and chug,

sit at attention, roll and inhale smoke 

and chug and come to go to honk and brake and jerk to

peel-out screech cuss stress.

they come and roll and stop and go to roll to stop and go to come

and roll stoplights lines limits laws of a 

not-so-friendly legalized mathematics.

such it is, this come-and-stop/go geometry

which enfolds the tin metal cloak 

of  each and every flesh-nucleus.

at least 

so it is here, this intersection.

this watering hole 

of the city’s motion sickness.

this particular hollywood hub-glut 

of narcissistic pop music drama/mine.

what would a last prayer look like here?

splayed open on the never-ending concrete slabs,

vivisected by streetlamps, cleansed by polluted rain,

picked over by the crashed claws 

of wrecked dented shreds of tin metal

under the smog-plump Shadow?

=============

10/7/24 eds

San Fernando Valley, circa 1990's

Poem: Tujunga Arroyo

 

Tujunga Arroyo

 

willow and nicotiana

hobo along the arroyo,

leafy plumage of anemic jungle birds.

strata stash squashed stones in the banks,

catastrophe upon extinction,

sabertooth pupils, long-slitted in black veins,

gazing above shark teeth.

 

my sandals, lost in the aftermath,

sink into dry quicksand

to kick up blossoms of dust.

empty orchids and not-really-there mallows

ogle me with their two-seconds of life.

 

i come to a place

where crows interpenetrate shadows,

both seeking shelter, scrutinous,

demanding proof that their feathers

will not soon die.

 

the gulch has ruptured here,

warded by the fronds of an old pepper--

a place where coyotes come to take rabbits,

and burrs cast hooks,

anglers at a waterless stream.

 

not so deep in the sand-hissed heat

minnow eggs bide their time.

yes, one day, algae will wave, the real thing,

victorious in immersion,

while frogs swell their sleek backs,

harrumphing about the short shrift

of amphibian orgies.

 

=======================

10/12/24 removed a word, modified a word

9/5/24 ... slight mods

Poem: Deselection

 

Deselection

 

it was the age of wired golems,

the construction of a cold electronic nest.

cell by battery by cell 

human smiles became bytes while

screens transformed into the consiglieri of dreams. 

 

it was a marketplace for mothy hearts

seduced by googol spiders in fire-fast webs. 

colorful saviors on pedestals of pixels 

rushed to rise from luminous crypts and

commenced to flagellate transfixed eyes.

 

mouse idols invoked arrow-magic,  

that clickety-prattle-quack-and-seethe of lightspeed lines,

so lurid in networks of conspiracy-

massive-multilayered-online hives.

 

no old-world psalm had predicted

such a contagion of connectivity.

the great new servers of the telecommunicated temples

hunted quick to infiltrate far

far far far far far far far 

urgent to hawk a new kind of mind.

 

==============

10/10/24  eds

mmorpg

clickety = mouse clicks

 etc.

Trump Can Never Be A Winner. It is Logically Impossible.

 

Whether Trump takes the election or not, he can never be a winner.  It is logically impossible, under the rationale and auspices of what this country is all about, its Constitution, evolutions, and precedents. 

Trump certainly likes to fashion himself a winner.  And, yes, by some standards he is successful (others not).  However, the word "winner" is commonly associated with someone who came in first in a competition, following certain rules and standards of ethics, and in that way proved themself to be the best.  

In this sense, Trump is in no way a winner or potential winner.  And it is this sense that is far-and-away the most relevant to the race for the presidency.

When Trump calls himself a "winner," he hopes we will subconsciously slide from seeing him as successful (in certain ways, such as fame) to seeing him as a moral person who is the best possible leader because he won fair and square.

This is false framing.  A devilish slide of semantics.  But so far, we have let him get away with it. 

Call him a devastatingly wicked influencer.  Call him a superb con man.  But it isn't rational or sensible to call Trump a winner.  For one thing, if he achieves the Presidency again, we all lose.  Moreover, he cannot be the best person to manage our country from the White House, not in the way a marathon runner shows they are the best in a competition.

My argument for this conclusion--that it is inconceivable that Trump could be the winner (even if he gets enough electoral votes)--has a couple of steps.

First, Trump is evil.  Evil, of course, can have many meanings.  In theology, it can apply to natural phenomenon like tornadoes and diseases.  But the evil I'm talking about is human-based.  No one can see into another's heart.  But we can judge behaviors and actions, and when those are numerous enough to form a reliable pattern, a point is reached where it becomes common sense to call someone evil.

So, when you use racism to divide a country, it is evil.  When you use that dark influence to shred basic norms of decency--of principle, democracy and virtue--to create a throne for yourself, it is evil.  When you have no respect for human rights, as in separating infants from mothers, it is evil.  

The above adds up to a hate-mongering tyranny, a force that can wreck our country on the world stage, and perhaps permanently besmirch its once-admired values.  Hundreds of years of ideals, gone in a flash.   This, too, is the product of evil.  

For all we can see, that product, the destruction of the republic, is Trump's narcissistic intent.  Dictatorship is what he admires and what yields maximum self-aggrandizement and adulation.

One galling trait of evil is cowardice.  Such evil never admits what it is doing and instead blames those who seek justice (racists who call others the racists).  In this way, rationality, the light of reason, itself gets wrestled down into the impotence of ignorant darkness. 

All the above indicts Trump, and is apparent enough in his behavior, after four years of evidence.  If you don't like calling him evil, it is enough that he is grossly unethical.

Now that I have established Trump as evil, I want to move on to the next step.  The point is simple:  a person who acts in evil ways in a rule-based competition can never be the winner.  If they come in first, it is because they cheated.  Competitions have standards.  And if you act with evil in pursuit of victory, you have, by definition, broken those standards. 

For some reason, in the common parlance of politics, we Americans are still talking as if Trump could be the winner--the projected winner, or possible winner of the 2020 election.  This despite his efforts to subvert the moral fabric of the nation and defy the Constitution.  Needless to say, this moral fabric, which includes the Constitution, is part of the rules.  

So, our common parlance is quite nonsensical.  Why consider a cheater a potential winner in a rule-based system, when they are clearly cheating?  

>>>>>> What???

The moral fabric of a republic is necessary for its existence.  If someone shreds the moral fabric, while claiming to honor and defend it, they are no more a winner than someone who cheats at sports--and of course the outcome is far more important.

Again, how does Trump "win" if he destroys the republic?  An overthrow makes him successfully evil.  If you rip out a country's heart, when it is your oath to protect that country's lifeblood, you are not a winner.

You are a destroyer.  You are a traitor. 

You might say that, when watching movies, for instance, we sometimes say that 'the evil side won'.  For example, in The Empire Strikes Back.

I would again point out, in response, that the race for the presidency has rules, and that the most relevant sense of "winner" is the one that requires following the rules.    

Actually, there are two sets of rules in relation to winning the presidency.  First, there are the electoral rules.  Now, by this standard alone, if we exclude all other factors from consideration, the nominee who gets the most electoral votes is the winner. 

However, and here is the catch, there is another set of rules that applies to the race for the presidency:  the rules embedded in the moral fabric of our society.  These rules reside in our Constitution and in our two-hundred-plus years of cultural progress and precedent. 

A political competitor must abide by both sets of rules to win the presidency.  They must satisfy the electoral rules, yes, but also the moral rules.  Without these moral rules, there is no republic.  There is no decency.  There is no winner.   

Therefore, Trump cannot be the winner in 2020--no matter what.  Judged by his pattern of actions, he is evil.  And by despoiling our most cherished values, he has broken the rules.

Call him a successful cheat.  Call him a fantastic con artist.  But he is not a potential winner in any sensible or logical way.  We abet his ability to be thought of as a winner, or potential winner, by falling for the trick of framing discussed above.

I think the American people have been so gullible, so lacking in vigilance, so ready to be ambushed, our freedoms so susceptible, for just one reason:  We have forgotten how lucky we are to live in a republic.  

Again, because we have become so blind, so deceivable, so gullible before awful illusions, I repeat myself:

Trump is no winner, and he cannot be a winner.  Even if--god help us--he gets enough electoral votes.   He is still a cheater and a con artist, a traitor who seized control by ripping apart the moral fabric of our nation through evil, selfish means.

If that happens, we all lose.

 =========