Poem: Cursor

 

Cursor

 

in the chasm between stanzas

a heartbeat of a paring-knife,

which lugs words even as it cuts them

across barrens of pure white hopelessness.

 

its insectoid blink

tells me what i can/can’t do,

frustrates, makes me want to run

faster than its snippet pulse.

 

but that goad is like the throb

of some invincible fiend,

always there, somewhere,

askance, above, below the stage,

tugging and jerking

in the wires.

 

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

Poem: Worms In a Storm

 

Worms in a Storm

 

to twitch in swollen mud,

frantic nerves of drowning wrath.

raindrops pucker gutter floods,

yank the false ecstasy

of the baptimsal squigglers

down through slime-lipped grates,

down through a stygian intestine

of sewer system where they 

dodge the swipe of rats and

feces-fecund gyres.

down, until they dance

as abyssal as possible,

not quite still dead,

vomited into the brine,

luring the mouths of bass.

 

 

 

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

Dream Quote

 ==

We pray to god that there is no hell.
(dream)

==

Poem: Wavery

 

Wavery

 

carried through another night,

to look is to feel

on this bridge of you and i,

this spine-like arch of memories

 

which floats warm but not so safe

amid deserts, snowfall and Tarot-faced leaves,

and then back to our duets,

this intimacy

 

of brio and cadenza.

 

the moon speaks in splashes here

on swirl-painted waters,

each sparkle a wavery footstep

athwart innocence and time.

 

the sun pullulates 

with billions of lit minnows

birthed by our sexual songs,

and when we turn to look back,

at the treasure chest of our hard-bitten and 

yet effortless aspects of trust,

doesn’t it feel we have been, you and i,

everything and everywhere,

 

among tides of chameleons and petrels,

seducing each other to dance

across so many worlds

and elaborate shores.

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

 

"pullulates" and other stylisms honor Neruda

4/6/26 ... heavy mods... difficult love poem

4/5/26  started with eds... needs more

Poem: Tempted

 

Tempted

 

vultures turn a blue keyhole

above the taut steeple of

my needy fingers.

 

lips of lava, blurry within stone,

chew on my prayers

and the tremble of my knees,

 

and they refuse to sponsor

the delusion that they harbor bread,

or any power or wish,

 

should i chance to fall, head down,

like the bill of a ibis

seeking wisdom in supplication.

 

i would instead

crash to mangle the frail platter

of my hope,

 

offering a feast that would unlock

all of god’s miracles and mysteries,

exposing them

 

for what they are,

what they were,

and will always be--

 

a vanity of bones.

 

 

 

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

4/1/26 ... removed a prep, changed a word

Poem: Deep in the Woods

 

 

Deep in the Woods

 

ants raid the corpse of a bee

near a branch sprawled

like a fallen madonna.

 

mushrooms rear, white-knuckled,

to ride a cratering stump

of irretrievable wounds.

 

everywhere the headless husk

of some gutted spruce

earns no special attention.

 

the quiet floor of leaf-and-root

moulders from a truancy

of porous ghosts.

even the youngest of sprites, 

the ferns,

 

fan vegetal pharaohs

below a granite ridge  

destined to tackle pines.

 

only a few trunks left,

wind-whipped as the arms of titans

beseeching a fillet of clouds--

 

and blue agnostic heaven.

the moon is heaven! 

crickets purr from their rot-rouged niche.

 

the moon,

sideways smile of night,

it comes to eat another day 

while season devours season

and the footfalls of lovers and jesters

prance over the bones.

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

3/26/26 ...more edits

mods after posting ...deep into the night...

Quote: Boastful talk about slaughter ...

 ====

Boastful talk about slaughter is as old as war itself. “The wheels of my war chariot,” bragged one Assyrian king, “were bespattered with filth and blood. With the bodies of their warriors, I filled the plain, like grass.” But America’s founders asserted universal principles that should make such an attitude unthinkable. If you believe not only that all men are created equal but also that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, then war cannot be justified as a pure display of power and dominance …

Power does not grow out of the barrel of a gun, cruelty is not the same as strength, and a politics built on such ideas promises ruin, delusion about the limits of our power and a betrayal of the promise of our founding. -- Phil Klay

        https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/22/opinion/trump-iran-war-memes.html 

====

Poem: Misstep

 

 

Misstep

 

a tote of ants

swells over the desert flesh.

jags of shredded wing and torn ort

vain as crowns.

 

eons have trained them

into a chain gang of riots,

lent them the surety

of a frenzied magnetic field.

 

one lack-of-mind

ignores all concept.

one heart diffusive

revels in arterial lust.

 

the ants have eaten the eyes

of a bricolage of fallen creatures,

have taken the lessons

back to the gulch --

 

that time-broken oracle

of mangled strata,

that great original unforgiving

insatiable bowel. 

 

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

3/22/26 ... changed a word and a line

Poem: Hwy 15

 

Hwy 15

 

the sound of breeze,

then meteors encased

in a growl.

 

this is the afterlife.

cars scamper to shriek quietly

across a curdled plain.

 

cars,

 

they are magic carpets,

but only for sabotaged wishes

of prisoners hungry in metal beds.

 

prisoners,

each  a drop of flesh

on a bleeding line of orange glare,

wardened

 

by a relentless vampire sun.

 

and the Mojave just stands there,

holding up the slink of the 15

like a girl offering her wrist.

 

 

 

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

3/17/26 ... changed a prep

used "girl" and "her" instead of "boy" or "boi"  and "he" ... personal choice, I guess, based on more girls/women committing suicide by slash in the culture I live in.  On the crisis hotline, I talked to women and girls who did cutting.   Felt more authentic and engaged to me.   I could've used the generic "teen" and "their"  ... but that sounded detached.

Poem: Old School

 

Old School

 

spoiled dreams of teary patients,

unleashed vitriol, sexual or

infantile, and such exceeding

parental hate --

 

it gnaws on his own defenses

to break theirs, chafes his super-ego

to endure the labyrinths

of melancholic counterfeit --

 

lie after lie,

webs of tentacles which

tense as tight as they can

to deflect the agony of insight;

to shield the tender ravages

of some wrecked childhood,

cradled dear and fulsome,

deep inside memory’s womblike

nest.

 

the Id,

always a demonic glare

from its half-psychotic eyes,

which never reach the surface,

even when the last mask falls away,

dissolved and desolate.

 

how do i see that glare? he wonders.

 

it’s as if a pus of evil

crammed the sinuses of the human brain:

accumulated cannibalisms and

much worse perversions,

lascivious and incarnadine,

the whole of it striving to pretend

behind teddy bears and lullabies.

 

is every desire so retrograde?  he wonders.

do the curved plates of the human skull,

of necessity beyond cure,

embody some thorny bassinet?

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

Standard theory of Freud, still used to this day

Poem: Edge of Freeze

 

Edge of Freeze

 

moths flit to rake

a pillaged moon’s embers.

 

such splintered wings,

threadbare glints in stardust,

 

it’s hard to see

what keeps them aloft,

 

swing-dancing so late,

zealous through the night.

 

some fey alembic, surely,

of trick and tide,

 

seductive yet monstrous,

obscure of chemistry,

 

must stoke their brute vigor,

the delirious squander.

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

 

 

3/9/26 ... changed some stuff... changed another word later

The Primal Irony

 

===

 

The primal irony.  The freedom of brain plasticity can be wielded to forge a cage of dullness inside our own heads.  - Uuva Viperbless, Petal of the Passionance Covens

===

 

From my novel, a Future of Angels (unpublished)

Quote, Nick Allison, shunning friends and family over Trump

 ====

…  Friends who finally stopped returning calls. Siblings who no longer talk politics, or sometimes don’t talk at all. Parents that people still love but can no longer pretend to understand. A racist uncle who gets blocked on social media. Thanksgiving dinners that get skipped. None of it has been easy. Walking away from people you care about rarely is. But again and again, the conclusion sounds the same: at some point, continuing the relationship required excusing things they could no longer excuse.  And that’s OK. …Doors swing both ways for a reason — sometimes they need to be closed. We don’t have to compromise our ethics or excuse beliefs that cause real harm, no matter how close we once were to someone. Even if they were family.  - Nick Allison

https://ca.yahoo.com/style/asked-libertarian-friend-trump-response-033102704.html

====

Poem: Stare

 

Stare

 

dawn circles onyx,

 

twin pools brimmed

by ancestors yanked back up

on ladders of lightning.

 

the fallen to rejoice,

cradled rapturous,

darkness now heaven sent:

 

a veil, rampant in its 

relevations of justice,

blithe to uncurtain

 

the fallacy of death.

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

Poem: No Clear Path

 

No Clear Path

 

a fracas of leaves tickles the sun

with googols of young green.

 

shadows flicker and sliver

through laced cemeteries of

 

fallen decayed heroes,

coursed by beetles which seem on fire.

 

greyblue puddles of lichen, inedible,

dry and flake on shabby stones.

 

a single arrow of light

hits a pine tree right in the chest,

 

impaling an amber bull’s-eye,

sticky heart turned to gold.

 

who will earn its love?

an ant, a moth, a squirrel,

 

some chickadee?

 

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

Jerry Brewer, NYT on US Men's Hockey accepting Trump's Invitation

 

From the NYT article, “The U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team won gold — and then lost the room”:

 

It would be a copout for me to blame only the environment that they must navigate, to rant about how everything is poisonously political now, to lament the impossibility of sustained joy in a culture that incubates outrage. These are all factors, but let’s not infantilize this team. These are men who thrilled a nation and rocked the world, and as adults, they need to be more savvy

That goes for every prominent team in sports. It’s nice, even expected, to be feted as a winner. But who’s celebrating you – and why they’re doing it and how they’re doing it – matters more …

Jerry Brewer, Senior Writer, New York Times

Ethical analysis of the US Men’s Hockey Team accepting Donald Trump’s invitation to the White House 

Poem: Leaves at Sundown

 

Leaves at Sundown

 

branches surrender as tame as

throats under those seductive 

leaves which hum with autumn’s blush,

rich in sauvignon joys, soaring off

never to fall again onto

cushions of mussed forest beds,

more sensitive than lips when

wind strums their withers and  

sparks such fantasticated songs:

such moans and coos and trills

of sighs and delights, higher still,

until the amaranth sky

inhales the flighty lust to churn--

to burst and cascade and whirl with

fugues of mosaics, emotional

tinctures of canopied cloaks and gowns, 

such brave siennas and vermillions and

umbers and butters whose

myths whisper in waltzes of

silhouettes cast from a campfire which doesn’t

dare to exist except in glades of semi-dark,

where the vibrant flames of the

oh-so-never-spent! leaves

sweep away, players now, forever,

precious as jewels in spectral roam.

 

 

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

2/27/ .. more

2/26/26 ... mods

Quote, Ian Buruma, NYT op-ed

Historians Confirm: Tomorrow Won’t Be Better Than Today

One reason for public docility in terrible circumstances is fear. In the last years of the war, a Berliner could be arrested and, often, executed for doubting the final German victory ... But there is something more insidious, something not unfamiliar to many of us today: the hope that things will turn out all right soon, that the political outrages are temporary or at least that they can’t get worse. One way of dealing with bad times is to pretend that they are normal ... 

This is the problem when the destruction of moral norms and the rule of law is incremental ... 

When Donald Trump refused to say whether he would accept the outcome of the election in 2016, people should have sensed the danger. And yet at the time, respected intellectuals told me that everything would be fine ...

Since then, one red line after another has been crossed ...

All this was incremental, too, but compared with 1934, everything goes much faster. And yet life continues as usual. What was unthinkable only yesterday we now take in stride, and we wait for that moment when things really have gone too far this time ...

But that moment probably won’t come. Things have gone too far too many times already. Hoping for better is still the right attitude, but only as long as we prepare for the worst.

Ian Buruma
Historians Confirm:  Tomorrow Won't Be Better Than Today https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/22/opinion/history-hope-delusion.html

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

Poem: Office Party

 

Office Party

 

chuckles and chatter

distort into a circus.

this scene might be far worse

than the ordinary, that is,

the automatic weekday sunny-grey

of the i don’t hear you chin nod.

or maybe it’s the same.

another episode of failure

unwitnessing itself.

actors who prove that exiles

die out there somewhere

in soundproof chambers

far too loud with truth.

far too pushy and nosey

with questions of fair pay

and harassment.

all of us, actually, at the party

sound like those little rotors

in micro-copters which drone wherever

warblers, larks and sparrows once sung. 

it’s that kind of lack.

machines which taffy-pull laughter.

pretzels of tricky remark.

a snazz of phrase lifted from bots,

all shifting and swaying in a

punch-bowl hall of mirrors

and bravado.

 

 

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

Poem: When Warheads Launch

 

When Warheads Launch

 

our dream perishes

but the stars collect it,

and with care prolong that brave choice--

 

for they have radiated hope

from the very start,

assurance it can be beautiful to breathe.

 

Earth, in their eyes,

is a silverblue minnow,

swimming sweet waters to drink the light.

 

no matter

how fast or far fear chases joy,

jealous through chasms of abyss,

 

the embers of the dance ignite again,

and even more,

the stardust of lovers

 

who are not so small, after all,

never to extinguish

what they were, are, or will be--

 

not so forgotten

to the bosom of the universe,

the praise of the cosmos,

 

not so forsaken, irrelevant, empty

or alone.

 

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

Essay: Poetry, Good, Evil and You

 

Essay:  Poetry, Good, Evil and You

 

Most people, most of the time, and this includes myself, are not facing the unbelievable, awesome, scary aspects of what it is to be human in the early 21^st century.  I think some compartmentalization is fine and even necessary.  Many of us need a buffer, some peace in other callings, activities or entertainments.   And yet it is vital, as well, to engage with the critical issues of these mind-boggling times.  To plunge in with full veracity. 

My poems, I hope, are aspects of the call.  My poems, really, are a way of dealing with a spectrum of brutal emotions, while adventuring in the crucible of the soul.  Ecstasy flows through me, love and anguish, and also hate [1].  These raw forces can be shattering.  Or they can be channeled into deepest expression and liberation.  A poet can be an alchemist, working with passion for purposes which ultimately advance the Good.

Before addressing the big question of whether we will go down a Good path or an Evil one, it is important to spell out some of the extreme changes we face in the near future.  The scary options presented below are not necessary futures, but they are likely futures, if we don’t act maturely and ethically to manage the godlike technology we are currently evolving.

Again, all this is very stressful to even broach, let alone ponder.  My way of dealing with it is poetry.  One of the main purposes of this essay is to get you to think about how you can deal with it. 

 

Our Near Future: Option One, self-deselection and AI supremacy

 

What’s so scary about our times, even compared to the general human condition, which has always been fraught with danger, challenge and stress?

As I wrote in a 2002 academic article, which is now a reference in the Wikipedia entry on cyborgs, we are likely to combine our natural bodies with implanted technology.  When?  Soon and at a reckless pace.  This involves artificial or enhanced limbs and organs, yes, but also connecting our brains to computers and an ultra-invasive internet [2]. 

I argue that this process, in our current culture of profit-making and competition, will lead to self-deselection:  we will change what we are so much that we become some new kind of species, one created outside the biological channels of evolution.  If this happens, humanity as we know it, and as it has existed for hundreds of thousands of years, will be gone.  It will also have profound effects on all of planetary nature, including what creatures and biomes remain and how. 

How far away is this transformation? It has already started and will likely proceed in stages.  Artificial limb and brain chips already exist.  If we are reckless, consumed with a rush for immediate power and new abilities, then within 200 years we will be a lot more similar to robots and robots will be a lot more similar to us.  

Indeed, through a brain-connected internet, it is possible for multiple entities to telepathically share and combine.  The scenario where AI controls us, or even effectively turns us into its slaves, gains traction if we are all wired up to each other under AI super-centers.

 

Our Near Future:  Option Two, nuclear annihilation

 

War has been a problem since farming was invented.  But never of such a world-shaking magnitude.  A scary possibility for our future is the obvious Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads; namely, World War 3 and nuclear annihilation.  Given the current tilt of politics toward bellicose dictators, which mirrors the conditions before World War 2, it is a decent bet to say that this is our most likely future.  

Tens of thousands of nuclear warheads are ready to launch.  Egomaniacal, saber-rattling, insecure dictators on golden thrones, petty men who won’t back down = BOOM.

 

This is where we are at

Even if we avoid a hellish finality, super-powerful technology is emergent.  Right now, we seem almost eager to hand over our existence to AI overlords.

This is the theater in the round, the world stage, on which you and I dwell, circa early 21^st century.  We are in the flow of a rapidly changing, technology-driven metamorphosis.  Our leaders seem all-in on advancing as vigorously as economic forces allow.  Such forces are the primary driver in our primitive, barbaric culture, our poor level of maturity and (lack of) ethos. 

 

The Most Important Choice We Face:  Ethics

Can we actually mature and consider our fate more wisely?  Is it even doable?  The answer is yes.  It involves reasonable, ethical decision-making.

Clearly, though, it is not foreclosed that we will suddenly wise up.  What we do now, what choices we make, are part of a unique historic flow.  You and I participate in shaping greater future destinies.  Will we advance our ethics, or stay trapped in the primitive system of vice that rules us now?

If we make certain choices, whether recklessly, or by failing to take a stand, acquiescing to the powers that be, we are likely to be among the last few generations of human beings to walk the earth.  As I outline above, we could replace ourselves with cyborg ‘upgrades.’  Or we could annihilate ourselves in a future-tech war.

The crossroads is here.  There are two possible forms of government we can support.

One type of government trends Evil

Humanity, right now, has a choice between two forms of global governance.  One is based on idols and tyranny:  cult-levels of ignorance, fear-mongery, and totalitarian control.  The other is based on democracy:  reason, equality and mutual flourishing through a merger of science, critical thinking and ethics.

I have written in many previous blog entries that ethics can be mobilized as a technology [3]. 

The totalitarian model of governance, as I argue in many essay on this blog, is Evil.  A fictional character, the Grand Inquisitor, in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, elaborates on this model quite well.  The Grand Inquisitor argues for a Pact with the Devil while pretending to follow Christ.  The basic argument is that fear and ignorance are the only way to keep humans in line, due to limitations in our very nature.   It is an Orwellian model.  Preach freedom but enforce slavery, preach love but inculcate the hate and fear of scapegoat-ism.

This is also a Machiavellian model.  In The Prince, Machiavelli argues that fear is the best way to control people.  This is certainly true, but only at a certain level of immature culture.  All the god kings since ancient Sumer have used it as a psychological weapon of control.

 

One type of government trends Good

The democratic model of governance follows the path of the Good.  It accepts a Pact with Honesty.  Scientific truths, therapeutic psychological awareness, and the basic idea of human equality.  We are all the same kind of cognitive animal and self-evidently deserve rights.  Fair and just treatment.  In the Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky labels this as the choice of love and reason over fear and fanaticism.

 

We have a choice right now between Good and Evil

 

You and I live at a critical juncture.  It is largely a barbaric, vicious and fraught time.  But ancient ways of darkness have been challenged effectively.  This means that both ignorance-based governance and reason-based governance are viable paths.  Will we dare to support compassion, virtue and psychological health? Or will be bow down to ignorance, fear and hate-mongery?  This can be summarized succinctly as:  will we mature?

Neutrality is not an option: 

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil--Hannah Arendt

 

The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of moral crisis preserve their neutrality"-- JFK (uncertain attribution)

 

Either Good or Evil will win

 

All this, again, is very stress-making.  Trust me, I know.  My poems help me to achieve and maintain the honesty needed to face the situation--the existential crisis--I describe above.  In my poetry, I channel very intense passions of many kinds from many chambers in my heart.  It is atrociously hard to face what is going on right now.  A true struggle between Tyranny and Democracy. 

Fear versus love.  Ignorance versus truth.  Obedience versus freedom. 

Good takes us in one direction.  Evil takes in another.   For more details on why one or the other will eventually encompass the globe, see my essay titled, “The Purgatory Principle.” [4])

 

Scenario 1:  Evil Wins

If we blow ourselves up in a nuclear armageddon, that is to succumb to Evil.  Some humans will survive, probably.  But they will start all over with the same god-king warlordism.  Might makes right.  Eventually these survivors will rebuild, get nuclear weapons once more, and likely destroy civilization again.  This could lead to a hellish cycle.   The way out would be to give up ignorance-based governance.  Reject the path of fear and chose the path of Good (see option three below).

 

Scenario 2:  Evil Wins

A second possibility is that technology will become strong enough to totally control each and every citizen.  No way to rebel or do anything but obey.  Suicide might not even be an option.  Robot police and robot military everywhere.  Seamless AI surveillance.  And, most cruel of all, a brain chip in every head, enforcing control from within. 

This level of puppetry will be possible within a few hundred years.  If malignant narcissistic dictators are still in charge at that time, as they are now--despotic patriarchs who crave total control--it will happen. 

An alternative form of hell

A totalitarian dungeon can, in a rare case, avoid nuclear annihilation, but the result is simply another kind of hell, the total mind-enslavement described above.  War is avoided if a single totalitarian system takes over the entire world--and somehow does this without getting in a nuclear war. 

Again, though, such an existence would be a living hell.  An example from sci-fi is The Borg from Star Trek.  The Borg assimilates whatever civilization and planet it conquers into an machine-flesh network controlled by a central AI.

 

Scenario 3:  Good wins

A third option is that humanity embraces ethics-as-technology.  This would allow us to act with honesty, to reject big-lie loyalty tests under emperors who ‘wear no clothes.’  We would implement scientific advances, not in order to oppress, but rather to create flourishing, mutually beneficial environments:  win/win situations where the beauty of the planet and humanity both thrive. 

This is path of the Good.  It works to eliminate the threat of nuclear annihilation.  It also preserves the humanity of future citizens, who ethically choose not to merge with machines.

Imagine AI and robots being supportive, angelic guides, rather than oppressive authoritarian jailers who monitor us for loyalty and subservience.  Imagine learning how to dance with your emotions and  passions, both light and dark, and channel that psychic energy to find your own unique, beautiful voice--to sublimate, to achieve catharsis, to find actualization. 

A lot of individual people have chosen this path already.  Therapeutic psychology has a better understanding than ever before on how to achieve such states.

Try to imagine our  innate “moral sentiments” cultivated and nurtured, not trampled down by the bottomless egos of saber-rattling, insecure, vindictive, trophy-hungry kings [5].

 

The danger is great, but progress has been made toward the Good

We are stuck in a primitive cultural loop that has been going on for thousands of years. I call this ongoing mental contamination/indoctrination the Ignorance Vortex.  Millennia of god kings have made Pacts with Ignorance.  What does this mean?  It means big-lie rhetoric.  Religious fanaticism.  Hate-stoked division and warfare.  These are the strategies that allow plutocracy, patriarchy and kleptocracy to domineer. 

We have been traumatized by this history.  We believe it is inevitable, since it has always been part of civilization.  Not a single person ever born in a ‘civilized’ state, including you and me, knows what it is like to be raised in a Good society.  We haven’t been given the chance.

That said, the Good is a possible future for us.  We have the brain- and the cultural-plasticity to advance our collective maturity.  And--importantly--we have started to do it.  A lot of progress toward the Good has been made in, say, the last 150 years. 

The greatest invention in the entire history of human civilization

I’ve proclaimed and argued, over and over, mostly to deaf ears, that the greatest invention since the Agricultural Revolution--going back around twelve thousand years--is the right for women to vote.  Universal suffrage.  This is huge.  Humanity not only conceptualized equality but made it real. 

This wonderful feat broke out of the original Big Lie, the grand deceit that programmed everyone not only to believe in the inferiority of women--physically, mentally and morally--but also to transmit the same mental programming to the next generation.  On and on…

Breaking out of the original Big Lie demonstrates that we can listen to reason and follow a path of ethics-as-technology.

For emphasis:  it is possible for the Good to be our path.  Gay marriage.  Made legal in the USA in 2015.  Civil Rights in the 1960’s.  LGBTQ+ rights have advanced, too.  I don’t deny that all these gains and more are in jeopardy.  Indeed, this essay hopes to bring out the peril we face.  And yet also, thereby, the exigent importance of standing up. 

Humanity has mostly embraced medicine as a technology.  This was a big change from faith-based healing.  This shows that we can embrace ethics-as-technology.  

I refer to ethics-as-technology as lightcraft (the working title of my book is Lightcraft).  Lightcraft uses science, psychology and critical thinking to advance the Good.  Darkcraft uses science, psychology and critical thinking to maximize the control of dictators.

Technologies of many kinds (psychological, computational, robotic... ) can make both lightcraft and darkcraft more capable of advancing their goal:   Good or Evil.

 

What is your choice?  How will you handle it?

 

Again, I know it is hard to face all this.  Who wants to confront decisions that affect the future of civilization as it grows, evolves, and even expands into space.  The very thought of it is intimidating and averse.

Yes, it can be agonizing.  But there is also liberation, ecstasy and love.  This is why I write poetry.  Poetry is my steam valve and expression.

What is yours?  How do you sustain yourself in following a path of Goodness? 

You can do this.

 

 

 

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

 

Footnotes

(1)  https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2025/10/essay-on-hate.html

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyborg (further reading:  Crittenden, Chris. 2002. "Self-Deselection: Technopsychotic Annihilation via Cyborg." Ethics & the Environment 7(2):127–152.

(3)  Some samples:

https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2025/05/draft-intro-of-my-book-better-angels.html

https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2025/09/essay-apotheosis-problem.html

(4)  https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2026/01/essay-most-important-law-in-physics.html

(5)  The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/67363

Poem: Collapse

 

Collapse

 

we held onto

the jabberwocky

in the center of it all

 

but the center

had its own desires,

didn’t want to be our holdfast,

 

wasn’t there to whirl

with a feeding-frenzy

of absolution.

 

there were all these silk ties

around powerful, smug necks,

the yank of compliance,

 

the intoxication of the doctrine

aided by the garrote of caution and

reason--

 

so that going down meant down is up,

our cherished motto,

the loyal, steady bray

 

until death decided for us

that none of our fear-throated policies

made any sense.

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

Poem: Late Walk

 

 

Late Walk

 

the leaves were not as

grey as my hair.  a month

for them was decades.

somehow it mattered

to my cobwebby thoughts,

that cities of leaves would fall,

garmented in rot, before

i got slabbed down.

 

perhaps.

 

but the change in my

moods appeared in the mottle under

my feet.  there was little

beyond the thin grasp of twigs

to restrain the moths

that wanted the inside of this heart,

to cloister there with their dusky

diamondback riddle of poisonous

unfinished things.

 

such doubts were

as effective as those aphids

which gnawed holes in

the long gone green of youth.

these fears were as tactile

as a dissolve of worms

to the contours of a robust, colorful

tapestry of life.

 

the roots of the trees passing by

did not assure a moor, such that at any time

i might let go, lost from history--

and then catapult-flutter off,

far on some cold gale of distress,

lashing out at nothing with

my last exclamations.

 

worse still to land somehow,

and look up, tired and broken,

tilted on a mattress of beetles,

just to breathe.

 

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

3/10/26  changed a word

Poem: Tongues

 

Tongues

 

the ocean, always a child,

as if it had been denied

because it is fed so much.

every mountain weeps

into its aquamarine arms,

feeding height to its depths

of silt and darkness.

 

maybe too much hope had been placed

in the thaumaturgy of rain.

the myth that it coated the skin of

the ocean’s grim water with fresh chances

which had spent previous lives 

catering to death.

 

the ocean simply

sticks out its many tongues, savoring,

always a child, as if the rain

were the gentle paw

of a grey-ribbed cat.

what could that cat know, after all,

of the regal yet defiled salt

of the wounded earth?

 

 

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

Poem: Catalysts

 

Catalysts

 

greed-stoked coal plants

piss endless monoxide

and poison the sky.

 

down below, we little humans

drudge and toil,

seeding the obliteration.

 

our gods have been revealed

as excuses to broker

our expansive urges,

 

while we offer our souls

to a new version of intelligence

beyond our kind.

 

surely our successors,

when they rise above Olympus

will see us as predictable,

 

as short-sighted, fated,

and mindless as bacteria--

easy to out-calculate.

 

 

 

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

Poem: January Storm

 

January Storm

 

birches bent of habit,

the prayerful turned mendicant,

rosaries of ice-willowy shine.

 

they count the beads

with fingertips hounded by grace,

flake by flake, so kind

to reave the birches’ bones.

 

let us all pray

for these broken nuns,

whose splintered wounds

 

seem the muzzles of dogs,

the mouths of jackasses,

the snouts of werewolves

laughing into the guffaw of a howl.

 

wherever they sway,

wind harpies them. 

no matter who they beg, or ridicule,

a swoop of zephyr rises up

to tug them down.

 

on and on,

beautiful yet wrecked,

savage from hope. 

only despair awaits

in tranquility.

 

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

Short Fiction: The Moral Status of Earth

 

Report:  The Moral Status of Earth

Human-civilization on Earth is trapped in a negative, self-sustaining, generation-to-generation indoctrination loop that originated when slavery and war were invented, going back thousands of years to the start of their agricultural revolution.  Despots considering themselves godkings took to the throne in ancient Sumer, and initiated an immature, cruel status quo of might-makes-right.  That mentality has locked down the minds of Earth humans ever since.  In the early 21st century, they still live under the thrall of ignorant, malignant godkings.  The human brain is an exquisite mind-jewel, what the Earthers inaccurately refer to as a quantum computer.  It possesses wondrous plasticity, which can blossom into advanced forms of cultural progress.   Such advance can lead to a synergistic eudaemonia, such as the majestic togetherness of nature and ecopolis that we cherish here on own lovely planet of Aea.  We Aeans have worked hard to 'know ourselves' in all ways, even the ways forbidden to the Earthers by their ignorance-based intergenerational dumb-down loop.  We see that Evil and Good are in competition for control of the universe, and we work hard to promote the Good.  The Earthers, however, have infected themselves with something like mental shackles.  The system absorbs each new generation--so many beautiful, susceptible children, billions of them--and cripples them with a disposition of ignorance and closed-mindedness.  The entrenched institutions, wrapped in sanctimonious, narcotic conceits of tradition and nostalgia, preach loyalty to patriarchs on thrones of all sizes, from government seats to heads of dinner tables.  Rulership-class males rise up because they are entitled and arrogant, committed to cultivating 'the masses' through fear, hate, big lies and the inevitability of war.  Sadly, Earth is headed in the direction of being an irretrievably Evil planet.  Nuclear holocaust, the benchmark of ultimate failure, is a palpable, increasing possibility.  When robotic enforcement and omni-surveillance arrive, I fear the candle of hope will be entirely snuffed out.  There is, though, still time for the Earthers to save themselves.  There is a strong counter-movement for truth, compassion and equality, backed by approximiately 60% of the population (disporportionately women, who are on average more emotionally competent than the males, for they have to be to get by).  That said, there is little time, and the tech level on Earth is increasing very fast.  As it stands, the new levels of power will be used to crush rather than liberate the human potential for veracity and virtue, which are the rootstalk of a dancing, soaring psyche.

Report to the Passionance Coven, Jessicadia
Green Spider Blue Butterfly, 13 orbits of sapphire 9
Galaras Sphynxwyld, dark loon poet 

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

Trying to recover from covid, feel sick and weak.  ... 

This blog post makes references to my epic novel, A Future of Angels, which involves two worlds, Aea and Earth (Terrar).  The novel discusses AI and ethics in detail, as well as giving a detailed look at what happens when you link human brains to computers (cell phones, etc.).  It is probably never going to get published, because I lack perseverance, even though a few agents were very encouraging.  Maybe I will self-publish it, but I don't have much money.  I might start putting it up on this blog, but very few people read this blog, as far as I can tell.  Most of my hits are from Vietnam, Hong Kong, Singapore and China.   I have switched to trying to publish my nonfiction book, Lightcraft:  ethics as technology.  I've only sent out three query letters, but one was very encouraging.  However, I am failing to send out more query letters because of (a) inveterate depression, (b) enjoyment from writing new things, (c) general distractions of all kinds, including work, (d) failure to be as obsessive, self-centered and insecure as you usually need to be, it seems, to spend all your time trying to get others' attention in the writing world, (e) I am generally a disagreeable, fickle person quite often disappointed with people, including myself

Poem: Archaeologist

 

Archaeologist

 

grottos within grottos

where neon enticed

like the filament of some underworld fish,

 

places where whirlpools in drowned eyes,

and games inside spun bottles of empty rum,

and sermons

 

of false, loving, doomed prose

could be crumpled and tossed into gutters

of dramatic complexity.

 

i asked myself,

 

how many midnights

spent scraping in sordid places like these,

down on my cuffs,

investigating the ancient shit of human sin,

would it take

 

to earn a PhD in ‘give me another try’?

 

there were so many scraps to scape,

and ill-treated hearts vomiting more

to feed the slime.  there were

 

gutter people whose only purpose

was to hoard filth in the wrinkles of their

lack of expressions, which were, themselves,

 

nothing but tossed wrappers of long-consumed hopes,

wrappers that, if you were an ant,

would crack your thorax when you tried

 

to get to the last bit of juice deep inside them.

 

there was a time when i sat in semi-darkness,

playing expert to such skewed pieces

of the past-present-now.

 

yes, it felt hasty, perverse, anonymous.

but i was obsessed then, myself,

with studying what others had become addicted to

to avoid.

 

 

 

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

1/23/26  mods all day on post

Poem: Wheatfield Under Clouds

 

Wheatfield Under Clouds

 

we glanced at the lapis of

the lazuli while the clouds basked

plump and idle above the swerving

walls of our flaxen chains.

 

not even the precious blue

could outframe so much hubris,

those polyamorous medusae as they floated lazy,

seductive and narcotic above our sweat.

 

they coaxed our feverish moods.

made love to us like ghosts,

admiring the flex of our torsos

while we coiled and swept,

only to soon lose touch.

 

day after day, parade after parade of

simulated worship rose above our scythes.

those menagerie-esque choirs, so innocent,

swilled to swell and storm until

sooner or later we were forced to shoulder

the heave.

 

how careless they were after the climax,

drifting to nestle

into the honey-orange-cherry heaven

of distant sundown.

 

we labored still at night

to dwell and dream of those hedonistic floats.

we played to their seraphim,

prettified the nightmare

 

when

 

in the foreshadows before dawn,

our flesh wore the same shadowy curves

as their mathless checkerboard.

 

always came noon,

atop those lotus horses, which somehow

rode far above the saddle of our pliant rut.

and the drug of our dismal rapture, once more,

offered hard-bitten pectoral breaths

to the galloping frenzy

of their wind-torn, joyless stride.

 

 

 

 

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

1/21 ...more mods last stanza... general mods later

1/20/26 mods all day

Poem: Prince

 

Prince

 

desire devolves

into the worms it seeks to avoid.

thorns outlive the kick of the wine,

the decay of the blush.

 

a sharp needle of rue

from even the smallest ghost

can possess such audacity;

and the rage takes on the full-fledged iron

of the maurader’s lance,

 

stabbing then

 

down and down,

through layers of masquerades,

and the contrivances of calm

that gird various throne rooms.

 

down and down,

into that most private and unwanted,

regret-rich and volatile,

pool.

 

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