Poem: Granite

 

Granite

 

a crow,

with the aplomb

of a pachinko,

bumped its way through branches,

 

to wonder if any bird

had ever hit the jackpot,

if heaven could fly upward 

out of husk, quill and bone.

 

death, no doubt 

preferred to throng the ground.

from possum thighs

to ichneumon wings,

 and everything in-between,

 

not much granite

among the carcasses.

although stones goggled,

epoch after epoch,

while the decaying 

layered in their spots,

 

so many countless dead things

jockeying for position,

hobbled though they were,

by the downward gnaw of the deepening damp,

 

long disobliged, as they were, by wind,

sluggish with fate.

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

6/21/24 ... mods

"granite" = tombstones

Knee out, no $ for a doctor, pain.  Still I have it better than hundreds of millions of people, who unfairly and brutally suffer the worst on this vicious miracle of a planet.  I made it to 60, somehow, at least.  I'll keep going as long as I can.

"Life is so sorry a thing that death is a delightful refuge for the weary" -- Herodotus 

An Excerpt From My Novel

 

Although I’ve made big sacrifices to attain it, I am grateful for the time I’ve had to work on my novel.  The title is A Future of Angels.   

It’s an epic sci fi, which means it is quite long, about 650 pages.  And yet it is full of new ideas in philosophy, psychology, and science.  There are two worlds.  Two very different futures for humanity.  Nothing less than reality and self-identity are at stake.

I believe this book is worthy as a cultural conversation piece.  Why?  Because we live in a time when humanity could wipe itself out, or create a paradise on Earth.  As technology accelerates, the time approaches faster.

What it comes down to is this:  how we handle our increasing tech.  Not just military and power tech.  Just as important, more important, is our ethics tech.

One reason my novel is timely is that most people today don’t even realize that ethics is a technology, capable of advanced and lesser configurations and effects.

One of the two worlds in my novel suggests that paradise is possible.  The other shows that hell is possible.

I doubt this novel will ever be mass-published.  Publisher and agents don’t like to take chances on first-time novelists, especially with a major project. 

I will keep on trying, though, even as I sketch plans for my next novel.  Perseverance is my best chance.  This is a quest for me, my part in promoting the Good (a concept not owned by any single religion).

Below is an excerpt from chapter one, which takes place in a near-future setting. The protagonist reflects on a dystopic state of affairs:  most people are now accepting a specialized computer--called an Umb--as an implant in their brain.

I’m certain this is a choice we will face in the future, maybe not long from now.  In the novel, I explore this option in detail.  I also explore the idea of angels, and how we could make them real--or not.

And on and on.  I created two new worlds, with their own tech, mythologies, cultures and fates.

There’s also a great love story in the novel, and plenty of action, all written in a literary style.

If you know a fiction agent who might be interested, I’ll send them a query.  I need any connection or help I can get, as I continue my journey.

Feel free to contact me even years from now.  I don’t foresee a quick path out of the proverbial desert.

 

owlwholaughs@gmail.com

 

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

Excerpt from Chapter One of A Future of Angels

 

...

Most kids bought their first Umb at the age of fifteen, the legal minimum.  Back when she was in school, it had been sixteen.  She had decided to wait an extra year, and the delay cost her social status and friends.  Even so, she had considered staying a pureflesh.  No mindware.  Mentally free.  The modeling and acting gigs could pay well, at least for a while. 

A few years out of high school, though, most pureflesh slid down the social ladder.  The first step was sexware and porn shoots.  After that, you became a collar, a trophy, a sex pet.  Poverty wasn’t as alluring as selling your mental leash to the whims of a sadistic noble.

At age thirteen, barely an adolescent, she’d had offers of free sexware.  High quality mindlynx worth tens of thousands of dens.  The man who solicited her had committed two major crimes:  recruiting a minor for prostitution and enslavement by mindware.  She hadn’t gone for it, thankfully.  Even at that age, she could see the degradation and sin. 

Trajan took my freedom.

Even in adults who ‘choose’ the lifestyle, everyone could see the real price.  Sex pets sitting in the passenger seats of plush glide cars, offering coy glimpses of banded crotches under stroke skirts or clutch jeans.  But what those smooth, perched thighs really meant was that some Duke or Duchess could push a button and make another human being beg to cum.

I’m not a sex pet.  Just meat turned into a weapon.

... 

  

===========

Poem: Flanked

 Flanked

 

the sky swam,

flank of a shark,

darker toward the deepening night,

that grim Atlantic blue.

 

there were birches that had no leaves

who reached up like lymph nodes stored in jars,

and you could

 

almost taste the formaldehyde,

 

the kind that kept fond idols

immortal and bright enough

to float in outer space.

in fact,

 

without the moon,

and yet the inevitable frost,

the Sisters and the Crab loomed dog-bark crisp.

 

someone commented on the brute logic

of the nascent tumescence

in those skeletal, orbital shapes,

 

somewhat a comfort,

 more vast than Euclidian,

those fonts of joy,

more ‘in the eye,’

 

and yet they curved down,

all human concepts do,

into the choppy iron of the Atlantic,

toward the golden ambush

of the great Devourer.

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

6/21/24 .. heavy mods

11/28 Flipped the prepositions in lines 16 and 17,  "of" "in"

Poem: Peacemaker

 

Peacemaker

 

six eyes turning,

wrath of fate,

staccato of gyre,

turning, turning,

 

that barking iron,

blue-bellied of steel, 

tongue of sulphur,

snarl of muzzle,

 

and the fangs shoot forth

to bite reap thresh gush,

a knee a throat a heart a breast,

spillage, a pillage of blood.

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

6/21/24 ... 

reference to Yeats .. turning gyre 

11/25 .... "out the muzzle" replaces "from the muzzle" "fangs shoot forth" replaces "fangs shoot out"

Poem: Wary Forest

Wary Forest

 

fins of shadow

slip under a boulder

near a poker face of snow.

this wary forest,

it must know something,

spruce lichened with odd smiles,

needles sensitive as goosebumps.

 

mice-like feet of wind

scurry through the treetops.

clouds equivocate

with their suspicious, mutable heads.

a hibernation of centipedes

tucked in coiled dens,

sentinel such frosty secrets,

and yet most of all

sunlight seems the sly butler,

winsome through the boughs,

cheerful almost,

too much sparkle in its face.

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

6/21/24 .. a few mods... "sly butler" .. the idiom of the guilty bulter 'the butler did it'

12/12/23 ... totally rewrote this poem again ... absolutely reconstructed.  still  doubt it is any good.  how can I tell when I can't even trust myself?

11/20 ultra-significant mods, including taking the first stanza and making it the fourth stanza.  (yep)

Poem: Uppity

 

Uppity

 

kind the purple sky,

if i fall up into its aerial cushions,

intoxicate the call of my heart

with ethereal grapes.

 

to be a frond on a slender cloud,

and undulate to hover,

so gently,

till peace holds sway,

 

able to ponder 

the wink of woke stars,

sip of their mysterious hopscotch,

as they ornament, loom and resolve 

the incipient night.

 

if i could ease worry

with magnificent noblesse,

as the silvering moon

in spite of its wounds,

 

and if i could walk

the liquid cobblestones it casts

across a pandemonium of ocean chasms.

 

wouldn’t it be marvelous, 

in the most holy yet god-free sense,

 

to walk over

 that great yawn of colossal fears,

and  arrive healed, unencumbered,

within a nest of dawn.

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

6/21/24 my goddess has shown me the way

11/29/23 ... fixed a typo ...

11/ 16 (later) ... "woke" replaces "igniting"

11/16   "fears" replaces "voids"  "ornament" replaces "dapple"  "purple sky" replaces "sky's purple."

Poem: Reflection

 

Reflection

 

i remember ice glinting 

one last time before it wept,

and dandelions melting into butter,

the green erecting sultry thrones,

and those zestful feudalisms of ants and bees;

sundry orchestrations,

vivid of April to serenade the blue.

 

you and i, we touched then

blooming into each other, supple of fingertips, 

caresses as narcotic as poppies,

the sun riding your back,

my hands on your hips,

a garden of sighs.

 

now songbirds nest mauve 

within a canyon of sleepy suns.

and the moons swing down,

ripe yet ethereal, nightly so elegant, 

imagining your breasts.

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

6/21/24  .. mods mods mods

11/14 stylistic mods ... mods, mods, mods... 

11/13 "to serenade blue" replaces "beneath the sky."

Poem: City Visit

 

City Visit

 

such taxidermy!

generous once of vigorous buffalo.

lissome once

of waist-high grass.

 

and yet now

the softest prairie flower tarred.  

roams of horses cold in stone.

schools of fish lost to glimmers

trickled onto a scale of coins.

 

the hardened, broadened trails

gutted of horn, hoof and heart.

lifeless of osprey.

eagle squeegeed for a sheen of windows.

 

and the rumbles of rubber and metal,

humungous to pollute, distort, and amplify

the snatched hum of bees.

 

gone.  all of it.

and yet prostituted still,

mashed into replicas and logos.

money the new blood. 

factories the fertile fields,

slicing exploited, caged flesh  

for mouths that pity no animal.

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

11/10 ... more changes... hoping to find coherence

11/9   ... lots of changes to original

Poem: Bitten

 

Bitten

 

the moon had been bitten,

down into a nimbus

on a stoic cloud.

 

it was almost an animal, then,

but no one wanted such scars,

and so the moon 

became succulent with wounds

to taunt such critics

and the hypocrties,

 

it

 

played hourglass

to the calculative schemes 

of the splenetic human rush.

it was something to be feared yet prayed,

chasing us as we overworked and underfed,

lost in our self-made riddles of delusion.

 

the moon

 

embraced the oceans

till they suckled its silky light;

and it became the sickle

of their heaving sparkling midnight harvests.

the moon,

some say 

it was the first stone employed as a tool,

before pestle, before weapon,

 

and that it was mistaken, once, as the eye of a great bird,

high over mountainous hearts,

where it somersaulted to stir hope with magic,

mixtures of ineradicable joy,

breaths of possibility.

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

6/21/24 solsticed

11/13... changed the "sickle" phrase

11/10  more edits, hoping for excellence through neurotic fixation

11/6   ... "played" replaces "it was the".   Fixed typo in second-to-last stanza