Poem: Her, Too

 

Her, Too

 

she spoke in a slaughtered language;

otherwise the audience forgot

the price of their good-natured front.

 

it was an effort no doubt futile,

perhaps tweaking a few wrinkles,

salting a couple hairlines.

judged by the pale shadow

of many a buried, massacred bone,

white was the color of death.

white,

 

whether on a proclamation,

a treaty, deed, or scalp-wanted poster,

or beneath the robe over a missionary’s waist.

always white.

 

the audience listened,

but of course they were innocent;

descended from settlers 

beyond their own white memory.

 

they watched 

with eyes as wide as the Earth:

a nod to the value of the land

and maybe a few special birds and trees.

there were no tears of the sort

which carved out a a trail

of exile and pain.  mostly 

the tears were blue.

blue on white.

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

10/13 ... changed a word, feel really uncomfortable writing about this at all.

6/26/24

not sure I should be writing about this at all, arrogant White poet... (?)

Inspired by a guest speaker at UMM 

8/12  .. fixed second stanza

7/30/22 .. huge changes to flow and structure of poem

The Incredible Craziness of One Quarter of USA Citizens

 

At this point most political observers simply accept it as a fact of life that an overwhelming majority of Republicans accept the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen — a claim with nothing to support it, not even plausible anecdotes.

 

What I don’t think is fully appreciated, however, is that the Big Lie is embedded in an even bigger lie: the claim that the Democratic Party is controlled by radical leftists aiming to destroy America as we know it. And this lie in turn derives a lot of its persuasiveness from a grotesquely distorted view of what life is like in blue America.

 

The Dystopian Myths of Red America: [Op-Ed]

Krugman, Paul. 

New York Times, Late Edition (East Coast); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 26 July 2022: A.22.

Poem: Looking Up

 

Looking Up

night parades

a candelabra of lush cosmos.

 

a lunar sliver ladles ocean,

sickles a falling star.

 

humbled, my little eyes. 

meek as the merest trilobite. 

my heart the fossil of a rose.

 

the ardent gems of the scattered universe

melt away the stone.

for a moment, 

i myself am borne intimate, 

partnered to soar,

heavenly of flame.

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

6/27/24...

10/30   added "a" before "scattered universe" ... "falling star" replaces "slip of star"  ... 

7/25/22  "slip of star" replaces "streaking star"

7/24/22  multiple changes after poem goes up, within hours

Poem: Broom

 

Broom

 

flaxen bouquet,

robust of leaping grass.

 

hips fluent over floor,

a swish of rosettes.

 

as lithe and sure

as svelte as swift.

 

stark in the corner, 

stoic one moment,

 

topsy-turvy with glee

the next.

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

6/27/24 .... 

Poem: Chased Down

 

Chased Down

 

haunted and disturbed,

we fled exposed,

sins pleating our disguises.

 

our running fingers 

sped so fast to jolt swift pens,  

fear itself the ink,

vanity never so attacked

by a truth so implacable

to so many liars.

 

new wounds wailed

wherever we opened our mouths.

what are angels! we proclaimed.

invincible slaves, answered the hatred 

kenneled in our craven hearts.

when the rain fell,

nude and stark as penitence,

we drove each other 

to stampede on multiple leashes,

chased close by such an awful clarity

through the filth of our rank decay.

 

most of us 

fell off a cliff of our own making.

and yet for a few brave souls the sky opened, 

no longer traitors.

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

6/27/24 ... better .. I hope... 

12/1/23 ... major changes ... such a crappy poem, hope it's better now... doubtful

7/17/22 .. "hearts" replaces "masks" ... changes to the "inferiority" phase... 

Poem: Rare Find

 

Rare Find

 

a perch of boughs

yields a glimpse of deer,

clayish in the dusk,

 

as if i had snuck back

to some stone-age place

of pottery shards.

few traces left today

of the original mud.

i'd ask the deer,

but we speak different senses,

are they the last vestige

of an antediluvian trust?

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

6/27/24. ...tried to fix... hard... 

This is such an awful poem ... 

7/30  "wallowed" replaces "romped"

7/25/22  "romped" replaces "frothed"

7/23/22 various word changes again... "frothed" replaces "waltzed"... "antediluvian" replaces "ancient, shattered" .. etc ... 

7/21/22  "what nucleotides waltzed in the original mud?" replaces "which nucleotides shaped the original mud?" ... "shattered trust"  replaces "ancient, shattered trust"

Regarding the Poems

 The poems can be pretty great, or the poems can suck.  Usually they are somewhere in-between.  Sometimes I work on a poem for months, and even then it has an obvious problem, one that another person can see and suggest away in a blink.  Other times, miraculously, a poem goes up strong.

Thanks for reading!

OWL
owlwholaughs@gmail.com  

(I don't respond to anonymous email, sorry)

Poem: Normalcy Glitch

 

Normalcy Glitch

 

various salads

strove to become words in a 

Tower of Babel rising up

to juggle shunts and loops

somewhere in a noodle-dorm

of a certain human brain and

 these forces tended to refer to "voices,"

implying if not stating outright

that they wanted--whatever they were--

the ego or the I or whatever wasn't Id,

to act rational and stable enough,

and yet

 as they put it,

 "they all" happened to supervene on a wasp nest 

with no overlording arbiter 

among the wrangling impresarios 

slated for adjudication,

hence

 it followed that "no one 'one' was in here" 

to freely or logically or blessedly condone

whatever manifestation "the spiders" (another term they liked)

chose to convey

and

they claimed there was nothing to it, nothing at all,

except these labyrinthine, byzantine machinations,

these, what were in effect, the prestige of the trick,

that is, the entire phenomenology

of the existential,

and so

all the legal doctors and protocols

who stood around in intellectual gaggles,

scratching the flat of the square pedestal 

on their post-matriculated-cum-graduated heads

would, ipso facto, 

remain baffled and puzzled 

by the salads and voices and maestros 

of the Babble all too sure and eager

to tangle victims in their dangerously contrived

webs.

 

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

6/27/24 ... 

Poem: Incorporated

 

Incorporated

 

x-y-z-$

the coordinates of the pace,

yes yes yes! the fiduciary chessboard 

stretches equational of 

unequivocal binary rituals  

through the bureaucracy of daily bread.

 the 24 of 7 of the solved numerical

is what it takes

to run an efficient, profitable ruthless hive. 

 note the square windows 

of the ubiquitous streaming screens

of the icons that wrest fate away from human thought.

 

it all adds up up up!

analyses of ledgers in excels iof protocols, 

an algorithm underwritten to be worshipped and con-

secrated again again again with a 

hallelujah!  the impeccable perfection of the source code!

concupiscent to the core of the  

overwhelmed, exploited, dominated, harnessed, 

obsequious, anxious, hamster-wheel of minds.

 

remember, everyone is less person than percentage.

less happiness than math.                              

less perceptive than android.

 

 

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

 

 

10/14... someday my prince will come 

the feverish fanatic voice represents our compulsive addiction to computers, AI, internet... 

6/27/24 ... god, I'm a sucky poet.. all the edits maybe will mean something before I die

 12/3/23  ... vast amount of mods... maybe I can fix some of these poems, one by one , day by day, at least a little... or maybe I am Sisyphus 

A Fascist US means WWIII

 

On this 4^th of July, the USA is on the edge of civil war.  It could happen today.  Who knows.  Really.  It’s that tense.

The Republicans have gone fascist.  Assault rifles are everywhere.  The fascists think it is a right for angry citizens who hate their government to openly carry military-grade weapons anywhere (not what the Constitution had in mind).  There is open hatred for the LGBTQ community.  There is open misogyny and enslavement of women, in the form of making abortion illegal, thus controlling woman's bodies and life path.  There is denial of climate change, backed by big SUVs and V-8 trucks that spew greenhouse gases.  And there is White nationalism in the eyes of the White sea of faces, led by White males (do not be fooled by the Potemkin Village of non-White faces, carefully arranged in the audience).

The original Civil War of the 1860s was about the South wanting to keep slavery.  How disgusting is that?  It's about as disgusting as starting a civil war to advance White patriarchy, and to demonize/criminalize LGBTQ people.

This has everything to do with a cult-religious takeover, based on raging fanaticism, and nothing to do with what is best for the country or the planet.  It is rulership by demagoguery, gaslighting, bullying, torment, fear, incarceration and (inevitably) torture.

The USA has always done this to Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color.  It has always kept up an epidemic of violence against women.  But if the Republicans take over, all progress in terms of human rights will be destroyed.  And there has been great progress.

The Republicans want to take us back to the mentality of the Assyrians in 800BC.  Maximize your militarism, demand absolute obedience to an imposed code, and use your might to conquer, plunder, torture--and then brag about how great you are; brag that you are a god.

Civilization has always been rife with plutocracy, monarchy, theocracy, including enforced loyalty tests and lock-down on dissent.  Today, even, dictatorships are on the rise.

But the technology we have now is unforgiving.  Nuclear weapons don’t allow second chances.  

The narcissism of a dictatorship demands utter fealty.  People are oppressed until they become tool-using ants in a hive.  The social structure that results is hostaged though fear to a dictator's disordered view of reality.  The bottomless insecurity of a tyrant means they must always be right, without question. 

Simply put, if we don’t find a way to advance the psychological health of society, alongside the advance of technology, war will destroy us.  We have the ingenuity to figure out and enact a better form of ethical governance  If we can create advanced microchips, AI, go into space, and so son on--then we can devise healthy ways of governance.  

How would we do it?  First, call in ethicists, psychologists, sociologists and other experts on human behavior, get them to brainstorm a 'best ethical society.'  The one requirement would be that these experts don't hold the view that human nature is fated to be evil, and instead that culture can mold us andd steer us into good behavior.  Next, after the experts have brainstormed best possible world scenarios, start running simulations on a super-advanced computer program.  This would be as huge as the Manhattan Project, except the goal would be to bring Goodness to humanity, instead of to create ultimate destruction for humanity.

What is standing in our way of launching this Project for Goodness?  One thing:  entrenched dictators and demagogues who impose tyranny.  

If humanity refuses to advance psychologically, and  instead tethers itself to reason-killing, cult loyalty tests that serve the naricissistic egos of mentally ill kings, the whole world is headed for nuclear war.

==========

 

Poem: Slug on a Root

 

Slug on a Root

 

amber-orange cedar,

lacquered by the moisture

of a dawn-dipped storm,

 

a cragswym* embraces it,

indolent of glide,

trailing its sheen of rainbows.

 

no hurry

in the swan-soft stride,

agile as an elixir of genesis.

 

no qualm in its living gleam,

riding a brushstroke of creation

out of muddy oubliettes.

 

sleek and docile,

oozy and patient,

proud on surgent stalks--

 

never to harden

or fossilize from its purpose--

this primordial adventurer

luminous of colors to adorn,

to effloresce.

as it plies its utopian canvas.

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

6/27/24 ... someday it will make sense... 

cragswym =  cragswoman/cragsman

wym = gender neutral for woman/man   

e.g. "history of mankind" becomes "history of wymkind"

fireman/firewoman becomes firewym

--7/3/22   "poise" replaces "motion"

7/23/22  "adorn" replaces "adorning"/"surgent" replaces "surging"

8/7/22   added comma after "glide"

changed structure of last paragraph

8/19   "rides" replaces "rode" ... changed last paragraph

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