The World Staggers

 The globe staggers as the strongest country, previously the strongest democracy in the world, flips to fascism and probably, given Trump's apparent preferences, a totalitarian state in the style of Hitler.  

This is a colossal, defining moment for all of human civilization--forever.  And yet, however, that forever is likely to be short.  

The instability and massive ego of our new dictator, a malignant narcissist, tends toward ceaseless spin and recklessness, which is likely to spark sporadic travails, scourges and, yes, wars, such as Putin expanding into Poland.  And China going into Taiwan.   

General mayhem and chaos.  Power-grabs everwhere because the global police force led by the US is gone.  World War Three is likely and with it nuclear launch.

Trump, himself, our new dictator here in the USA is mainly interested in being worshipped, so perhaps he will not invade Mexico or Canada or seize Greenland (he has expressed interest in 'buying' it).  

Maybe this evil man is content to destroy the greatness of the USA and shrink it down to a theater of one:  A golden T, akin to the golden Calf of Baal,  constantly in the spotlight, with severe punishment for those who dare to challenge his authority and total control.  

In a sense, all Americans will soon live in the equivalent of a very abusive, violent household, where the police and military will be the abuser's fists.  And the abuser's voice will grate our ears, demeaning us along with the very fabric of country and culture, a suffusion of sickness from every angle of the media kingdom the dictator now controls.

A little segue.  I am grading papers, and may not write poems for a while.  (indeed, this may be my last semester ever grading papers, because the university has not as of yet offered me any classes next year).  But it isn't just about having no time due to grading--

I stagger.  The whole world staggers.  We knew the power of demagoguery.  Of hate and fear when wielded as psychological tools to turn masses of human beings into ignorant hordes.  But Trump, being so odious and disgusting, so generally awful, many of us, perhaps, still clung to some hope that the US citizen wouldn't be that gullible, so hate-bound,  and straight-up self-destructive.  So obsessed by the need to maintain the racism and sexim inveterate and essential to the US "caste system" (Wilkerson).

But no.  

And so ... 

Behold the Idiocy.  Behold the Darkness in the human soul. ugly and bared on full naked display.  The Orwellian gambit.  Hate is Love.  War is Peace.  Slavery is Freedom.  Let me add, Ignorance is Wisdom.

It likely now damns us, our concession to worship a man so vile and disgusting that political satirists lamented he was impossible to caricature.  He is a living caricature.  A walking extreme of everything vicious and rotten with vice. 

Can those of us who resist survive? Can we choose the Light?  Lincoln talked of "better angels."   Will you surrender yours?  Will I mine?  

How will we find a way to preserve our own inner Light?  To keep love and compassion in our core, as Trump's henchman, Stephen Miller, beings the construction of the 'camps' that he has vowed to build across the country?  How will we keep our souls as immigrants and others--potentially people like me, seen as political enemies--are put in those camps?

There has to be a way, even in hell, to not bow down to to devil.  

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

It's My Father's Birthday: "Keep Your Goodness"

 

Today is my father’s birthday.  Kit would’ve been 91.  He died in May last year at the age of 89.  As my grief continues, a process of remembrance across decades of philosophical discussions, as well as our time analyzing countless games of chess together, browsing through bookstores, eating at a range of restaurants, going to movies, taking hikes, and so much more, the whole odyssey of joys and pains that family share, and too the simple habits and routines that fondly demarcate individual quirks and preferences, I am feeling considerable relief that he did not live to witness what just happened to our country:  the election of a fascist to the office of the president, an egomaniacal man without conscience, who will do whatever it takes to become a full-fledged dictator and destroy the Constitution which founded the United States in liberty and human rights.

My father was a strong advocate of democracy and a foe of fascism.  He spent the last few decades of his life working on a book that not only laid a foundation of philosophical arguments for the importance of what he considered the only decent form of government, but which in addition developed an outline for its most ethical and effective expression [1].   One could quibble about specifics, whether Kit was right about this or that, but there’s no doubt that he took up the call of Enlightenment values.  The dignity of humanism.  It is a hopeful perspective, one that ennobles and frames the human condition as a stimulus for great and beautiful deeds.

One cornerstone of a humanist ethic is the idea that we can elevate each other, moving forward together, to sculpt better a world, by championing our unique human ability to reason.

Fascism, conversely, champions ignorance.  It blares the cultish call of a charismatic dictator, whose aura of might strives for two things:  (A) to dominate and direct the minds of about one third of the citizenry (this seems to be the average, on historical analysis) through a zealous rhetoric of divisive propaganda, and (B) to wield the resultant obedient herd as a weapon to menace and bully the dismayed and disorganized majority.

The championing of a cult versus the championing of reason.  These are the two paths.  Deceit or truth.

It’s a well-worn platitude that one’s character is an expression of one’s soul, manifesting in behavior that shapes the environment.  The person is known by their deeds.  Metaphorically, the tree is known by its fruit.  As it stands, the American people have chosen the tree of fascism.  In the USA, this is to submit to the superiority of the White male, and the inferiority of all others.

Isabel Wilkerson, in her book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, argues that the USA has always had a caste system, similar in some ways to India’s caste system.  She discusses how Martin Luther King, Jr., after arrival in India in 1959 and while receiving accolades, was shocked to hear himself described as a member of the “Untouchable class” of America.  At first offended, King accepted the label upon reflection.

So, here we are.  Embracing our traditions of racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ+ and similar embedded otherisms.

Humanity could go on forever being ignorant and fanatic, locked in oppressive hierarchies, except for one thing:  the weapons we have evolved over millennia of war are now capable of annihilating civilization itself.

If not for this fact, we could go on being prisoners of our own ignorance and the dark karma it generates.  We could simply continue the cycle:  to fight and war and fear and butcher and slaughter and enslave and hate from our various hilltops, marked with our little flags of prejudice, always seeing the other sides as less human, more stupid, more sinful, more animal or even as insect, as when a scapegoat group is referred to as "cockroaches."  

One might say, we deserve an eternal fate, similar to crabs in a bucket, always pulling each other down.  And yet the children are innocent.  And very many adults desperately want change, and they do their best to be good and kind, not just to people of their own skin color, but to everyone.  And yet the innocent cannot stop the demagogic kings who control the police and the military and who can impoverish, jail or otherwise torment anyone they choose.  

Hitlerian propaganda, such as the Elders of Zion, saw the Jews as cannibals who fed on infants during Satanic rituals.  Recently, in a case dubbed “Pizzagate,” a man fired a rifle inside a pizza shop because he believed the shop hosted satanic pedophile rituals performed by Democrats:

 

“The unfounded "Pizzagate" Internet rumor at the center of this case accused the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria of being the home of a Satanic child sex abuse ring involving top Democrats such as Hillary Clinton. "Speculation and fabrications tied to the bizarre conspiracy theory have been relentlessly circulated by politically motivated fringe sites," as The Two-Way has reported.”  (NPR.org)

 

This level of ignorant violence and cruelty has an ancient history.  Long ago, humans proved their susceptibility to superstition, so much that we have stained our history with many battles, atrocities and oppressions of the utmost horrible nature due to the darkest, most irrational reactions of fear, outrage and hate.  

And yet these sorts of irrational reactions are a perverse mana-from-heaven to the mentally deluded men who sit atop thrones and proclaim themselves gods.  Such weaknesses--the exploits in the human mind-- are the reins they tug to steer the herd, to determine where it goes and grazes; and where it tramples.

It was a truly fantastic, beautiful moment in history, only hundreds of years ago, when a few countries began to break out of tyrany to advance democracy.  This change led to hundred of years of slowly improving conditions here in America.  An increase in fairness and equality. In the quality and dignity of our lives. 

Slavery was made illegal.  Black men gained the right to vote.  And then all women, too.  In 2015, gay marriage became legal, something I never thought I would celebrate in my lifetime.

But it is all crumbling away.  All America’s ethical advances are sliding down the slope of a sandtrap, which is the widening maw of fascism.  Once again, a disgusting, macho dictator with no conscience will lead us into a dark place of White male superiority in counterpoint to the inferiority of everyone else, with corresponding privileges or privations, powers or degradations, elevations or segregations.

Was my father, Kit, wrong to think that we could rise up above this evil?  No, he was not.  Democracy has been shown to be a plausible route.  After WWII, Hitler and other fascists were defeated.  Before that, the armies that defended slavery were overcome during the Civil War.  Despite frequent falls and failures, somehow in its broken, brutal journey the USA has managed to stumble toward the Light.

So, again, no, Kit was not wrong to champion democracy.  

Consider, too, the effect of our own individual choices, yours and mine, on our own souls.

I believe that every one of us who harbors a conscience--a sensitivity and reactivity to good and evil--is being watched by some part of their own mind, an internal judge capable of meting out sizeable sentences, whatever their mysterious nature and innermost effect might be.  Our own internal judge is immune to the denials, masks, deflections and even the self-loathing we erect to hide from the truth.  Even if we shut away the internal judge forever, still, it watches from the subconscious, and troubles the currents below the surface on which the completeness and quality of life depends. 

Whatever happens to humanity, even ultimate doom, I believe that somewhere, somehow, someone is watching us, aside from our own internal judgement.  Maybe it is aliens, though I don’t think so.  Maybe it is the Universe, whatever that means.  Or maybe it is Angels, as I like to call them.

Of course, we also watch each other and feel each others' gaze.  This fellow assessment can exert a pressure to conform.  But we are also drawn to honor the good people in our lives by acting in accord with their conscience and our own.  The alternative is to disappoint those we admire and to shame ourselves by bowing down to evil and its big lies.

My father’s last words to me were, “Keep your Goodness.” 

Thank you Kit, for your courageous philosophy.  We humans have wings that want to spread, to fly, even if it is only through the heavens of our own mind. 

 

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

 

 

11/12 ... eds throughout the day

11/11 ... This is going to need editing, but I wanted to publish it on the actual birthday of my father.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Noise

 

Noise

 

cannot be silent

in the way of a lake.

we clamor, bustle and complain.

 

no hint of the sonata of a loon,

a cricket croon,

or the ancient fugue of coyotes.

 

our lampposts blare all night.

 

don’t have it in us to succor the quiet.

our very attitudes belch

with the bravado of leafblowers,

whose tirades richochet off each other,

ostentatious in their obstreperous.

 

collective and multiplicative.

 

it’s the antithesis of the humble.

the air strains

to host so much noise.

even so, we keep on trying,

upping the density of the hoopla & rackety-clackety

to make it spread.

 

it’s the reverse of majesty.

we are each an endless whoop

against the still of the woods,

competing to take up verbal space.

 

all the other lives around us,

those inferior nuisances,

 

if they are even seen,

 

had better learn to listen,

to be meek and harnessed,

to hide.

 

 

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

11/11/24 ... mods

Poem: Thought

 

Thought

 

a hidden ruckus,

not that glib fake flow we call speech.

a donnybrook of puzzles

within a gnash of coarse

and yet complex folds.

 

a furioso, at times,

of mud, water and spark,

designed to rub some unnameable

fantastical itch--

 

an itch much more important,

in the end,

than the lifeless boasting

of all those nocturnal

dice-throws we call stars.

 

those stars worked forever, after all,

to forge this lewd internal contract,

this decillion-storm of little lights

stinging and binding and exciting each other--

 

all bubbly in a bowl of phantom soup,

a recipe cobbled together over eons

within a shell of bone

on a silly and yet oh so awesome

and cruel stage.

 

 

 

 

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

A description of thought

Poem: Another Chicken

 

Another Chicken

 

a thin neck takes blade.

the same cruel that has always been.

a predator-prey

pong game of pulsing red.

 

the hatchet crouches

between split throat

on bespattered bench.

 

ghosts of other limp plump

domesticated birds

lurk in the muck,

a succession of slaughters

over thousands of years.

 

should have been left to fly,

not bred down, whose ancestors

were once bright actors,

 under a forearm’s flex?

 

another thoughtless tensor

brought to us by the scourge of hunger

in a global abbatoir

of unthought whys.

 

 

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

Essay: Downward Slope

 

Not all that surprisingly, the American people have chosen a downward slope of ominous Darkness.  They have chosen Whiteness and patriarchy instead of equality; thuggery over decency; and violence over justice.  This is a country that only 165 years ago fought a war with itself because about half the States wanted to keep Black people enslaved.  The South went to war with the North to defend their freedom to keep Black people as chattel.   Needless to say, when the North won, the hatred of the South for the victors didn’t dwindle, nor did its will to oppress.  It festered instead, ambient in a culture of extreme and barbarous racism, including legalized segregation.

As well as its legacy of enslaving Black people, who built much of the country on their backs, America was founded in genocide of the Native Americans and continued that practice of murdering and herding entire peoples from the 1700s onward.

In sum, the core culture of America embodied in its ruling White class has a repugnant history of claiming manifest destiny while trampling on other peoples, territories and countries. Even today, right now, the USA, under its liberal president Joe Biden-- and this is not its right-wing fascists, who will soon take dictatorial power--is participating in ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza.

Cruelty and chosen ignorance has been the ceaseless standard of White patriarchy, ever since the inception of the country.  Even so, America stumbled along for over 230 years, maintaining its republic and avoiding the tyranny it was founded to escape.  The Constitution itself was designed around the idea of protecting against takeover by a tyrant.

In his Farewell Address on September 17, 1796, George Washington warned against the dangers of political parties.  They could divide the people and lead to dissolution of the union:

 

However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

 

This is exactly what culminated on November 5, 2024.  On that day, which is yesterday, as I type, the republic of the United States died.  It was replaced by “cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men.”

Despite its horrible entanglement with genocidal blood and slavery, the USA managed to evolve ethically.  For two hundred years, faltering and awkward progress was made.  Slavery became illegal.  Women gained the right to vote.  In the last sixty years or so, we continued to approach a standard of general equality among people.  We still had a long way to go, but the progress was real.

Feeling a shudder to its pillars of dominance, the White patriarchy fought back.  And won.

Now commences a most brutal, unstable time for all of humanity.  I myself am an old man, pretty jaded.  I’ve had a good life, all in all, and was blessed to be born in and experience a democracy.  It hurts me a great deal that children born in the USA will now be taught to worship a repugnant man of no moral fiber whatsoever, and to revere him, perversely and with full Orwellian irony, as ‘the greatest man who ever lived.’ 

By separating greatness completely from morality, we shame ourselves completely.  We thereby alloy ourselves by definition with the Dark, not the Light.

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

Poem: Healed

 

Healed

 

skin of  ice

thick with scars,

i wore it for so long

it ached,

uppng the numb.

 

touch couldn’t be

more empty so i

sought candles

of fingertips,

 

only these to possess me

and i quaked, at first,

in their stirring,

how the bliss

 

crept through,

trembling drops of water

which braved my eyelids.

 

such pilgrims! i thought,

how and why did they

find this mental tomb,

and bless the fallen?

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

The world hangs on the pivot of November 5th.

 

Regarding the Poems--And the Fate of Humanity

 

I may not be posting poems for a while.  I am busy grading a huge stack of virtual papers.  Just as importantly, I am stung to my core by the upcoming election, one that will determine if America loses its republic to a fascist dictatorship under the most disgusting human being I myself have ever encountered in a public figure within my country.   

What’s most disturbing to me, even more than his conviction on felonies, is that Donald Trump has been found liable for rape in a court of law twice and, as well, dozens of women have credibly accused him of sexual assault.  I will leave aside the many other reviling aspects of this racist, sexist malignant narcissist, who has wallowed in greed and fraud all his life; otherwise, I could write all night.  I will instead conclude with the most heartbreaking aspect of all of it:   despite his crimes, sins and unrepentant hate and demagoguery, his psychopathic lack of conscience, his bankruptcies both financial and moral, even so, despite all this, and despite overwhelming documentation disproving his big lies, such as that the 2020 election was stolen, about half the population of the United States, millions of people, even after ten years of exposure to the chaos--to his dysfunction, abuse and incessant spew of lies--are still going to vote for him.

The perpetual question I hear, and many of us hear, is why?  Why are so many people going for Trump?

Kamala Harris is obviously highly competent, whereas Trump is obviously incompetent, even leaving aside his disgusting, wretched disordered soul.  Many of his followers, in fact, say they don’t like him as a person; and yet are going to vote for him anyway.  What is going on?

 

My answer, which I have expressed on this blog before, is this:  White Protestant heteronormative patriarchy has always ruled this country.  A change would be as dificult as it would be profound.  It would be an historic, even epochal, accomplishment. 

Trump is the spearhead of the longstanding entitlement of Whiteness to keep the throne--and so many people want this, want Whiteness to reign, that it doesn’t matter that Trump is a grossly wicked, egregeiously unfair man, or that he is incapable of sane management.  Indeed, he has been professional diagnosed by numerous psychologists, who have written a best-selling anthology titled, "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump."

Isabel Wilkerson explains the situation with far more clarity, detail and insight than me.  Wilkerson does so in her book, “Caste:  The Origins of our Discontents.”

 

Here’s how a New York Times book reviewer started off his review of it:

 

A critic shouldn’t often deal in superlatives. He or she is here to explicate, to expand context and to make fine distinctions. But sometimes a reviewer will shout as if into a mountaintop megaphone. I recently came upon William Kennedy’s review of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which he called “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” Kennedy wasn’t far off. 

I had these thoughts while reading Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” It’s an extraordinary document, one that strikes me as an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far. It made the back of my neck prickle from its first pages, and that feeling never went away.

I told more than one person, as I moved through my days this past week, that I was reading one of the most powerful nonfiction books I’d ever encountered.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/books/review-caste-isabel-wilkerson-origins-of-our-discontents.html

 

In short, according to Wilkerson, America has been saddled with a caste system ever since its earliest roots, going back to the revelations of the 1619 Project.  Kamala Harris represents the decline of our traditional caste system.  Trump is its continuation and fortification.  Trump takes the hate and rage of the caste system’s racism, sexism, homophobia and other oppressions and turns them loose on those who would challenge the old ways. 

 

Trump is attempting to do what the White-ruled system has always done:  shut down protest with fear, terror and the threat of violence.  Once he gets full power, he will use actual violence, and so will his followers across the country, down to the smallest town and village.  In my tiny town of 1000 population, there are a number of Trumpers who are filled with rage, stoked by Trump’s words, and who own assault rifles, these being easy to purchase in the USA.

 

Wilkerson says that people support Trump--support the caste system--because they see it as being in their own selfish best interest.  Mostly, these are White people, and mostly White males within that group, that is, the males who are at the very top of the caste structure.   Black and brown people who support Trump do so because, like everywhere in the world and throughout history, some people in oppressed groups will serve the ruling class dutifully to get ahead, even and perhaps especially by turning on their own.  Turning on your own is required and rewarded by a segregated slot in the hierarchy. 

So, America is at a crossroads.  One of Trump’s slogans is “Bring American Back.”  One of Harris’s slogans is, “Not Going Back.” 

Because America is still by far the strongest country, both militarily and economically, the result of the upcoming election will tilt the whole world--toward either fascism under Trump, or democracy under Harris.

I’ve argued many times on this blog that rulership by a cult-charisma dictator is an ancient, primitive form of governance.  Its essence is nothing but 'might makes right.'  

Democracy, on the other hand, is an advanced form of ethics technology.  Democracy embraces the concepts of humanism--equality, human rights and rational decision-making--to advance the pursuit of happiness for everyone. 

If Trump wins, the world will slide toward cult-charisma dictatorship even more that it already has, and the result will be a primitive global standard of government, one that is centered in the irrational chest-thumping of a few insecure males. 

If Harris wins, the world has a serious chance of advancing its overall ethics technology.  This is critical, because without advanced ethics tech, humanity will not have the maturity to properly manage its other advancing techs, such as weapons, robots, and AI.

Again, either we evolve our collective conscience--by advancing our ethics tech--or we perish under the rule of petty tyrants. 

I believe everything--not just for America, but for the entire human world--rests on this election.  We will either be ruled by ignorance, or by reason. 

Trump, indeed, denies that global warming even exists.  The vast body of scientific evidence, and the climate change happening right before our very eyes, the mutating of the continents and the oceans, mean nothing to Trump, simply because they conflict with what he arrogantly opines.   He sees himself as a god.   A messiah.  And he has surrounded himself by those who will fawn before his fake omniscience, a retinue of lickspittles who will tell him that he is always right, always wearing the emperor’s new clothes.

I personally believe that it will be very hard for Harris to win.  She is up against the White male caste system that has existed for hundreds of years.  It is also fair to say, given the seamlessness of misogyny, that she is up against 12,000 years of patriarchy.  Harris, if she wins, will be the strongest person in the world.  A woman.  A non-White woman.  And she will not be a placeholder for patriarchy, as were the sprinkle of women in the past who ruled over various city and nation states.  It’s not as if Elizabeth or Cleopatra worked in great portion, if they did at all, to advance women’s rights.

Harris and everyone behind her is up against patriarchy.  And the cruelty of patriarchy has always been at the top.  It has never ruled with logic, or with fairness.  But instead with a fist. 

Still, Harris might win.  And what a fantastic victory that would be.  Not only for the Democratic Party, but for people everywhere, in every country across our barbaric, wretched, struggling yet hopeful, naturally wondrous globe. 

It won’t be a final victory, not by any means.  The battle to advance the collective human consciousness will go on.  However, if Trump wins, I believe we will be stuck with patriarchy and all its ignorance and cruelty until the end of civilization.  I predict that this end will come fairly soon, probably within decades.  We’re on track for WWIII, after all, with startling similarities to Europe in the 1930s.  Putin invading Ukraine.  China eyeing Taiwan.  Israel expanding a war in the middle east, while committing genocide and ethnic cleansing.

'Never Again,' the motto meant to ward us from another Holocaust, has fallen before Netanyahu's genocidal appeal to 1 Samuel 15:3, where the Amalekites are not only slain, down to the last woman and child, but also their animals slaughtered and lands salted.

Yes, we hover on the edge of the end.  Full war.  Full Fascism.  But there is still a flicker of candlelight in the dark.  A hope that we can walk out of this underworld labyrinth and find our way, eventually, onto a full-bodied path of light.

I hope and pray to the Angels.  The Angels, as I see them, are non-religious.  The Good transcends any one religion.  Religions are simply different mythic routes to approach the Good, but must be shorn of the biases and dysfunctions which lead their adherents astray.  There are Angels for all of us.  Good beings, somewhere, even if only in our minds, beyond us.  Call them by some other name, if you wish.  The Good is real.  If Evil is real, and it is, for we can all see it in the crystallized, maximized hate of ethno-nationalist political movements, then so is the Good.  And so, too, are Angels, at least as I have framed them.

We can as a species approach the Good together, down a reasonable, loving path.  But  we must dare to embrace the truth of equality, a simple truth underscored so long ago in that immortal statement:  Do to others as you would have them do to you.

I pray for all of us.  I pray to the Angels.  I pray for all of human fate.  This is a turning point for Civilization, one way or the other. 

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

11/1 ... eds

Poem: Wind Ode

 

Wind Ode

 

listen to the wind,

a festival of hugs

defying loneliness,

calming and stroking,

 

listen

as it shatters and unshatters,

an ethereal liquid sculptor

never to die, always regenerate,

 

to uphold the sky and spill it,

to moan and pray,

sacred and as well

effulgent and sexual.

 

the wind is always an embryo

rushing toward the faintest hints

of the most venerable

understanding.

 

art and soul,

the clues are in the wind,

flirting and somersaulting,

answering

 

what we crave to know, 

the wind, incantata,

a bard beyond words,

a mirror of what is.

 

 

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

10/23 ... changed last stanza and a line above
spellbinding

Poem: Old Tree

 

Old Tree

 

i want to hug you,

shimmy up your shorn smooth sheath,

past branches gone as cobwebs,

the knotholes a cuneiform

whose bruises inlay my chest,

so when i descend

every lesson of weather,

every breath and teardrop

known to the sky,

goes with me.

 

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

10/20 ... "goes" replaces "comes"

Exhausted.  Praying that fascism doesn't win the upcoming election.  The ugly prejudiced violence of a cult of hate.  

Poem: No Santa

 

No Santa

 

while crows funnel

in a cloud of rotten milk and

meat and raucous bickers as

sharp as lacerated bottles and

cans and curses of wing,

a pimpled putrid smell

curdles the notrils of the children

who kick paint cans to fiddle their fingers

under a helter-skelter of ripe diapers and

tinfoil and cardboard-vegetable muck,

children whose forearms delve down deep

in the disgust of flavors of grime,

hunting for a 5¢ prize of fungible plastic,

children who trudge to hunker,

fat black garbage bags on their backs,

and who look not at all like elves

who tote nonexistent toys

for no Santa.

 

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

Poem: Pebble

 

Pebble

 

to shout from its minor perch,

to sing with the blaze of

an asteroid leaving outer space,

 

it craves to be heard

and laments the exile

of its admixture.

 

it scolds the quirk of its own honest substance 

with a gall so derided 

it is obsolete in the cities of gravel.

 

it has so much to say.

every fleck on tegument

could be a crease sporting lips.

 

but who will notice

such a cloistered hideaway,

where a nova masquerades as a glint?

 

 

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

10/20 .. changed a word

10/14/24 mods

10/13/24 ... mods to make this mod sound more about the danger of honesty 

Poem: Under the Gun

 

Under the Gun

 

an occasional ant

upgrades the course of the colony’s chores,

lucky to avoid the pluck of a spider.

 

the ant clutches the podium

riding a dice roll that somehow slips

dismemberment by righteous mandibles.

 

once daft and deviant, malign and rampant,

the previous pariah basks in accolades,

inscribed now as a hero in the pheromone codes.

 

atop its servile scurriers,

and the corpse-husks of hated failures,

the new leader legislates,

 

godly over those who are similar, superior even,

except the babble of time

didn’t call their names.

 

 

 

 

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

10/14 mods

plays on, "there is nothing new under the sun"

Poem: Kettle

 

 

Kettle 

 

my february-cold face sinks

toward a coil under kettle and water,

a serpent of warm orange

deviantly hot-blooded,

whose industrial mettle

plays young to the cataract stare

of windows glazed by frost.

 

the kettle casts a spell,

encouraged by my quest,

of little emissaries of air

which launch ocular as they plunge upward

toward my fevered gaze.

 

first a few then streams then a

kettleful of eyes which mushroom

in the effervesce, each one

of them a momentarily ogle

devoid of anything at all

except perhaps a hint of innocence.

 

such is the bubble-boil brouhaha,

a frenzied figleaf of drama,

sandwiched between clones

of drywall and ancient pale-lime paint and

those wizened panes of icy squares.

 

on and on

the replenish of little dots

rises in sways of columns,

tucked in a bell-curve of glass.

collectively a specter,

they condense into a blurry patina of steam,

concealing the weave of  tears

on my flushed face.

 

 

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

10/9/24 ... renamed poem "Kettle"

Slyia Plath inspired 

The Monster Netanyahu (WaPo article)

The Washington Post has had the guts to publish what the monster Netanyahu has done:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2024/gaza-reconstruction-rebuild-process-plans/

And, yes, Hamas is wicked and evil, too, it should be disbanded.  But Netanyahu is the one who has carried out his dark vision of ethinic cleansing and, as well, genocide, in Gaza.

========================= 

Poem: Downtown Rush

 

Downtown Rush

 

conformity, conformity,

shirt-button pips on dominos.

 

one stray truth could topple

the whole busy sidewalk of oxfords.

 

urbanites, cheeks of micro-knots,

stretch into spurs of a bobbing fence:

 

we are pedestrian cattle, after all,

roped and herded

by internal wires.

 

i try to be lazy

in the bustle of twill and leather.

 

i dare, for just a moment,

to dangle in the crosscurrents,

jostled as a marionette.

 

a dirty human being

curls at the foot of a dumpster.

 

is such the price of wisdom?  

 

is this acuity,

this bipedal piece of trash?

slovenly and unseen,

crumpled and unkempt?

 

is he a vagabond-guru?

it comes easy, the thought, 

a pill to sugarcoat our perambulatory denial.

 

really, though, it is true,

even a moment out of step

and one's shoes become a nuisance,

wayward in the stress-greed march.

 

 

 

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

10/27/24 ... mods

10/6 ... mods 

NYC circa 1996

Poem: Doors

 

Doors

 

we weren’t meant

to tango vivid with ghosts,

the gone should not outflesh the day,

nostalgia never never dreamed

to be so concrete.

 

for how fragile we were then,

were we not; and not to witness

is what magnifies this togetherness,

we who once begged to immerse in bliss

and yet now are far less

than a glimpse of that which

was never meant to be.

 

this past of ours

holds much more than canvas or sculpture,

and reaches out as if singing

so many songs without answers

behind the doors.

 

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

USA Media abandons Gaza to doom

 Mainstream US media is completely ignoring Gaza now and the genocidal conditions inflicted on them by Israel:

Analysts have identified Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as one of the deadliest and most destructive in recent history. Large areas of Gaza, including critical infrastructure, have been bombed to the ground, with about 63 percent of the total structures in the Gaza Strip estimated to be destroyed, damaged, or possibly damaged. According to the UN Development Programme (UNDP), even if a five-fold increase in construction materials were allowed into Gaza, it would take until 2040 to rebuild completely destroyed housing units. But it could take “approximately 80 years” if reconstruction were to follow the same pattern as after previous escalations.

The humanitarian situation in Gaza remains abysmal. At a recent press conference, UNICEF Director of Child Nutrition and Development Victor Aguayo estimated that “over 50,000 children suffer from acute malnutrition and need immediate treatment”, before warning of the ongoing risk of famine.

(UN Security Council)

https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/monthly-forecast/2024-10/the-middle-east-including-the-palestinian-question-17.php

2.2 million people in Gaza have been subjected to genocidal conditions by Israel's violence, which at best means a grey area, between genocide and atrocious war crimes that don't quite reach that status.  Now they are going to be forgotten as the war goes into Iran (my prediction).  

The US Empire, supplying weapons and now military support for the expanding Israeli aggression--Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon, soon Iran--is showing its Evil side.  

Genocide is what the US empire inflicted on the Native American people in North American in the 17th-19th centuries, and it whitewashed that over (perverse pun intended)  Apparently it will do the same with the genocide in Gaza, gaslighting it into the non-existence of mainstream-media silence.

I cry out to the gods, why did you create a world where might-makes-right, the force of Evil, always seems to win?  And why put us in this position, where might-makes-right, the force of Evil, will damn us all, very soon, it seems, to the fires of WW3?  

I love my country for the progress it has made.  And I hate it just as much for its global wicked cruelties.

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

Essay: The Wall of Masculinity and War

 

The Wall of Masculinity and War

 

Marathon runners sometimes confront what is referred to as “the wall,” a pivotal moment when  the brain says there is no way to keep moving.  The metaphor is meant to convey a formidable psychological barrier, and yet it is one that can be transcended to complete the 42 kilometer race.  

In the course of human history, our society currently faces an analogous wall of its own, one that we must break through, for it is essential for our survival.  Success will require a movement of great courage and perseverance.  Failure, however, means the likelihood that civilization will end, a terminal finale that occurs in mere hours, once it is initiated.  In a swift launch-code of judgement, twelve thousand years of human striving and development will say good-bye in a nuclear flash.

The challenge can be framed this way:  will we continue to accommodate--to saber-rattle and invite--the scourge of war?   Or will we break through a longstanding wall of immaturity to advance our collective consciousness beyond the dominance of might-makes-right?  To be blunt:  will we avoid the annhilative force of World War 3 and the ‘mutual assured destruction’ it inflicts on the globe and, in brave retort, instead propel our mental health beyond the wall, achieving a new way of being:  a practice where the method is reason and the goal shifts beyond greed and paranoia to the highest of virtues, that is, the Good.

To answer the above questions in the affirmative is to confront a corollary question, one that concerns how we define masculinity.  Will we continue to abide narcissistic dictators, who rule nations through force and demagogic fear?  Shall we bow down, literally, to the tyranny of  wounded ego, of nihilism?

Readers who have made it this far might be shaking their heads and muttering about hopeless idealism.   It is indeed an immense task to motivate people to consider that the gender norm of masculinity can be rewritten to eschew, rather than reward, violence and aggression.  It seems impossible even though the solution is quite doable in the sense that the adaptive potential of the human mind is vast.

At the risk of redundancy, let me state that the wall we face is mental, not physical.  What stands in our way of evolving gender norms is an obduracy of bias, a dogma stuck in its claim that men simply cannot change.  According to this canard, ‘boys will be boys,’ ‘war is war,’  and violence is inevitable because males bear an intractable curse.

Such a view is resignation.  It dams us to warfare and doom with the surety of a tragic self-fulfilling prophecy.  Despite the infinite negative cost--the slay of civilization itself--the common belief is that men are, in large part, immutably evil. 

I would like to ask all men:  Is this how we want to be seen?  Is this what we are?

No matter how many times that arguments based on ‘human nature’; on the specious precept that ‘it has always been this way,’ are shown to be flawed and false;  no matter how many times they have been exposed as mainstays of brutal control, the decrees of cruel kings who conquered logic to foster long eras of oppression, we humans cling to the blinkered belief that we are consigned to destroy ourselves.

There is a chance that such gross ignorance will not win.  In the last few hundred years, and with accelerating pace, we have started to overcome patriarchy and its rhetorical bludgeons, not just in theory but through actual example and practice.  In science, if you falsify a hypothesis through irrefutable evidence, the hypothesis is wrong.  In critical thinking, if you demonstrate a logical contradiction in a conclusion, the conclusion is dismissed.  And that is what democratic movements have done.

Equality is today a professed standard, one we have not reached in full, and yet significant progress has been made.  Many countries embrace universal suffrage and civil rights.  Slavery is illegal.  The legalization and predominant acceptance of gay marriage occurred in the United States in 2015.  If Kamala Harris wins the US election in November, the USA with have its first woman, Black and Southern Indian president.

If the appeal to ‘human nature’ is a fallacious red herring, what prevents us from discarding the crippling, ancient trope of the violence-driven male?

Two core factors come into play, delineated by the disciplines of psychology and sociology:  (a) up to this day, who gets sovereign power has always been determined by patriarchy, (b) every new generation of children has been taught by those who have been sanctioned by patriarchy.

The problem, then, in simplest terms, is an entrenched system of mind control that includes highly efficient techniques for extending its tentacles into the future.

A correlative factor is (c) the ponderous weight of tradition.  People get nostalgic about the past and seek to maintain their traditional culture.  This tendency facilitates patriarchy’s remarkable status as a glaring injustice that has managed to saddle humanity ever since the founding of ancient Sumer.

What patriarchy requires is an ignorance vortex, a system that never allows society to advance beyond the domination of aggressive males.  This acculturation seeks to dumb-down, not liberate, the mind.  An ignorance vortex is very good at preventing ethical progress.  It limits knowledge and maintains division and bias.  The indoctrination starts in infancy and carries on from there, steeping every developmental stage of a human life in messages, both conscious and subconscious, flowing from all institutions of society.

The benefits of escaping this darkness are vast for women, men and nonbinary persons.  There is a clinical name for the debilitating condition that the majority of men suffer from worldwide:  normative male alexithymia, an inability to face what one is feeling, let alone express it in words. 

For thousands of years, boys and men have been trained to lose something very special.  As Ruth Whippman writes in a recent op-ed:

“All the old deficiencies and blind spots of male socialization are still in circulation — the same mass failure to teach boys relational skills and emotional intelligence, the same rigid masculinity norms and social prohibitions that push them away from intimacy and emotionality … Under patriarchy, boys and men get everything, except the thing that’s most worth having: human connection.”

 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/05/opinion/boys-parenting-loneliness.html

 

Such deficiencies give boys and men insecure egos prone to irrational confrontation, as well as the tendency to fall in line under a ‘strongman’ leader.  I put ‘strongman’ in quotes because such leaders are not strong; they are exceedingly insecure and parasitic on the vibrancy of a country.  A current example is Putin, whose ego-driven invasion of Ukraine could end civilization. 

Take a moment to grasp this:  END CIVILIZATION. 

The survival of humanity comes down to whether we can dethrone such leaders and defuse our tendency to bow before them.  Can we psychologically mature?  Many individuals already have, often through personal therapy.  Advanced emotional skills are real and teachable; and yet emotionally secure people are not what a social system of control based on insecurity wants.

Emotional skills and new levels of ethical awareness are starting to spread to the general populace.  A critical steppingstone was the 19^th Amendment, giving women the right to vote in 1920.  Today, younger generations of males are beginning to reject the straitjacket of traditional masculinity.  The progressive impetus, however, is in a race with a backlash from the only form of government the world has ever known. 

I like to label this as MMRP for might-makes-right and patriarchy, two critical norms inculcated into most males.  Using an acronym underscores an imposed condition, one we can escape.   Another acronym is RBDE:  reason-based democratic equality.

Either we will end the 12,000 year curse of MMRP or it will end us. The technologies we possess are near godlike, and will not bring happiness in the hands of malignant narcissists like Putin or Trump.  If Trump wins the US Presidential election in November, it will tilt the whole world into fascism.  Insecure male egos will, as they have so many times in the past, saber-rattle and go to war.

As we develop powerful technology to shape reality and world--nuclear, AI, robotic, genetic, nanite--we gain the ability to approach heaven or invocate hell.  Healthy honesty or enslaving fear await our focus.  Which will it be? 

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

Poem: Late Awake

 

Late Awake

 

the night had my eyes.

it thought back.

shadows in mazes of

sorceries of what i hated

and lived in mist

cried into my face--

quested but nebulous

and touching me almost

here and there,

some nuzzle of feelers

inside a cloak of moths.

i was surely asleep

where nothing was dead,

ideals lured by the Id

and cannibalized in a cave,

jawbones of angels there,

too many guilts,

holes of taboos,

too much lack of wish-

fulfilled truth,

a speech that some audience

waited for my forgetful

self to say, loops of

déjà vu and failure,

sustenance, maybe,

a semblance of

a figment of presence,

but no power.

 

 

 

 

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

10/5/24 ... removed a word

Poem: Artificial

 

Artificial

 

deep in the orifice of some unseen machine,

invisible chords dangle from the sky.

is this the blood and pulse of the future,

every household

connected by veins of electricity in its breast?

every roomy lobe

drawn to dreams within hidden hardware?

 

an ivy a trellis a noose

no axe can chop and yet every muscle obeys.

all life hostage to sparks, a leapfrog 

of sockets, circuits, airwaves and prongs.  

 

no embryos in the code’s uteri.

even death might not be safe.

could crypts be seized, coffins hacked

to own the laugh of Buddha,

wear the thorns of Jesus,

upbraid the witches of Wicca?

 

no one has any idea,

while so many necks crawl and crawl,

where this hydra is going.

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

10/27/24 ... mods

9/22/24 mods... 

"What is your relationship to the program?"

 

Poem: Forecast

 

Forecast

 

bees drift drunk on yellow

while the hummers putter and yaw;

both of them breeze in a slothful mobile.

 

tadpoles nearby

drowse glazed in stream.

 

how the sky lounges,

mountainous on pillows

and bolsters of fleece.

jellyfish willow trees

wallow mired in azure ponds.

 

no rain disturbs

somnolent twigs or serendipitous clover.

no thunder trembles

the narcotized devils-paintbrushed

moss.

 

is this comedy,

noon’s comely sleep,

to await charger and prince?

and yet none appears.

no princess cares.

you can hear the dandelions

scolding Zephyr.

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

Poem: Cliff

 

Cliff

 

weary basalt

hangs plump over the sea,

cubic honeycomb,

geological snakeskin

shedding shedding

but it takes millennia

to cry in relief.

 

not agile or bright

as ocean or sun

like prometheus pummeled

while water and heat look on

not at all awed

by the patience of a battered martyr.

 

humans

hike climb nibble swarm

film photo take selfies 

chirr trill word sounds

gone as quick as we generate,

specks in the gale

of the erosion of the cliff’s dreams.

 

it cries for us

insular in empathy,

each tear a foamy splash,

tons and tons in a lifetime,

but the sadness remains,

duly unremittent,

invincible.

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

10/10 mod

10/7/24 fixed typo

9/20/24 eds 

Entities with empathy on this planet are often surrounded by a lack of empathy.

Poem: War Plea (And also a tribute to Kenny Cole)

 

War Plea

 

don’t bark at me with your

black tongues or spit your red. 

don’t carve my name

with bullets into marble.

i was only walking by,

a little angry to find your tank

in my garden,

a bit distressed at becoming a flea

under the fury of your gaze.

 

let me hop away.  i’ll eat

sand and drink stones. 

i’ll pretend my grandfather

didn’t plant fruit trees

near your craters. 

 

i’ll set up shop

in the smallest grave

of shadow, whittle

spoons with parched

old hands, and pray

in ways you’ll never notice

that the hearts of my children

remain sweet as pomegranates.

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

This poem was part of the greatest moment in my poetry career, when the incredible, nationally known artist Kenny Cole asked me to collaborate with him.  And so my poems, as part of his utterly unique vision, ended up in the Zillman Gallery of the University of Maine Museum of Art. 

The name of Mr. Cole's presentation is Parabellum.  The latest review of it appears in the September/October Edition 2024 of Art New England.  As you can see, Parabellum is still potent:

https://artnewengland.com/ed_review/kenny-cole-parabellum-prepare-for-war/  

Mr Cole is an absolute genius across multispatial mental and physical dimensions.  Art within art within art involving hidden secrets and stories.  (see the review above to get a slight idea)

Far and away, the greatest moment I ever received as a poet was due to Mr. Cole asking me to participate.  I have never properly thanked him.  In part, I am notorious for being a hermit; and, also, the whole 'adventure'--which is how I see it--was so stunningly different from the rest of my life that it was like being touched by some higher force of brilliant spirit.  There's no way I could express to Mr. Cole how he tattooed my life.  Maybe he'll find this comment someday, a sweet admirer of his, someone whose soul he forever galvanized.  Thank you, Kenny--but thank you most of all for your ceaseless efforts to combine aesthetics and ethics.  I believe this is essential for the highest, most sublime--and world-saving--artworks.    

Love

 I feel this sense of doom.  Panic-attacky stuff, not so brute but intransigent and lingering.  Remember me for this:

https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2020/12/poem-love-poem.html

Poem: Montecito Hike

 

Montecito Hike

 

camphor of oleander

musky greenish-blue 

astride freshly cut dust

which cakes the wild leaves

of lupine and radish.

 

osprey-gull birds

figure-eight over acres

of deadlocked pale husks,

tresses straw blonde

on the skulls of clods,

fields and fields and fields of clods;

of tilled dirt so disturbed it shines.

 

a khaki man with runt epaulettes

orders tractors about.

he tosses a braggadocio

of mean sun and cruel earth

from which he shall render heaven.

 

above his head in ascent, 

on slopes sanitized and shrubbed,

many, many shingles, fine-kilned clay

roof the broken hills with a godliness 

of haciendas.

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

10/5/ eds

9/14/24 eds