Regarding The Poems

 

Thank you for reading the poems!

The poems are often not in the best of shape when I post them.  They go up because they get more editing that way.

Many of the ones I put up recently have been edited.

An example is “Man Watches January.”  Originally, it had two uses of the word “single”:

 

and yet nothing is gone.

not a single sin is dead.

 

a single white rabbit

snowshoes over the tombs.

 

That was totally inadvertent.  This double-use created an unwanted overlap, so I changed it:

 

and yet nothing is gone.

not a single sin is dead.

 

an old white rabbit

snowshoes over the tombs.

 

 (As an aside, it was hard, I found, to describe myself as “old”).

 When someone reads a less recent poem on OWL, I can sometimes see the history.  I then go back and check the poem.  Of course, it's too late for whoever read it, if I make a change, which I often do.

 Some poems will never be ‘good’, due to my lack of ability.

 I am glad, though, that some readers find a bit of impact.

 

Fly Well In The Dark,

 

 OWL

owlwholaughs@gmail.com

(unfortunately I cannot respond to anonymous email)

Poem: Stone On Shore

 

Stone On Shore

 

glintless and grey,

tide-lathered,

eggish and monochrome,

 

here it is,

 

the Earth without azure,

not even laurels

of glitzy cloud-dull quartz.

 

just one of a hapless many,

a tumble of multiple planets,

brooded by dutiful surf--

 

massages of inexorable water,

patient, numb and slow.

 

we all guess what will hatch

from this saturnine nest,

 

nestled in a ceaseless kinship

of weltering dunes.

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

 

Ethics Is A Technology: the USA is leaning in the wrong direction

 

Ethics is a Technology.  The US is going in the wrong direction.

 

One thing I’ve learned, teaching college for decades, is that ethics is a technology.  The tools that humanity employs to make moral decisions have advanced to become more fair and equal.  The Golden Rule--do to others as you would them to you--is such an advance.  So are human rights, which are an attempt to elaborate the Golden Rule.

 

Ethics tech needs to advance with other sorts of tech, otherwise a society can be in a lot of trouble.  Right now, nuclear warheads are poised to wipe out civilization.  What keeps this from happening?  Self-preservation, sure; but also a sense that this would be evil.  An evolved sense of decency helps prevent the worst.  Without it, the risk goes up.

 

Another example is hunting rifles.  Maine hunters have a superb code of ethics that promotes the responsible and proper use of these powerful high-tech guns.  What would happen if that code deteriorated?

 

In the US, right now, our ethics tech is in danger of sliding backwards.  The political climate makes this obvious.  Whichever side of the political divide you are on, there’s a good chance that you think the other side is attempting to overthrow democracy in ways that are treasonous and despicable.   Readers of this article will disagree on which side is guilty.  However, given the mutual allegations, it is likely that one side is trying to tear down our constitutional republic. 

 

Even as our ethics tech level is in danger, perhaps of decline into despotism, our weapons tech is on the rise.  Examples of advancing weapons tech are designer-engineered viruses, and drones that kill with stealth.  There are also psychological weapons.  These include AI surveillance and propaganda networks.  Better understanding of the human brain can bring more happiness to all, but it can also be used to cement domination by a few at the top.

 

A common saying, with roots in the Bible is, With great power comes great responsibility.  The concept of responsibility is part of ethics tech.  And yet our ability to act responsibly, as a country, is under threat by those who care more about seizing total power.

 

The good news is that big advances in ethics tech have taken place in just the last few hundred years.  It seems normal to us that women have the right to vote.  That wasn’t the case about a hundred years ago.  A most recent advance was the legalization of gay marriage, something that seemed impossible just a generation ago. 

 

Ethics tech is based on developing reasonable moral standards, drawing from axioms like equality.  Human beings are, however, as irrational as we are rational, which is all the more reason why we need virtue--that part of ethics focused on mental health and harmony--as a guide. 

 

Because ethics is a technology, it is possible for humanity to reach a brighter world than we’ve ever known.  But the road is fraught.  The 20th century saw two world wars that dethroned countries.  There were only two atomic bombs to drop then.  The situation is different now.  We must advance our ethics tech to match our weapons tech.  The US is currently leaning in the wrong direction.

===========

Poem: Watching Screens

 

Watching Screens

 

bouncy eyes become balls of bread in circuses,

so many twin black wide holes

to wolf down the rhubarb sugar mocha supple pink wax liquid flesh,

a seductive glisten on the new cars, fine clothes, plush beds,

and worms in tequila.

days become years of the parade of bees-turned-to-husks,

wasp nests in poked honeycombs, scandalous vogues, fashions,

oh so many lame legions of peccadillos,

hoarded in subterranean mainframe-spleens.

everyone knows it--everyone saw--

somewhere in the infinite archive

of your own exposed private pulse of aroused veins and hips,

now a scorecard on mockery’s dartboard.

 

permanent as a mausoleum.

 

more and more and more, yes, more screens,

more and more screens,

screens more and more human than the people watching the screens,

billions of eyeballs that flirt along,

swallowing to wallow and worship

the Airwave Octopus of the Hidden Cruel.

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

The first line is a nod to "bread and circuses," an allusion in Juvenal's Satire X.

Poem: Man Watches January

 

Man Watches January

 

a stumble of thoughts

trek through forgotten snow.

 

if my heart warmed,

would the grief thaw off my face?

 

so many lessons unlearned, frozen here,

scars from harsh failures.

 

winter simply buries them,

pure in its cleansing chisel.

 

and yet it's all here, down below,

not a single sin is dead.

 

an old white rabbit

snowshoes over the tombs.

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

11/30/23 ... lots of mods 

Poem: Coastal Trail

 

Coastal Trail

 

cobble-shore frost nips me, forty miles an hour,

awkward stupid animal

to slip on icy boulders,

and squelch in smoky seawater--

 

only a hundred sperm-whale lengths to go.

 

waves crash on the curse of crags

and ratchet up the odds of death;

they turn ocean spray into Lot’s wife,

a disassemble of salt and ghost.

 

over and over, this nameless wife,

she vaporizes, leaps, vaporizes, leaps…

 

i pretend i am more special than she, 

because i have a name,

even though my name means little,

for it will die with me--

 

and i try to find 

in a donnybrook of hail

the strings of a parachute, 

for no angel will protect me

if i fall off a cliff.

 

or maybe one will.  it must be.

so it must.

thousands of poems to write

before i go.

 

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

7/19/23 ... considerable flow and quality edits

https://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/sea+smoke

Poem: Santa Susana Foothills

 

Santa Susana Foothills

 

remnants of spiderwebs in cracks of sandstone;

remnants of giants that gnash dreaming teeth,

fractured now, jawlines that scream of ignored skulls

till a valley brims with their dusty breath,

till a vulture droops through their sockets and cavities,

till the spiders weave again.

 

deadly nightshade swallows the sun

with the instinct-wrath of a viper on a mouse.

wind shrieks through a pelvis-shaped canyon,

coyotes raise their eldritch piccolos,

bats paroxysm over the---charred, charred, charred,

brushless ashen faces of burnt slopes.

 

dawn swarms boulders with spray-paint pentacles

near sage that cat-licks a flipped car,

maybe Charles Manson’s rusty chassis,

maybe his enslaved killer cultists,

or maybe just another big bust coffin crash

from a failed, B-grade movie set.

 

just another day, gnashed by sandstone and wind,

dust and rust settling into cracks,

coyotes, vipers, bats, mice mice mice, char char char

wrinkled, splintered faces, herbs as cruel as cats as kind as cats

amorous murderers

till the spiders weave again.

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

Poem: Restless

 

Restless

 

blush of sapphire and gold,

the ocean wallows.

its sumptuous pillows

no human ever slept.

 

it devours beauty,

amorphous and nude.

long before gods, it sequestered death,

and made itself the door.

 

petals of foam trellis its wine,

bristling to wane.

restless petals, needy yet doomed--

ceaseless pulse in white-green gardens,

wet flames, arch-and-sink of lusts,

such swollen aches

melting on the heave of pendulums.

 

the ocean, its great Gaze,

amasses the fluid lenses

it has swallowed and shaped,

and waits, as shipwrecked as a fiancée

who stares up at the deeps of the universe

for a trace of a fiery kiss.

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

Poem: Hungry Moon

 

Hungry Moon

 

to the moon,

a bat is nothing but a cursed fly,

a shriveled cherub,

mene mene scrawled in tenebrous chaos.

 

songbirds are lost, long gone flirts,

whose tasty arpeggios

titillated every pore

on the body of sound.

 

every sunset, it's the same,

the same cheshire cat grin, 

a fiery languor on the horzon, 

shooing all feathery morsels.

owls and loons are too lean and haunted.

even the cryful crickets,

more boney than plump,

yearn for a chirr where the dancers

can see each other twirl.

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

10/31/23  ... Lots of mods... still not much confidence.

Poem: The Ancients

 

The Ancients

 

agile in the dust,

uncrushable flounders,

they fawn to butterfly-kiss our toes.

 

such stricken veterans of misdeed.

anachronous anchors.

zealous mental shackles.

 

they apologize, yet whiny,

hurling both jibes and pleas,

barbed as they barb us with not-so-gone sin:

 

“we suffer, we suffer,

and so should you, and you will--and you have--

because we were so damn cruel.”

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

Poem: Upset

 

Upset

 

wind herded fat clouds,

but the stars bit their white virtue away.

was that the prize for my patience,

these glinting caltrops

that wouldn’t let anything pass?

 

could a way out of my pain

lounge behind the stars?

i would never know.

perhaps because the clouds regrouped

to close like a jawbone over Cygnus.

but it was more than that...

i thought about the old myths of love,

how unsuitable they were for the stars.

how deranged we were, us humans,

to co-opt the sidereal armature

as a drape for our fancy delusions.

 

no wonder

the constellations tasted so cold.

it was hard to listen

to a faux strung-out Olympus. 

and so i turned away,

not wanting to be lessoned

by a projection of my own hopeful fears,

something that pretended to perch--

 

up there, somewhere …

 

if the stars hid a secret

they wouldn’t reveal that gift.

why?  because too many times

they’d seen us revel in crimson.

seen us guzzle down what we can get,

turn wine into greed into hate.

 

no.

 

the stars are not so foolish as us.

They glare, little auras bristling,

and will not be our guardians.

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