Poem: Dogpaddlers

 

 

Dogpaddlers

 

dogpaddlers in a sea of cellphones,

dollar bills eager as mosquitoes,

what a vulnerable underbelly,

what braggart confidence:

 

to chain the short term gain

to the long term zero

with the interest rate of our souls.

 

the illusion gets pushed so fast

over an abyss of compulsion,

below the brainstorm of competence--

 

a fatalism so toothy, 

so cruel and voracious,

it lurks far too inconceivable

under the masquerade of the hi. 

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

9/26 ... more modes, trying to find some music and depth

8/26 mods

2/19/26 more mods... 

4/9 ... more mods... 

1/29/24 mods

10/13 ... big changes to last stanza... "dogpaddlers" replaces "dogpaddling"

Two wrongs will make things far worse (Israel-Hamas commentary)

What Hamas did was wicked, evil, atrocious.  There's no justification.   That said, a few days into this war, 300,000 Palestinians are homeless in the Gaza Strip, due to bombing, and the IDF hasn't even sent in its massive ground force yet.  

We will now see if Israel acts as a democracy or a dictatorship under the demagogue Netanyahu.  A democracy respects human rights.  A dictatorship will seek revenge with the unconscionable wrath of a vengeful bully, a racist one, who has an opening to kill and torment.

If the latter happens, the conflict could spread to other countries who are enraged by Israel's actions, which in turn could pull in the US.  And so on.  

In this day and age, with weapons of ultimate killing and chaos ready to launch in minutes, the lords of hate--the demagogues, the fascist populists--could destroy us us all.

Respect for human rights, which is based on a fundamental agape or universal compassion, must be our way forward.  We have to evolve beyond the rulership of saber-rattling, ego-driven warlords.

It's possible we can overcome the dark allure of demagogues.  We need to try our best, for the future of humanity.  

OWL

Poem: Approach of Ice

 

Approach of Ice

 

a moldering afternoon.

birches feign as aortas

pale in formaldehyde.

 

we witness, wander, wonder

at the plateaus of the torn,

those syrup-like salads of once-whisked leaves,

 

and we ask if we should be thankful

to stand above the rot and fossil

of dim spring and gone summer

 

to consider those below the surface of the earth,

the rungs climbed by yesterday’s hands,

never to escape a chill morgue,

 

never to flee a postmortem of sharp winds

and their prognosis of so many of husks

of spent joy.

 

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

10/10 ... "feign as" replaces "pretend they are" 

Regarding the Poems

 

My poems have often focused on conformity and the horrors behind the mask.  Recently, they have been especially dark.  Before saying more on this, I want to point out that quite a few of my poems rhapsodize on the beauty and miracle of existence.  My nature poems often do this, and also pieces like “Broom” or poems that fascinate on motion, such as the play of wind or water.  But there is another dimension to human existence and that is the ethical. 

Could it revolve around a simple yet painful premise: that to speak the truth is to suffer?  For most all of human civilization, including today, this has been the case.  Oppressed groups have been forced--through social norms backed by sheer threat of violence--to go along with systems that keep them down.  Consider the history of women.  When President Biden pulled our troops out of Afghanistan, he effectively condemned the women and girls there to a modern day slavery that hails back to a time, not so long ago, when that was the global norm.  Civilization is perhaps ten thousand years old and for most of it, women and other dominated peoples and groups have had to shut up and agree to their inferior roles.  

This has been the way of things.  To speak the truth is to suffer.  Donald Trump attempts to impose the Big Lie as a loyalty test for membership in his fascist, fanatic hierarchy, where physical strength and threat, not reason or virtue, determines the way of things.  Vladimir Putin invades Ukraine, justifying it with a web of lies while committing war crimes.  We see this pattern in China, or wherever one person, almost always a male, attains singular control of a whole country, not because he is wisest, but because he has cultivated his nationalist cult of followers who will physical and mentally punish anyone who speaks up.   

The human body can feel and sense wondrous things to achieve great bliss.  But it can suffer proportionately.  Such is the ‘wonderful’ existence we are all born into.  Such is the difficulty of the choice to speak the truth. 

It is a hard, impossible, unfair choice.  Maybe this is why existentialists say life is absurd. Do you risk giving up the simple yet magnificent pleasures, miracles and marvels of basic existence, fed to us by our senses and thoughts--to do something so bold as to speak the truth?

Perhaps it feels wonderful to embrace and speak the truth.  I know, in my case, it has been.  It is a priceless state of being.  Those who do not gain it, which they could simply by opening their mouths, lose a gift so beautiful in its own unique way.  To be able to speak the truth in a society of lies, this is the essence of a virtuous freedom. 

It could be said of this universe, this world, that it is not a Good place, nor is it an Evil place.  But we humans, through our collective choices, can steer it either way.  How much will you be part of steering toward the Good?  Or toward the Evil?    

Perhaps this is where I am at:

Michel de Montaigne - "I speak the truth not so much as I want, but as much as I dare."

We all have to choose.  If our head isn’t already plunged deep in the sand, which is capitulation to ignorance and darkness, the choice already made, we can see that there is a battle between fascism and democracy taking place.  Democracy is human rights and the Golden Rule.  Democracy brought advances in the USA for women, Black people and LGBTQ.  We had a Black President.  We currently have a Black female Vice President. 

What is fascism?  Fascism is tyranny under the disordered mind of a malignant narcissist.  In the USA, fascism will be patriarchal, heteronormative, and White supremacist.  It will be expecially virulent given that the South, which was defeated in the Civil War that it fought to keep its slaves, has never lost its vast racism and never lost a root of hatred for its conqueror:  the United States.

Again, the war between Israel and Hamas, even at this early stage, can be linked to the chaos and racism stoked in Israel by its hard right-wing leader Netanyahu.  He is a typical demagogue who sows hate and fear to advance his own might and form a zealous cult. 

So, yes, my poems are dark.  Why?  Because fascism could soon take over the world.  Trump in America.  Putin in Russia.  Xi in China.  Modi in India.  And so on.  If this happens, it will be the same old warlord-ism, going back to the realm of ancient Sumer.  The prime example today is North Korea.  the people worship Kim Jong Un as a god. If they dare speak the truth, their whole family could be incarcerated in a ‘re-education’ camp.

War is Peace.  Freedom is Slavery.  Ignorance is Truth.  George Orwell’s book 1984 got it right.  It can get to the point where the control of the dictator is so great that any lack of conformity--or simply perceived lack--can get anyone tortured.  Of course, at that point, torture could be inflicted for any arbitrary issue, say for simply being Black.

Our current weapons are too mighty for us to survive World War Three.  That is where warlord-ism will take us, as it always has, into war.   This is a battle between Good and Evil.  What's at stake is civilization.  Let’s not forget that Hitler was a fascist, and that Trump is now parroting Hitler’s words, saying that immigrants “are poisoning the blood of our country.” 

To speak the truth is to suffer.  It has always been this way.  And our bodies and minds can suffer greatly.  But if we don’t speak up, we go down.  This is the horrible conundrum.  This is the awful, unfair, impossible task before each of us. 

At some point we all have to choose to bow down--to accept the breaking of our will, heart and soul--or instead we choose a higher love, an agape.  The Golden Rule and human rights are, ultimately, expressions of a fundamental compassion.

Yes, I excoriate conformity in my poems, the kind of conformity that leads deeper and deeper into the belittlement of the human spirit.  Conformity out of fear is the worship of the bully.  In these dark times, this is especially the case.

Should you choose death over conformity to fascism?  What about me, would I choose death?  I don’t know.  I am terrified of death or pain.  And that terror will be used by a police state to break me.  I am far from perfect.  I see too much and know too little.  I can hope that I would die choosing the Good.  If it comes to that, I pray I will choose the Good, and not keep my head down.

But, right now, it hasn’t come to that.  Right now, we still have some freedom of speech in the USA.  We can save democracy for our republic, and carry it forward into the future as the flag of human progress. It's quite possible.  

But if we don’t stand up, the Trump-types will wreak horror and ignorance on the world.  Then they will destroy it. 

 ===============================

Poem: Beneath

 

Beneath

 

human faces share ancestry

with imps that feast on tepid meat,

 

and what goes on beneath 

is often rotten:

 

dull appraisals, meek thoughts,

festering inside a cranium

to spark then fall moribund.

we are tureens full of nothingness

who slosh on stilt legs zombie-ish.

 

 and so our cheeks  ...  so fidgety

stretch as unhappy as  

as sun-bathed nightcrawlers

which swivel on racks of staggering bone.

 

how much different, in our squirm,

 really

than the obligatory task 

of maggots?

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

11/11/25 .. trying 

9/21/25 .. exceedingly awful poem

1/29/24 .... mods

10/12 ... fixed grammar error

Terrible time for our country, add my own heath woes, and now job troubles.   It's a cruel planet most of the time for most people.  I suppose it's possible to be lucky, but only if you close your mind to what's beneath.  Keep in mind, we are probably about to doom the whole planet to nuclear war, which maims all animals and ecosystems... and we'll probably survive, in a new Stone Age, and do it all again, once we reach the nuclear stage a second time... on and on... 

Op-Ed: Good and Evil are Measurable in Politics

Ethics is a technology.  Good and evil are measurable in politics.

 

In our era of exponential tech growth, metamorphoses emerge to alter the globe.  In my sixty years, this has happened at least several times.  The acceleration not only jars us, but unifies and magnifies social movements.  Humans have conceived a conflict of good and evil since ancient days, and so maybe my repetition of the theme is prosaic; and yet we have nuclear weapons, genetic engineering, and a wired wink-fast oneness of interconnectivity, susceptible to hacking and, just as important, a highly targeted marketing strategy or ‘psy ops,’ which exploits fear in the human brain.  If this weren’t enough, the threat of AI overreach looms over it all like an umbrella.  Perhaps we can define good or evil more clearly than ever before, simply by considering our impact and effects:  whether we devastate and destroy or instead advance and dignify humanity and our planet.

 

More than ever, our future is ours to craft.  It  comes down to how we manage our godlike abilities.  A good management style, one that brings good effects, is adaptive, rational, science- and psychology-inclusive, and centers on flourishing of both human and environment.  Given our rising tech powers and related knowledge of brain and ecosystem, the result could be a relative utopia, a world where humans live in relative security and edification. 

 

An evil management style fosters effects much like what we are seeing now:  wanton disruption of global pillars of environmental stability, such as weather patterns and ocean currents, as well as toxicity, both physical and mental, and wanton potential for extinction of species, including our own.  Such effects are brought about by a management style that is irrational and nonadaptive; a style that is myopic and disordered, driven by insecure ego; one that fosters ‘lemming effects’ whipped along by obsessive fear and greed. 

 

I have taught and studied ethics for decades.  If I had to crystallize what I’ve learned into a single phrase, it would be:  ‘ethics is a technology.’  As a set of ideological tools for managing human well-being and the world, ethics can evolve and advance.  Good effects increase as we rely on science, humanities and critical thinking, as opposed to fixated preconception.  Humans rights are a reasonable elaboration on the venerable Golden Rule.  And our understanding of human rights has evolved and improved in the last few hundred years.

 

The bottom line is that we need to advance our ethics tech in order to keep up with our weapons, AI, genetic, and other tech.  Otherwise we are like children wielding planet-sized machine guns.  Right now, there are two main options for governmental management on the geopolitical stage.  Democracy and fascism.  Fascism, as Madeline Albright described, is a way to gain and maintain power through a charismatic, demagogic dictator.  In terms of ethics tech, it is primitive and pathetic.  The reason is that such dictators fit a pattern of malignant narcissism.  They lack a conscience, are reckless, ‘always right’, thrasymachian, and generally irrational and nonadaptive - traits that fit the evil management style described above.

 

Democracy, flawed though it is, is our only path to advance our ethics tech.  And, yes, it is possible.  In fact, we have already advanced greatly since the time of ‘the divine right of kings.’  Women can vote in the USA.  This is an enormous change across the entire history of civilization.  Our collective consciousness, over recent generations, has enshrined and advanced reason-based standards, while challenging prejudice.  The progress of science and ethics go hand-in-hand.  The Human Genome Project supports the fundamental ideal of equality.

 

If we don’t advance our ethics tech, we will likely perish as a civilization.  Our increasing ability to shape the world, our minds, and our genes needs virtuous direction.  Soon after WWII, Omar Bradley said, “The world has achieved brilliance without conscience … We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.” Short-sightedness will destroy us.  Everything beautiful about life is in our hands to either nurture or desecrate.  This is a critical juncture.  It is time that we began to learn more about peace and living than we know about killing and dominating through fear and force.

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

This op-ed was rejected by the Washington Post.  I didn't bother with the local paper, which leans toward Trumpism.

I would like to write a book someday on how ethics, as a meta-religious force based in a consonance of reason and spirituality, can approach an ideal of 'the Good'.   However, that is likely to be quite a while from now, as I am working on a second novel.  It may never happen.  But the core ideas are in this essay and others I've written on this blog.

Poem: Seeking the Good

 

Seeking the Good

 

what if there isn’t anything beyond,

only the end and the beginning of this purgatory?

 

the tests go on and on,

hoops for the heart, no ultimate finish line,

always the latest monsters,

visionaries, prophets,

 

caught in some race.

 

you try to shoulder the load,

walking on steppingstones of hidden levers,

trying not to lose balance,

or fall into cycles so addictive you bleed.

 

maybe there never was any reward,

no god who anoints victory,

heaven itself a crumbling staircase,

which exists only for a desperate climb.

 

no reason, no purpose,

everything stripped away, even hope.

only then, even if you are doomed,

can you challenge the darkness,

 

make your statement.

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

1/29/24 ... mods ... 

Inspired by the words of Elie Wiesel:

 

Behind me, I heard the same man asking:

“Where is God now?”

And I heard a voice within me answer him:

“Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows. . . .”

 

Poem: Night Valley

 

Night Valley

 

in these sunken switchbacks,

a sandsoil of ghostflesh,

graveyard of prolific roots,

a corpse sheds rigor mortis

more easily than it seeks justice;

and my headlamp stutters,

much smaller than the obscurant stars,

the warmth of its meek bulb

so much less than their leastest heat.

i tilt beneath a horned moon,

ghost of an auroch,

who lists where her last flesh

tangled in wolves of clouds--

vultured now by oak branches,

groped.

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

4/6/ 24 ... more edits

1/29/24

1/4/24 ... lots of mods for streamlining, general improvement in the magic

10/5 ... added a verb for clarity ... added a stanza break

abused as a child

Poem: Closed

 

Closed

 

drainpipe-ears pour a runoff of words

down the sides of a shaking head,

until feet just walk off.

folded arms construct an impassable wall. 

the slightest shrug of a bulwark of shoulder 

shoos an opportunity to sing.

a twitch of cheek taunts flutters of hope.

maybe there is some color underneath, 

some vim or jest or verve? ... ... 

...

stronger than logic, small as a nerve cell, 

bricks of gray architecture

imprison the ability to see.

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

10/26 changed a few words

10/3/25 eds

2/25/25 ... eds

Poem: Balance

 

Balance

 

to lie in the half-damp grass

was to both die and resurrect;

to feel the lissome blades 

as they burst into a pyre of stars.

 

i would go up into heaven

and my dreams could stay forever;

and yet time always latched on again, 

furious as a circle of moths.

 

choirs of crickets cowled my nights,

rhythmic of ecstasy;

but the world was changing,

coin by coin, wire by wire.

 

the vision came to me,

and i knew i had to go back, into the city,

and thereby witness as a fool,

those who would not care.

 

it would take a tragic yet open heart, 

to dwell among so much suffering:

the blind, the sacrificed, the sadists,

and somehow manage to balance.

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

7/26/25 ... mods

9/24 ... quite a few mods