Windy
sighs sift the boughs,
swirl to soften willows,
lull fronds.
as always,
air purls as if trees were staves,
the glade a stanza,
leaves clefs.
the sky a vase of faint violins,
whispery
with cadenzas.
the forest remembers and rephrases,
fugues and arias,
all day,
until amethyst
and crepuscular,
a coda of moon.
Age
wrinkles slither
over the desert of my skin.
so many sketchy eels
on saggy roads.
they twitch in packs,
forming a seine no memory can evade,
nor even a breath.
i write these verbal cobwebs,
the art of reweaving
the creases on my skin.
maybe i’ll hunker down,
crab-gripping dry pens
to copy the mayhem
aimless in my throat.
===============================
8/3/24
Thank you for looking at the poems!
A quick note. I often edit a piece quite a bit after it goes up. The more-or-less final version, the one that settles in, arrives after a few days of the initial posting. (It's almost fair to say that a true 'final version' is like the Holy Grail and not likely to ever materialize).
Admittedly, this is a feeble strategy. I use it simply because it gets me to edit faster and more attentively than if the poems were merely tucked away in a folder.
The downside is that readers who visit right after a work goes up are often met with a less-than-stellar version. For this I apologize. Again, my only excuse, albeit feeble, is the quirkiness of my own craft.
If you have comments or suggestions, or potential topics you'd like to see, you can email me:
owlwholaughs@gmail.com
Fly Well in the Dark,
OWL
===========================
Malykatu
young cars and old clouds.
secretive foothills near skyscrapers.
no shaggy animals here.
Some Bird of Fire blinked and the glaciers went.
some Ant Spirit took over,
dominating the Two-Legs.
crowds are everywhere now,
like never existed anywhere.
so many conquests and constructs
thick over Earth's ancient skin,
sharp, straight lines to disrupt Her face.
they cut through straw baskets,
through animals and plants,
through the heart of an ancient respect
woven across time.
=======================
3/23/26
4/29/25
8//3/24
Psychoactive plant used for visions and prophecies. I don't want to exploit or expropriate the culture of Native Peoples, and I do not have any wisdom in any of their many ways, across countless tribes. All I can say is that these words came out of me, this voice, so I wrote the poem, rightly or wrongly.
Not So Great
the Fathers invoked a heraldry of the linear,
eschewing the curves of natural shapes.
the Fathers crammed the wonder of the heavens
into a blue box of equidistant stars.
blood doesn’t flow straight like that. nor ivory.
beware such rigidified tongues and flesh.
beware the glint of the single squared Cyclops eye.
beware the cubic Tyrannosaur of the-many-into-one.
what if
the whitewashed blood and fangs and gleams,
and the sharp bursting bombs of red flare,
fell into a chastened heap?
what if
the indivisible stripes of Manifest Destiny
humbled themselves to coil among roots
on a winding riverbank of peace?
============================
8/26 ... changed last word again
8/7/25 ... changed a word
8/5/24 eds
US flag theme
Eagle Over Lake
shadow on aqua,
slow oval, an invisible turn
of current and figure.
keen of fang, water the skin,
a stray ripple
the neck.
white head, silver spine,
a wriggle hauled, puncutred,
gripped.
then nothing,
no one left,
a wisp within a photo.
no reflection,
slants just so.
brown flames, then.
brown flames and ivory embers.
=================================
7/26... 8/26 ... changed some words n stuff
8/7/25 ... mods ... someday my eagle will come.. or not.
8/24 ... mods
7/12/24 ... mods
A Moment of Rest
seconds dissolve
into universes dying.
we wear them in our thoughts like rain.
so many births
which struggle not to tire,
restless and relentless,
narcotic and aphrodisiac;
but completion
evolves to deny even as it tastes.
such explosions!
they seem inevitable,
passions gone, just like that,
obliterated on the canvas of the heart.
minds together, my mind, all minds,
a synchrony of similar originals,
configure the real. the globe
but, still, awe--
it is not faithful.
the beckoning path of god,
hearthstone, signpost, deathbed,
some. sometimes.
nothing less. or more.
will i see?
==================
8/7/24 ...
Stone Tell
orion looked at me,
size of a pinprick,
quiet from a stone
which i had scolded with my weeping.
cheekbone wet on mica flecks.
it was orion, for sure, after the pleiades,
over millions of metamorphic years,
much as in astronomic night--
and yet flashy like a kind adonis,
and not to ravish, not at all,
merely to scamper,
happy as sun-glossed quartz.
orion, he danced with the sisters,
leapfrogging to twinkle
in time with the turn of my wrist.
such lambent angles,
what a treasure!
to walk the beach
and find this secret constellation
which had been absolved by waves,
this wisdom,
however violent or jealous,
however monstrous,
now peaceful and beautiful,
nothing more to do with the cruel.
disaffiliated, yes, free now,
free to dance,
only glitter and truth.
=========================
8/25 ... slight change last stanza
8/10/24 eds
If the Big Lie Wins, We All Lose
The presidential election was not stolen from Donald Trump. Over fifty court cases have shown this, all
the way up to the Supreme Court, including many judges nominated by Trump
himself. Numerous state-run recounts have
verified it. GOP Secretaries of State as
well. There is no evidence to support
the claim at all. Still, the Big Lie remains, a battering ram to knock down the
defenses of our collective rationality. It
has become the faultline along which our democracy will either persevere or
fall.
This is a grave assertion, and yet it results from a simple
thought experiment: What if the GOP, promulgating
the Big Lie, wins?
In that case, a party
that willfully trampled a court-backed truth will be in control. They will have the support of a segment of
the population that is outraged at a nonexistent deep state that did something
that didn’t actually happen.
Moreover, given the nature of the Big Lie, our electoral system
will have been successfully impugned as fraudulent. Without a secure means to vote, the will of
the people cannot be ascertained.
At the helm will be the cultish Trump, a demagogue who incubated the Big Lie many months before the 2020 elections. Sitting on an established throne of conspiracy
theory, he need merely extend the Lie, or make up another, to curtail future
challengers.
Trump refused to agree to a peaceful transition of power,
both before and after he lost the election, saying only, “We’ll see what
happens.” Indeed, on January 6, after he
gave an inflammatory speech, his fanatic followers stormed the Capitol in an attempted
insurrection. Nothing like it has
happened since 1814, and then it was foreign invaders.
Trump’s rapacious need for praise is more important to him than
the survival of the republic. His niece,
Mary Trump, published a book titled “Too Much and Never Enough” in which she calls
him “the most dangerous man in the world.”
Experts in psychology nationwide published an anthology, “The Dangerous
Case of Donald Trump.” It diagnoses him as the most ruthless sort of narcissist,
and warns of extreme peril if such a person takes over.
What happens if a leader turns a nation into an arena for
self-glorification, regardless of damage to its people, traditions, and
fortunes? For starters, the loss of the ability
to wisely adapt to change. For someone who
can never be wrong, there can be no error.
Remember Trump’s absurd, contradictory claims during the
pandemic, even as the death toll rose?
Now extend that to any sort of major challenge, whether crisis or
opportunity. Climate, tech,
infrastructure, economics, cyberattacks, foreign policy and on and on. There would be only the subjective,
single-person strategy of someone focused on preening his own hungry ego.
When a constituency embraces their leader’s views, no matter how absurd, with the fervor of faith backed by a flimsy, deceitful logic of ‘alternate facts’, there is no need for competency, fairness, or accountability. Corruption runs rampant, as we’ve already seen during Trump’s time in the White House.
We have a recent historical example of what happens when god-complex
leaders rise to power in the strongest countries. That example is World War II. We still ask today, “Why did all that awfulness
and atrocity happen?”
Perhaps the answer lies in a perfect storm of dysfunctional
swarm dynamics. When you instill a
worshipful mindset of black or white, good or evil, with us or against us, love
or hate, then prudence, adaptive thinking and even common sense have no place.
==========
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