Poem: Her, Too

 

Her, Too

 

she spoke in a slaughtered language;

otherwise the audience forgot

the price of their good-natured front.

 

her effort was no doubt futile,

though perhaps tweaked a few wrinkles,

and salted some hairlines.

judged by the pale shadow

of many a buried bone,

white was the color of death.

 

whether on a proclamation,

treaty, deed, scalp-wanted poster,

or the robe below a missionary’s waist,

always white.

 

they listened, the audience,

but of course were innocent;

for their own whiteness

came from settlers beyond memory.

 

they watched her

with eyes as wide as the Earth:

a nod to the value of the land

and maybe a few trees.

there were no tears, of course,

even less the sort that carved a path

of exile and pain.  mostly 

what they saw was blue.

blue on white.

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

Inspired by a guest speaker at UMM 

8/12  .. fixed second stanza

7/30/22 .. huge changes to flow and structure of poem

The Incredible Craziness of One Quarter of USA Citizens

 

At this point most political observers simply accept it as a fact of life that an overwhelming majority of Republicans accept the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen — a claim with nothing to support it, not even plausible anecdotes.

 

What I don’t think is fully appreciated, however, is that the Big Lie is embedded in an even bigger lie: the claim that the Democratic Party is controlled by radical leftists aiming to destroy America as we know it. And this lie in turn derives a lot of its persuasiveness from a grotesquely distorted view of what life is like in blue America.

 

The Dystopian Myths of Red America: [Op-Ed]

Krugman, Paul. 

New York Times, Late Edition (East Coast); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 26 July 2022: A.22.

Poem: Looking Up

 

Looking Up

night parades

its bouquet of lush cosmos.

 

a silver pistil ladles ocean,

sickles a falling star.

 

my eyes humbled,

small as the merest trilobite. 

my heart the fossil of a rose.

 

these wild campfires of a scattered universe

always melt the stone.

 

Earth itself borne intimate,

partnered to sail

on heavenly flame.

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

10/30   added "a" before "scattered universe" ... "falling star" replaces "slip of star"  ... 

7/25/22  "slip of star" replaces "streaking star"

7/24/22  multiple changes after poem goes up, within hours

Poem: Broom

 

Broom

 

flaxen bouquet

of robust leaping grass.

 

hips fluent over floor,

a swish of rosettes.

 

as lithe and sure

as svelte as swift.

 

stark in the corner, stoic

one moment,

 

hectic and topsy-turvy

the next.

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

Poem: Chased Down

 

Chased Down

 

haunted and disturbed,

we sped exposed,

tearful sins pleating our disguises.

 

our running fingers 

fled so fast to jolt swift pens,  

fear itself the ink,

vanity never so attacked

by a prose so implacable

to so many liars.

 

new wounds wailed

wherever we opened our mouths:

what are angels! we proclaimed--

invincible slaves, answered the hatred 

kenneled in our craven hearts.

when the rain fell,

stark as nude penitence,

we drove each other 

to stampede on multiple leashes,

chased close by such awful clarity,

through the rank filth of our own decay.

 

most of us 

fell off cliffs of our own making.

and yet for a brave few, now traitors,

the sky opened in our hearts.

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

12/1/23 ... major changes ... such a crappy poem, hope it's better now... doubtful

7/17/22 .. "hearts" replaces "masks" ... changes to the "inferiority" phase... 

Poem: Rare Find

 

Rare Find

 

a thatch of boughs

yields a sight of doe,

clayish of fur in the dim,

 

as if i had snuck back

to some stone-age place,

near a living pottery shard.

 

how was the lost pot made, i wonder?

what nucleotides wallowed

in the original mud?

 

few traces now

of grass-swelled swards

prowled by smilodon.

 

i’d ask the doe

but we speak different senses:

is she the last survivor

 

of an antediluvian trust?

 

 

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

7/30  "wallowed" replaces "romped"

7/25/22  "romped" replaces "frothed"

7/23/22 various word changes again... "frothed" replaces "waltzed"... "antediluvian" replaces "ancient, shattered" .. etc ... 

7/21/22  "what nucleotides waltzed in the original mud?" replaces "which nucleotides shaped the original mud?" ... "shattered trust"  replaces "ancient, shattered trust"

Regarding the Poems

 The poems can be pretty great, or the poems can suck.  Usually they are somewhere in-between.  Sometimes I work on a poem for months, and even then it has an obvious problem, one that another person can see and suggest away in a blink.  Other times, miraculously, a poem goes up strong.

Thanks for reading!

OWL
owlwholaughs@gmail.com  

(I don't respond to anonymous email, sorry)

Poem: Normalcy Glitch

 

Normalcy Glitch

 

there were various salads,

striving to become words, a regular

Tower of Babel, except it rose

in random shunts and loops,

squinched tight in the noodle-dorm

of a certain human brain.  and

 

such forces tended to refer to voices,

implying if not stating outright

that they--whatever they were--

the ego or the I or whatever--

seemed stable enough,

and yet

 

as they put it,

 

supervened on a wasp nest of wrangling impresarios,

with no rational arbiter for adjudication.

 

it followed, they explained,

that no one ‘in here’ thought freely

or blessed whatever action ‘the shells’

(another term they liked)

chose to take.

 

there were all these, what were in effect,

byzantine labyrinthine machinations,

these goings-on.  and

 

that was the prestige of the trick--

that was the entire phenomenon

normally defined as “self-determination.”

 

but

 

all the legals and doctors

stood around in intellectual gaggles,

scratching the flat of the square pedestal on their head;

because somehow, some way,

the salads and voices and maestros of the Babble

were all too alert and functional,

all too sure and eager

to dangerously contrive.

 

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

Poem: Incorporated

 

Incorporated

 

x-y-z-$ coordinates,

they graph everyone’s pace,

while the fiducial chessboard stretches

 

through equivocal equations,

faceted words, binary rituals,  

bureaucracy leashed to daily bread.

 

24 out of 7,

that is not what it takes

to run an efficient, ruthless, profitable hive. 

 

note the square windows 

and the ubiquitous icons streaming on screens

to wrest control of human lives.

 

it adds up and up and up:

analyses in ledgers in excels in protocols.

and yet it must be underwritten and worshipped again and again:

 

the impeccable perfection of the source code

to overwhelm, exploit, dominate, and harness 

obsequious, anxious hamster-wheel minds--

 

until everyone is more skyscraper than person,

more math than happiness,

more android than frankenstein.

 

 

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

 

 

 12/3/23  ... vast amount of mods... maybe I can fix some of these poems, one by one , day by day, at least a little... or maybe I am Sisyphus 

A Fascist US means WWIII

 

On this 4^th of July, the USA is on the edge of civil war.  It could happen today.  Who knows.  Really.  It’s that tense.

The Republicans have gone fascist.  Assault rifles are everywhere.  The fascists think it is a right for angry citizens who hate their government to openly carry military-grade weapons anywhere (not what the Constitution had in mind).  There is open hatred for the LGBTQ community.  There is open misogyny and enslavement of women, in the form of making abortion illegal, thus controlling woman's bodies and life path.  There is denial of climate change, backed by big SUVs and V-8 trucks that spew greenhouse gases.  And there is White nationalism in the eyes of the White sea of faces, led by White males (do not be fooled by the Potemkin Village of non-White faces, carefully arranged in the audience).

The original Civil War of the 1860s was about the South wanting to keep slavery.  How disgusting is that?  It's about as disgusting as starting a civil war to advance White patriarchy, and to demonize/criminalize LGBTQ people.

This has everything to do with a cult-religious takeover, based on raging fanaticism, and nothing to do with what is best for the country or the planet.  It is rulership by demagoguery, gaslighting, bullying, torment, fear, incarceration and (inevitably) torture.

The USA has always done this to Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color.  It has always kept up an epidemic of violence against women.  But if the Republicans take over, all progress in terms of human rights will be destroyed.  And there has been great progress.

The Republicans want to take us back to the mentality of the Assyrians in 800BC.  Maximize your militarism, demand absolute obedience to an imposed code, and use your might to conquer, plunder, torture--and then brag about how great you are; brag that you are a god.

Civilization has always been rife with plutocracy, monarchy, theocracy, including enforced loyalty tests and lock-down on dissent.  Today, even, dictatorships are on the rise.

But the technology we have now is unforgiving.  Nuclear weapons don’t allow second chances.  

The narcissism of a dictatorship demands utter fealty.  People are oppressed until they become like tool-using ants in a hive.  The social structure that results is held hostage by fear to one person’s disordered view of reality.  The bottomless insecurity of a tyrant means they must always be right, without question. 

Simply put, if we don’t find a way to advance the psychological health of society, alongside the advance of technology, war will destroy us.  We have the ingenuity to do it.  If we can create advanced microchips--incredibly sophisticated computing tools at a molecular level--we can devise healthy ways of governance--

If

If

If--we can stop dictators and demagogues from imposing their tyranny.  

This is not just about a pitiable fate for the anti-intellectual citizens of the USA.   If humanity refuses to advance psychologically, and  instead tethers itself to reason-killing, cult loyalty tests, the whole world is headed for nuclear war.

==========

 

Poem: Slug on a Root

 

Slug on a Root

 

amber-orange cedar,

lacquered by the moisture

of a dawn-dipped storm,

 

a cragswym embraces it,

indolent of glide,

trailing a sheen of rainbows.

 

no hurry

in the swan-soft stride,

agile as an elixir of genesis.

 

no qualm in this living gleam,

which rides a brushstroke of creation

out of muddy oubliettes.

 

sleek and docile,

oozy and patient,

proud on surgent stalks--

 

never to harden

or fossilize in purpose--

this primordial adventurer

 

plies utopian canvas.

luminous colors adorn its poise

to effloresce.

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

cragswym =  cragswoman/cragsman

wym = gender neutral for woman/man   

e.g. "history of mankind" becomes "history of wymkind"

fireman/firewoman becomes firewym

--7/3/22   "poise" replaces "motion"

7/23/22  "adorn" replaces "adorning"/"surgent" replaces "surging"

8/7/22   added comma after "glide"

changed structure of last paragraph

8/19   "rides" replaces "rode" ... changed last paragraph

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