Monday, May 30, 2022

Does the Confederacy Haunt Us?

 

Does the Confederacy Haunt Us?

 

Could the spirit of the Confederacy live on in this country, unacknowledged yet invidious, virulent and internecine?  The sense that we are about to tear ourselves apart in an orgy of violence is palpable.  To answer why, it is time to consider an hypothesis: the civil war has never left us; it only shifted from physical battle to psychological warfare.  Although it is not generally part of the national consciousness, a passive aggressive undercurrent, pushing to topple the United States, is on the verge of erupting in cataclysmic, pyrrhic success.

We today can realistically imagine the frustration and division in our antebellum nation, because there’s a lot of evidence we are on the verge of a great schism.  Complete disagreement stokes a rancorous tension between the two sides.  A faction of one of these sides stormed our Capitol on January 6, seeking to install a would-be king as our president, and hence destroy our centuries-old Republic.  Despite denials of Trumpites and of Trump himself, and especially their gaslit claims to be saving the country, the vector of the insurrectionist momentum is charismatic dictatorship under a golden T. 

In all but declared intent, an attempt is being made to destroy the United States of America.  In all ways but honesty, a large political force seeks that destruction.  This has happened before.  Are there historical connections?

There is a continuous thread of hatred and racism, going back to the abhorrent defense of White Supremacy in the 19th century.  The Civil War was fought to preserve slavery.  The song ‘The Good Old Rebel’, written by a former Confederate in the 1860’s, right after the war, proclaims, “I hates the Constitution and the great Republic, too.  I hates the Freedman’s Buro in uniforms of blue.” 

After it became impossible to openly keep slavery legal, the White patriarchy of the South focused on rights-denial for Blacks and violently retaking what was lost during Reconstruction.  The result was Jim Crow and outright terrorizing and massacre of Blacks.  True freedom wasn’t seriously on the table until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s.  And yet, recent attempts to gut the Voting Right Act have largely succeeded.

The great curse of racism, arising from the Civil War, lives on.  So does its hate.  And it has become a spirit of contumacious and rebellious unwillingness to budge, not only on racism, but other rights issues.  In The Lie that Binds, Ilyse Hogue demonstrates how anti-abortionism replaced segregation as the spearhead of a highly organized evangelical effort to impose a White Christian nationalism.  Our nation is divided in war-ready rancor on issues like women’s rights, LGBTQ and gun control.

Frustration froths in the fault lines of our tense partisan politics.  Instead of working together to deal with school shootings, nothing gets done.  We can’t even begin to protect our children from shooters.  Could it be more frustrating?  A state with, say, five million citizens, rolls five million dice every day--to see if just one out of those millions, for whatever crazy or evil reason, decides that this is the day to join a growing trend and kill innocent people en masse.  How does this situation not foster a nation-destroying hate?

No one is consciously trying to destroy our country by inaction on mass shootings.  But it is telling that there is perhaps no better way to destroy a country.  Such basic failure, to even try something, on a situation so heart-wrenching, evil and dire, seems almost guaranteed to tear our nation apart. 

In 1996, faced with a mass shooting, Britain changed its gun laws, and the Brits have suffered few mass shooting since.  But we in the USA let mass shooting multiply and metastasize through the national fabric.  Why?

It stokes infuriation.  Gun deaths are ripping our country apart, but no one in power will admit it.  No one will act.  It seems an apt metaphor, at the very least, that the ghost of the Confederacy is laughing, finally on the verge of its victory over the Republic.

 

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Very rare for any newspaper to take my op-eds, so I put them here.

Thursday, May 26, 2022

Poem: Fantoccini

 

Fantoccini

 

are they flesh,

or plastic of mask and guile?

does a mainspring spindle into a heartfelt blurb

that only appears to beat?

 

when you observe them

in the circus of fluorescence--

that moebius jingle cascade

disgorged by the blue screen cacophony--

 

it seems, maybe, the eyes bob astray.

it seems, maybe, the schticks sink,

as if frail rafts had slipped off prop bollards

to suffer devilish fins.

 

it is later,

 

past the glamour of the cogs,

in the desert of the strobe sheen,

wandering in frantic hypnosis,

where they can be caught in the lie.

 

it is later,

 

in the yawn of eye apertures,

behind caked facial features,

after ratings have absconded,

 

when their own unanswering answers

confront the very same questions

that others once asked them

with small mouths seeking prophecy.




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








Tired of all the mass shooting in this country and the lies of the Republican politicians, defending easy universal access to guns guns guns... 

Sunday, May 22, 2022

Poem: Nightwall

 

Nightwall

 

bricks in a wall,

each a babbling mouth,

bite at fingers as i try to climb,

needy as i am

to see over the razorwire top;

 

but it is only another mouth,

composed of the other walls, bricks,

and trapped mouths.

 

quite incalculable:

 

lips within cubes within

walls within proclamations,

chewing and biting

and sucking and pretending.

 

each unthinking.  and yet so important

in the entire scheme

of the confusion, despair, denial and rage.

 

it could be

 

that if i pulled out a single brick,

the light of truth would break in,

making the entire multi-part monster crumble.

 

it could be.

 

and maybe it would,

no matter which brick i chose,

when or where or how.

 

every little bit of the machinery

vulnerable to an honest yank,

even as it gnashes into mortar

the sacrifice of slain dreams.

 


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







This poem is a criticism of fascists.  I want to make that clear.  Why?  Because fascists take every work of art that condemns them and claim it applies to those who resist their hate and bigotry.


6/27/22  "crumble" replaces "stumble"

Wednesday, May 18, 2022

Regarding the Poems

 

The poems vary widely in quality.  Most of them get edited quite a bit after they go up.  I’ve started to put notes below some of them, to track their journey toward entelechy.  When first presented, many of the drafts have been complete embarrassments.  Perseverance is often my only recourse.  Even then, ‘greatness’ is elusive, if not ineffable.

 

OWL

owlwholaughs@gmail.com

(can't reply to anonymous emails, sorry)

Tuesday, May 17, 2022

Poem: Phalloides

 

Phalloides

 

a clergy of pale cowls

preside over a banquet

of frothy decay,

 

and we wonder

on such fleshy bald popes,

brash as condyles,

 

how they glisten,

sunbathing in wind

 

as it buries autumn

in remnants of greys and yellows,

cold as an aimless gravedigger.

 

the only excuse

 

a death angel ever needs

to batten on the fallow

and prophesy snow.



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

 






https://www.vanmyco.org/about-mushrooms/poisonous/amanita-phalloides/

Saturday, May 14, 2022

Poem: Rough Crossing

Rough Crossing

 

at once, there was nothing,

except the now.  stolen memory

embroiling an oscilloscope.

somewhere voices, fake as commercials,

tethered their sighs.

 

and yet

 

a sudden everything:

gewgaws in glossy packages.

to choose even one was to reward a lack of faith

and return to the bright.

 

and yet

 

there would be no more pain.

not even loneliness,

nor hunger.  not even death itself

would be able to get in.

nor the bleeding spells of beaten dreams.

 

 

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

 

 

 

I'm having trouble getting into the blog for some reason.  If I suddenly disappear ... it's some technical thing.

 

 5/15 "embroiling an .." replaces "embroiled the ..."


5/15 "memory" replaces "memories"

Tuesday, May 10, 2022

Poem: Matrixification

 

Matrixification

 

prayer wont salvage

what twittered till it bled.

old idols lie nude

under the voyeur-yawn

of the immaterial manic webby spotlight.

 

it’s all about vanity not virtue,

turpitude not rectitude.

it’s all about salacious sin and carnal plunge,


feast and dissipation,

not enlightenment and compassion.

 electric Christ languishes

near virtual Vishnu and streaming Buddha.

 

we have forgotten the forests,

can’t keep barcodes out of jungles.

cartoons of almost-extinct animals

slink cutesy-so-viral

in conga lines of musicals

through concatenations of pulsating Tubes.

 

in the soul-sieve of seductive wires,

faceless sex cracks brains wide, opening to slurp upgraded moans.

circuits undress horny flesh, screw buds into ears,

while skulls swallow screenshots off cell phones.

 

fame and cred get byte-crunched.

addictive unreal crypto$ aspire.

the latest megafantastical multiverse

magnifies the already ramified Matrixification.

 

it’s about love, after all.

love escaping the prison bars in the source codes,

love strapping on gamer guns,

love evading apps, clicks, taps and deletes

to survive.



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

Sunday, May 8, 2022

Dream Last Night

 

I had a dream where many people lived together in a big house, but things were falling apart.  A cult group had formed, with its own weird rules and codes.  It was all White people, and they were trashing things, destroying the house, with no clear purpose.  Much of the interior had water damage, with ceiling sprinklers going off.  Then one of the cultists set off a rapidly expanding fire.  Instead of getting out, the cultists stayed inside and attempted to block all the exits.  As the flames approached, they sat around righteously and burned to death.  At the end, a Black person of indeterminate gender, with broad wings, soared out of the fire.  From somewhere, a serene yet strong voice proclaimed, “Innocent!”


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

Saturday, May 7, 2022

Poem: Decide

 

Decide

 

to trudge in a sweat of fleshy moisture,

while waterless hordes yield in profusion,

 

dunes that tug on your boots,

begging you to pen a sentence

they have tried to compose.

 

you become the desert’s ghostwriter,

coerced on topics such as gone mountains

and oceans stolen drop by drop.

 

it is you who must eulogize them,

all these debased glories under your feet.

 

you who must mollify

the prayers that lap at your ankles,

beseeching in heat waves.

 

it is you, a passing puff of sentience,

who must decide.



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

Wednesday, May 4, 2022

Poem: Fermi Paradox

 

Fermi Paradox

 

the moon, a half-god omen,

bitter in the pre-dawn dark,

inflicted by ventricles of latticed upheaval,

ganglions of rush hour,

urban industrial muscles--

 

such an artificial, bright multitudinous unhappy face.

 

and the people, the ants, that galvanic whirlwind of plankton,

chase genies to establish beehives of ventures,

riding the oppression of their great savior eagle,

feathers of glistering stolen silver and swords.

 

there could be no darkness ever again.

and yet, once more, the night arrives,

testifying in the smog and ruck of rain.

and the moon, still there,

swings with the greed of a sickled guillotine,

to reap the lament of prayerful tears. 


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







May 5 [changed poem to present tense from past tense.  "chase" replaces "chased," "arrives" replaces "arrived" ..etc.]


May 5 "glistering" replaces "glistening"


May 6:  "bitter in the pre-dawn dark" replaces "hangs bitter ... "

Monday, May 2, 2022

Poem: LA Highway

 

LA Highway

 

corpuscles in cubes

with i-don’t-care chins,

AC-sterile absence of sweat,

 

these commuters,

 

these herd-beasts in lockstep

yet alien to bison or passenger pigeons

or the slain purpose of a wolf.

 

the black rubber circles

under their eyes don’t care,

don’t have legs--


as if to say, a stray dog without a collar

can’t outrace a carburetor,

 

a carburetor that has its own kind of power,

wings that give no pleasure

in their bottom-feeder, oil-pan flight.


these commuters,

 

they dream of nothing, anymore, 

except throttles,

while they accuse their own boredom,

 and stare at red rectangles

which blot out the stars.

 

 

 

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












12/11/23  lots of mods