Poem: Coin

This poem originally appeared a long long time ago in a journal called The Homestead Review. Enjoy!

-------------------------------




Coin

don’t look at me
as if you have a complaint,
some false story about lost youth
when you shimmered on the flank
of a sparkling dragon.

you’re a hard blind eye
stealing the warmth of my palm,
you and your sorcerous stare:
its lying runes,
its bloodless head,
its calamitous raptor.

it’s not important that you see us,
but crucial that we see you--
that was the bargain you made,
immortality to become the prophet
of violent kings.

that’s why jesus gave you to caesar.
that’s why the hungry weep:
because they are the prisoners
of a weepless thing.

My Poem Up At: Bolts Of Silk

http://boltsofsilk.blogspot.com/2010/09/outside-by-chris-crittenden.html

If you get a chance, you can find one of my best nature poems ("Outside") featured right now at Bolts of Silk, which is one of my favorite journals. So, a great combination. I hardly ever get it just right, and if you have a spare moment, why not glance over this short yet potent poem?

It's about 12 lines long and took months to edit into worthy shape.

Thanks as always to one of my FAVORITE editors on the web, Juliet Wilson. She's a fantastic writer and poet, and a great leader in the literary world too.

If my patient wife Shanna and I weren't busy making bottles and bottles of applesauce, and canning them, an arduous task, I'd have a lot more energy to praise this editor's abilities, as I have in the past.

Yay Druidess Wilson!


OWL

What Is Wealth Really?

The following two quotes show you how to satisfy all your desires without a lot of money:

 ------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------

Humans correct in making the leap from wealth as currency to wealth as energy. But logic failure. Wealth ultimately is desire fluctuating with emotion and state of mind. Desires, when all are supported in purely adaptable system, true wealth is achieved.

Usurper Judaa Marr, "Human : Nature"

------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------

When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you. --Lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Be Spiritual Not Material

A great Op-ed by Robert B. Reich recently appeared in the New York Times, titled “How To End The Great Recession.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/03/opinion/03reich.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage


Part I

Reich informs us that the wealthiest 1% of Americans take in 23.5% of our total income, a bloated percentage that hasn’t been seen since 1928, just before the Great Depression.

Let me express his strong implication with a handy jingle:

When the super-wealthy bloat with money, it is bad for the country.

Why?

First of all, they tend to hoard, not spend. Second, when they do spend, it might well go out of the country--for a Villa in France, for example, or a nifty tax-free bank account in the Cayman Islands.

Heck, they have the money to travel wherever they want and they probably do, spending untold thousands of dollars as tourists anywhere but here.

In other words, the ultra-rich don’t put money back into the American economy as efficiently as the rest of us. We need to redistribute the wealth so that we get the fair and level income curve that existed in the 50’s and 60’s.

Reich points out that during those Golden Decades there was a (gasp) “70 percent to 90 percent marginal income tax on the highest incomes.”

Moral of the story: the government needs to play Robin Hood. Take from the rich 1 percent and give to the poor 99 percent.


Part II

From about 1970 onward, the American income has been struggling to keep up with our neurotic need to buy new stuff. Instead of wising up and stepping back from the temptation of glitz, we fell into the trap set for us by the Madison Avenue mind-controllers.

First, we sacrificed our free time. Women started working instead of staying home like they did in the 60’s. Then they starting working more and more hours. Men, who had been working full time already, ramped up their hours. Now everyone is a frantic thoughtless callous ant.

Get this: even sacrificing our free time to meaningless jobs under tyrannical bosses couldn’t boost our income enough. We needed that stuff so badly. Gosh golly! So, by the 1990’s, we went into debt.

Yes, that’s right. Because we are addicted to shiny new stuff, we sold our souls on two levels: (1) gave up our free time, (2) put ourselves in more and more debt.

So, here we are. Porcine shoppers who had a wonderful lifestyle back in the 60’s, but we let ourselves be tugged along by the golden rings through our noses.

Realize this: The corporations sold us out as soon as they could. As Reich says:

This crisis began decades ago when a new wave of technology — things like satellite communications, container ships, computers and eventually the Internet — made it cheaper for American employers to use low-wage labor abroad or labor-replacing software here at home than to continue paying the typical worker a middle-class wage. Even though the American economy kept growing, hourly wages flattened. The median male worker earns less today, adjusted for inflation, than he did 30 years ago.

Nothing in this world more resembles a Biblical “Servant of Mammon” than a corporation. These obese creatures have no loyalty to American workers. Through public relations campaigns they put on a good face, but they are amazingly selfish. Corporations are perfect sociopaths.

I find it ridiculous that Republican Conservative Christians and right-leaning Democrats are so hateful when it comes to government programs to help the needy; and yet right in before them, larger than any of us, are some of the most repulsive pustules of greed the world has ever know: multinational corporations and billionaire carpetbaggers.

Time for another jingle:

Be spiritual not material.

If OWL’s jingles were followed, to quote Sam Cook, “What a wonderful world this would be.”

Acceptance: Phati'tude

Phati’tude Literary Magazine is a project of the IAAS, which stands for the Intercultural Alliance of Artists and Scholars. The organization is professional and varied in its approach, and seeks to use art and literature as dynamic forces to initiate and advance intercultural dialogues.

From their website:

The IAAS's primary objective is to present a forum for artists and scholars to unite under one umbrella and create literary programming that develops and explores critical thinking about cultural assumptions, immigration, and diversity. Our goal is to enhance the field of multicultural education and broaden its impact on the world, inside the classroom and, just as importantly, outside the classroom. The IAAS sees multiculturalism directly connected to our work, our lives, the communities in which we live and to our emerging global society. Using literature as a conduit, we believe artists and scholars have the power to effect and implement change and ultimately create a viable "intercultural alliance."

Programs of the IAAS include Phati’tude Literary Magazine and also Phati’tude Literary TV, which has produced two documentaries (“Visionary Voices” and “Visual Signatures”).

There is also education program called Phati’tude Language & Literary Arts Curriculum, with middle school, high school and college applications.

The driving force behind this very professional and charismatic organization, as far as I can tell, is Gabrielle David, who puts in the hard work of managing a multi-sided non-profit. I strongly recommend going to the websites to get an idea of the quality and compelling presentation:

theiaas.org

phatitude.org


I’m extremely honored that my poems “Justice Quest” and “Reagan’s Ghost” were accepted for the upcoming Issue Three of Phati’tude. I felt very at home submitting to this zine. Free to express a side of myself I usually keep hidden.

Below is the biography I submitted, and that might explain why.

If you are looking for a great literary magazine to support, one that is part of a larger non-profit organization founded on the importance of cultural exchange through literature and art, this is your place.

I wish I had much more time to praise the IAAS and Gabrielle David, but my life is particularly hectic right now. What else is new!

OWL

-----------------
------------------

My Phati’tude bio in the upcoming Issue 3:

[Owl Who Laughs] teaches environmental ethics for the University of Maine, and does much of his writing in a hut in a remote spruce forest, fifty miles from the nearest traffic light. He lives near Deer Island, Canada where his native ancestry is buried. Although mostly ‘white’, he seeks the wisdom of the shaman, and promotes reciprocity, spirit, and empathy for the Land. It has been said of the Wabanaki that “they [are] a people remarkable for their poetic imagination,” and his obsession with poems (over five hundred published) draws from that.

The denizens of the future will look back at Homo sapiens with great curiosity and scholarly fascination, wondering what it was like to be born wild in Nature, and then to destroy Nature through an overwhelming greed manifested in technology. Most of all, they will ponder the role of the human being as a pivotal link in the ongoing chain of sentience--a creature that started off as purely animal and then, after tens of thousands of years, rebuilt itself into cyborg, thus eliminating the species.

Adelpho Tharr, What’s On The Universe’s Mind?

There are many ways to be a wolf, and those who are best at it know well how to hide.

Sleeps Near Nataaq, Journals

Poem: A Midsummer Night's Glee

This is a fun poem, something I don't do too often. It originally appeared in The Centrifugal Eye, You can read it in situ here:

http://issuu.com/centrifugaleye/docs/tcefeb10-troblems

I recommend reading the poem at TCE. The journal is a stunningly sensuous blend of color, art, calligraphy and poem.
------------------------------



A Midsummer Night’s Glee

whippoorwills
commence to prate
on topics illustrated by bats
and sphinx moths;
and a clown-like moon
slants in fallen breeches.

lightning bugs court
whirligig silver
kicked up by beetles
on lunatic water;
and frogs burp
as if they had swallowed
Pan’s thyrsus.

coyotes dirge
like a barbers’ octet,
an owl spins its weird crick,
and spiders jig
their crazy legs
like trampolinists.

a goose speeds over like
what the f---
a meteor hurtles
as if Orion had spit,
and the stars decidedly
take their wish
and sleep on a cirrus.

Acceptance: Kill Poet

killpoet.com


Kill Poet said to me: "you write good. real good.
we'd like to use a piece for issue9 which will drop soon.
congrats."

Kill Poet is not just a poetry journal. It is a multimedia immersion in a hard-bitten subculture that embraces the grotesque and the violent, perhaps drawing some of its knife-edged momentum from the legendary Grand Guignol.

On the other hand, perhaps not. Kill Poet is utterly fresh in its avant-garde fatalism, the amoral plunge into a collage of altered states, taboo fixes, and symbolic murders. It’s a wildly popular venue judging from the four thousand followers on MySpace. Readings at Lestat’s Coffee House in San Diego seem (from YouTube) horribly well attended.

Cut Bukowski in half, trim him young and mad, then fuck with his brain chemistry to reflect the situational anguish of today’s youth--then suture that onto body parts of Mrs. Lovett and Green Day--and you get some idea of what’s going on at Kill Poet.

Make no mistake, though, this is not a garbage dump of mindless gore. The great salvation of kp is its literary merit, the excellence that forgives and even encourages its explorations and subversions.

As the United States plunges into dismal pain due to a gluttonous housing-market binge, two senseless wars, and a numb reliance on debt to support a craving for material fluff, Kill Poet may become the spearhead of a graphic yet eloquent dissent. If I were young, as the kp crowd seems to be, I would be disgusted with the leadership of the Empire for pissing away my future during an insipid and evil binge.

I’m an old geezer and I’m disgusted with the Empire. We all should be.

And yet most of us continue to chew our cud in bovine resignation. But not at Kill Poet. Their black-and-red motto is, Viva La Poem!

Poetry might be all this country has left for its younger generations. Even the basic supplies needed by a painter--oils, brushes, easel, canvas--are unaffordable. Someone needs to speak the truth, even indirectly, about our deranged wonderland of commercials and bombs.

But then again, Kill Poet refuses to be put in a box as a protest zine. It is many things liable to many interpretations, but in the end it is the underground masterwork of Jason Neese and Cat Benitez and whoever else is involved.

The only way to begin to fathom this site is to go there and start being killed yourself. The words of the editors, from the “editors’ page,” are a good place to begin dying. I humbly present you the first few lines, which deserve to be etched in a wall somewhere in blood (there is, in fact, a picture at kp of a poem apparently written in blood):

----
greetings.
i am a few things.
i publish poetry
but i am not
just a poetry press
as my name
would allude to
i do want to end you
but not in the way you think.
it will be an honor
killing your perceptions
of poetry, only to
reanimate them

----


A final caveat and plea: If we close our minds to the genius of Kill Poet just because it is disturbing, we sacrifice empathy for comfort; and those without empathy lose contact with half of their own minds.


OWL

Homeless Story of J, Part 11

This is a work of fiction.

-----------------------------------------------

XI


I eke out my days as a “dirt hermit,” a solo shaman hiding from the Processors. They are like dog catchers who loop the time clock around your neck, leashing you to a chain of money.

Go to a shelter, you get Processed. Herded to then next shelter, and so on.  Finally there is Skid Row. A freakzone ghetto asylum, miles of lattice in all directions. Skid Row's ashpalt moats keeps you in, teeming with crime, crazy homeless people like me, with police blocking all the exits.

I'm a dirt hermit. I stink. My clothes rot. I look like the protagonist in Ordinary Wolves, that paleo-eskimo.  His greasy Parka.  Its patches of duct tape and crusts of caribou blood.

People forget that our ancestors drove stone knives into the throats of cervids to finish them off.

Slasher films, which cost $20 per rich kid owe their visceral impact to the kill. Slender animals with feminine necks. Most of human history is the tribe, blood-drenched as they cut up what once roamed free. 

This Earth!  It is miracles destroying miracles to create more miracles.

If you’re raised telecommunicated and decide to be the last eskimo, or a dirt hermit, you have to go back a long way, but once you do, you find yourself right in the middle of a hundred thousand years of stabbing animals' necks.

All this ordinary bloodshed is in all of us.  Somewhere.

Don't assume that your ancestors had no morals.  They did not act like ants as we do. They did not swarm.  Today, when we go to war, we act as brutally as ants.  It was Churchill who fire-stormed whole cities of civilians--children, noncombatants, their homes, possessions, their dogs and cats.  

I read that a firestorm is just as bad as a nuclear bomb, in terms of devastation.  So Britain and the United States are equally extreme in evil infliction.

A dirt hermit must look crazed and out of place. Contact with raw earth makes you a necessary pariah. You must be farouche.

Without a Processor, you won't be upgraded to the latest version of the Program.  The Program will not see you, even when you stand on a street corner and watch the thousands of tin coffins go by.

Humanity used to kill wild animals.  But now, we kill the wildnerness itself.  We are the Bridge Species on this planet.  Our future is techno-machine.  It didn't take us long to murder nature.

Nothing like 'us' has happened in the last five billion years. The Permian Extinction and the Triassic Meteor Strike, those were different extinctions than the one we inflict.  Those extinctions merely set evolution free to play.  

Our extinction, the human-caused extinction, is the murder of evolution.

Welcome the end of nature, and the new Era of Machina Convolvus.

(Note to myself: "era” is “are” backwards)

There is no stopping our blind march.  We all say yes and we all act no.  

We are as much pawns as that first primal algae which turned the sky from methane to oxygen.  An algae that destroyed its preeminence by teeming.

As I watch the reorientation of the essence of our planet, I am like a frail old man watching an avalanche.

At least I've had my time. Thirty-seven years is nothing to regret. Ten with the spirits.

J