Poem: Rogue

 

Rogue

 

this aching planet,

 

a handful of healers cry daily

over its burning, excavated ribs,

 

where no wild things roam.

 

crowds scurry in packed cities

amid obvious evil,

but only a few raise their heads.

 

one brave women

watches a wall of smiles

freeze-dry her pleas,

 

swallow them into cold throats

stainless as upscale refrigerators.

 

some teenagers

 

rage against the blood money of empire,

yet the streets ignore, ignore, ignore,

 

or laugh and hurl scorn

 

or ignore, ignore, ignore …

 

a few college students

call those who bow down locust and ants,

call the middle class pharisees,

call the rich posh swine

 

who soil pearls.

 

a sliver of authors, journalists, casters, artists and professors

make a calm case,

 

but no truth of any kind does anything

to steer the march of the scuttlers,

 

or impede the swarm.

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

8/16/26 ... eds off and on all day

NYT quote, Jesus vs "Tribute and dominance"

 ====

Jesus says, "In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you ... "

Such an ethic is demanding. Few of us live up to it. But the problem with adherents of the modern right is not just that they don’t live up to it; the issue is that they detest it. To treat the foreigner residing among us as well as we treat our native-born is derided as suicidal empathy. The Trump administration glorifies cruelty toward the immigrant, the stranger, the weak and the poor. It takes money from Medicaid to cut taxes for the rich. It threatens the destruction of whole civilizations. The modern right is built on the logic of tribute and dominance.

====

Ezra Klein, Christopher Nolan's Trojan Horse
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/02/opinion/christopher-nolan-odyssey-elon-musk.html

Regarding the poems

 The poems don't like you and they especially don't like me.  "What are you doing," they ask, "pretending to hear?"

Poem: Inventor Reflects

 

Inventor Reflects

 

the higher you go, the less you breathe,

and the more beautiful the air.

a why beyond dirt and sweat,

peace mulled by floatation,

reclusive as Lao Tzu’s clouds.

 

nerve endings took eons

to sprout out of bacteria and perceive this.

more quickly we ruined our awe

by inventing flight.

 

we praise no god now,

only mechanical wings.

whether brilliant or damned,

only the angels we replaced could say.

too many tricks

have been played on our ideals.

 too much thimblerigging

between judges and thieves

knotted in warrens

in the switchbacks of the metropolis.

 

we weren’t created

to see where we’ll go,

only to get there lost.

to suffer chains of puzzles

in doglegs of whys.

the gods need us

to unfurl like opium rings,

waft from their fickle rush.

 

if you invent something

it’s just the gods

using you as a mirror.

you’ll be dropped

and then no more insight,

just a brief ritual of shatters:

the giving of yourself

to the glow.

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

Icarus theme... 

This poem was originally published in Samizdat in 2013.  I have started re-publishing poems on this blog, as well as adding the new ones.  A big part of it is the end of the USA as I knew it, and my concern that I will be incarcerated.  I am, too, in my 60s, and could die of natural causes, exacerbated by grief and anxiety at the loss of the democracy and freedom I knew all my life. 

Micro-fiction: New Perspective

 

===

All I was asking people to do was to consider a new point of view:  what if 5,000 years, the approximate age of human civilization, was not a lot of time?  What if it were a mere blip in the consideration of where and how civilization can go, how it could evolve, given that the universe will continue to unfold for billions of years?

Just by changing their point of view in that way, even for a second, many people found new hope and purchase in their own identity.  They became an expression in something vast, something that listened and watched their every behavior for clues on what could happen far into an utterly magical future.

What is clear is this:  the mental aspect of the Universe is just starting to Bloom; and each person is a part of that, especially if they have the courage to be aware.

Ayestasya Ulswofe, Petal of the Passionance,
Blue Butterfly Green Spider Coven

===

This derives from the characters and philosophy presented in my unpublished novel, A Future of Angels

Quote, "I remember, too, the stories of older women who marched ... "

 

==== 

I remember, too, the stories of older women who marched on August 9, who reminded younger activists that many of them had taken to the streets over the objections of their husbands and fellow male comrades. They explained that at the time they did not have the language to explain how race, class and gender intersected; they just knew how sexism felt in their bodies.

By the time we were marching for a new set of rights, they had gifted us the language and analysis to describe how race, class and gender shaped women’s experiences. Their stories also showed us that sexism did not sit neatly outside the struggle against apartheid: women could stand alongside men in a liberation movement while still having to fight for equality with those same men.

 ====

“Women’s Day in South Africa turns 70 with equality still out of reach”-- Sisonke Msimang

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/8/9/womens-day-in-south-africa-turns-70-with-equality-still-out-of-reach

Poem: Red Squirrel

 

Red Squirrel

 

sputter and chip,

rebuke me with variants

of raucous croon,

 

you perky piccolo of fuss,

high on a spruce,

helming azure.

 

if i could shimmy, bristle,

and cackle like you,

besotted by the spirit of

 

Puck,

 

would i, too, dash

from my own moods,

a child lost to daredevilry,

 

and forget the madness

of the mean world

through the quicksilver roan

 

of my flips?

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

This poem was originally published in Bolts of Silk in 2012.  I have started re-publishing poems on this blog.  A big part of it is the end of the USA as I knew it, and my concern that I will be incarcerated.  I am, too, in my 60s, and could die of natural causes, exacerbated by grief and anxiety at the loss of the democracy and freedom I knew all my life.  

Poem: Sims

 

Sims

 

it was easy to feel ankle-chained

to the neighborhood.

its transistor-like fences,

and pomeranian-sized lawns--

 

as if the will

of the residents suffered a hex. 

only fishbowls with their blobs of poi

trending nonlinear.

 

how to find voice

among cathodes and laminates?

no Muse braved this straight-laced

stratified oasis, except

 

once when a coyote

wormed under a construction fence.

 

wakes of worry

followed the beast’s deviant slouch,

fawning over every plump

cosseted cat.

 

no one could ever truly leave.

escape was circular.

they always returned, became

their own replaceable part.

 

women took up

the software of the smile again.

men shook hands as if gears had meshed,

a fingerworks of pawls.

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

This poem was originally published in Ithaca Lit in 2014.  I am going to start re-publishing poems on this blog.  Why?  A big part of it is the end of the USA as I knew it, and my concern that I will be incarcerated.  I am, too, in my 60s, and could die of natural causes, exacerbated by grief and anxiety at the loss of the democracy and freedom I knew all my life.

Poem: Unseen Tears

Unseen Tears

 

can’t be scrubbed with what’s fresh,

or shed in a church,

 

or unhitched from a loom of memory,

where they shuttle sure

 

as fate.

 

sad dimples swallow them,

tarnishing the eke

 

of on-the-edge irises.

 

they are jaded nutrients,

little packets of pump

 

in neck and fore veins,

 

milligrams of heavy, heavy iron,

mined from brittle cheekbones

 

which tend to turn away,

chasing after the dark side

 

of the moon.

 

 

 

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

Poem: Far Gone

 

Far Gone

 

slight tilts of wind

sculpt easy drifts

when my palms are feathers,

so i imagine, perched 

above a boulder, not on it,

and so cannot fall.

 

no death here,

for to soar as i am,

i must have died already.

there is no weight,

peace all around, depthless.

celestials in a pageantry of blue.

 

so high above,

my own antics now minuscule,

i forget about competition.

none of the fussy worries

of ego or money.

 

it becomes all too natural to ask why,

and then not to care.

to dwell, instead, on a gift

which no one in the

valley of asphalt down below 

can see.

 

it isn’t fair.  how my urban life

is so easily destroyed,

doomed now to watch the

criss-cross sluice of shiny cars,

swineherded as they are by the anxious rich,

never again to believe.

 

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

7/31 ... mods all day, off and on

Poem: Rain Universe

 

Rain Universe

 

can anyone count the worlds born

in howl and sizzle now falling

among shoves of wind to smash

and be gone, utterly gone?

they were too quick for me.

i sought the spell of hue and ghost within

the spheres.  but the speed, it was

terrible.  it would take a microscope

and a camera that magnified

until oblivion became sane, a camera

that sliced time faster than

the scribbles of a mad god filling

the sky with water.  only then maybe

would there be a song in a raindrop,

a glint that gave back the bard

i sent to find the dreamt artifact,

a gleaming blinding jewel of an eye. 

this eye that would not care about eons.

something in its gaze would last.

the war of horizontal and vertical

would become mere lines.  the faster

that worlds fell and died the stronger

it would get.  as the instant of its

life shrank it would grow to encompass

the storm, leaving it far behind,

as a tide leaves a cowry on the shore.

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

This poem was originally published in Blue Unicorn.   I’m not sure of the date due to poor record keeping on my part.  Maybe 2006?  I am going to start re-publishing poems published in the past.  Why?  A big part of it is the potential end of the US as I knew it, and my concern that I will be incarcerated.  I am, too, in my 60s, and could die of natural causes, exacerbated by grief and anxiety at the loss of the country I knew all my life.

 

Expect more poems like this, and so a bit of a different poetic voice--who I was ten or more years ago.  Probably smarter.  And saner.

(I will point out, for every poem I published back then, there were many, many rejected poems.  I still work with those old drafts, trying to wrestle them into shape.  Most of the poems I've posted over the past five or six years on this blog (2021-2026) are of such a nature.)

Poem: Highs and Lows

 

Highs and Lows

 

mercury or zinc, servant or throne,

which races or oozes inside me?

am i cellar or pinnacle?

do sparks, wind-tossed petals,

whirl from pinwheels of torn sunflowers?

will this maze-ful abacus,

squirmy yet sluggish,

incinerate from beads of burning thought?

 

of burned-out death?

 

should i have never

exhumed my krakens?

these short-circuited galaxies,

which ramble in gardens of blossom and rot,

far through marled or astral earth,

only to be pruned--fiercely, hungrily--

left to hang in a breath--

by novas and blackholes?

 

 

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

 

Poem: Inferno

 

Inferno

 

to heal the wound

he had to find a crypt

in a hurt place.

had to dig

through silt and shit

and childish striae,

and not cripple

the ladders in his pain.

 

there would be massacres

in written bones,

and nightmarish mineshafts.

tears would bleed,

make love to lies

worse than the original ache.

 

he would have to swim

like a darter that became

a bat in the pulse of 

an oryx inside a tiger.

no Valkyrie, no Beatrice,

no golden thread.  there

would be cannibals that

bit groins, smallpox boiling

in his daughter’s canthus.

 

there would be red ants

in the coffers of his love,

and other worst fears

he could not survive.

 

he took out a piece of his heart

and dangled it down trapdoors

as demon bait.

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

This poem was originally published in Danse Macabre in 2012.   I am going to start re-publishing poems published in the past on this blog.  Why?  A big part of it is the potential end of the US as I knew it, and my concern that I will be incarcerated.  I am, too, in my 60s, and could die of natural causes, exacerbated by grief and anxiety at the loss of the country I knew all my life.

Expect more poems like this, and so a bit of a different poetic voice--who I was ten or more years ago.

====

Additionally, on this particular poem, it is in the vein of a shamanic awakening to the spirit world.  But it is also about primal, ethical agony.

Quote, getting away with genocide

I’m a Scholar of Genocide. We’re Entering a Terrifying New Era.

 ====

What we have seen unfold in Gaza, where Israel stands accused in the International Court of Justice of committing genocide in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, appears to portend a new future for the crime.

It is a future in which other nations or leaders may have an incentive to pursue genocidal policies knowing they will not only get away with murder but may even benefit from it. It is a future in which the countries and international organizations that had been committed to stopping and punishing genocide may give license to its recurrence.

=====

Omar Bartov, Professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/21/opinion/israel-gaza-palestinians-genocide.html

Quote, Era of Dumbing

====

We live in a time of mind-gamery, the Era of Dumbing, which is rife with devious denial of insidious intent.  Not only do most people not know this, they have been trained to not want to know. 

====

From my unpublished book, Lightcraft:  ethics as technology

Poem: Last

 

Last

illimitable blue,

the eagle takes wing,

somewhere off a cliff,

the ghost of its mother crying.

 

below, a busy man with a hammer

looks up with eyes that fondle the bird.

but it glides on,

out over a pale bay

where draggers shrimp the seabed

with nets of underwater claws. 

 

the eagle veers onward,

off toward a succulent sun.

soon its wings darken to glints,

blending with the warmth

of forever.

 

 

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

NYT quote on the unethical conformity of the TV industry

 ====

Our president does what he wants, where and when and to whomever he wants, and the cowed and craven set of politicians who make up his flock just go along for the ride. It seems more and more as if we’re living in a burn-it-all-down age of greed, mayhem and corruption.

You might never know this from watching prestige TV … There was one show, however, that hit this head-on …

=====

David Colman

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/19/opinion/emmys-the-boys-amazon-homelander-snub.html

Poem: Barstow Junction

 

Barstow Junction

dry nettlesome air,
it had the heat of a femur-long railroad spike,
nailing him to the motel bed,
or pinioning his knees to pray.

crows added more cast iron,
hundreds listless
on the weapon held by the telephone poles:
that long, vein-sized garrote
constricting the pulse of the town.

Barstow wasn’t round or flat or social or open,
it was a sluice of squares,
an ooze of commodities, chains
of hellbound freight.

its DNA was a snarl of
business molecules loaded on
squeals of metal that whined across
miles of sluggish boxcars.

many victims plodded by–
ore and bitumen, cattle and timber,
suffering the great desert,
enslaved to soulless deposits of cash,

so very small.

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

This poem was originally published in Full of Crow in 2014.   I am going to start re-publishing poems published in the past on this blog.  Why?  A big part of it is the potential end of the US as I knew it, and my concern that I will be incarcerated.  I am, too, in my 60s, and could die of natural causes, exacerbated by grief and anxiety at the loss of the country I knew all my life.

Expect more poems like this, and so a bit of a different poetic voice--who I was ten or more years ago.

Quote, "The great constant of history ... "

 

The great constant of history, [Gibbon] believed, was self-delusion: the willful inability of people to recognize how much the habits, rituals and laws they took for granted had slowly changed — until it was too late to bend them back into shape. Mankind “is governed by names,” he wrote, and Romans seemed willing to “submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.”

Charles King, Professor at Georgetown 
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/13/opinion/edward-gibbon-empires-fall.html

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

Although I agree with this quote, its sense of defeatism is wrong (so was Gibbon's).  As I've been writing on this blog, through many essays, we have the brain- and cultural-plasticity to move the collective consciousness to a place of maturity and advanced ethics technology.  We have already started on this journey, as evidenced by the invention, for instance, of Universal Suffrage.  From the perspective of advancing our ethics tech, which should be number one, this is the greatest invention in the entire history of civilization, breaking one of the ancient cardinal rules of Big Lie governance.  We have a long way to go to reach MLK Jr's mountaintop.  But it's a feasible journey.  And people need not necessarily dwell in "self-delusion."

https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2026/05/essay-sustenance-and-darkness.html

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

etc/

Poem: Out of Place

 

Out of Place

 

questions lurch,

born in cocktails

with lewd names.

 

those of us with minds

as guarded as soda water

do not know the answers.

 

we appraise wastelands

of sassy youth,

wanting to be part of the grunt,

 

but unable to sway

like these sexy philosophers,

who broach casual taboos

 

and do not sing of fear.

 

we stare

as if stunned by godlings

agile and immune.  how easily

 

they stalk pleasure for hours,

devouring each other,

chasing necks.

 

when they die

they moan up again, half destroyed,

and the rest lovely, toned,

 

supple with war.

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

This poem was originally published in Barnwood Magazine in 2012.   I am going to start re-publishing poems published in the past on this blog.  Why?  A big part of it is the potential end of the US as I knew it, and my concern that I will be incarcerated.  I am, too, in my 60s, and could die of natural causes, exacerbated by grief and anxiety at the loss of the country I knew all my life.

Expect more poems like this, and so a bit of a different poetic voice--who I was ten or more years ago.