Showing posts with label news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label news. Show all posts

Sunday, September 1, 2019

Fake news


Poetry is dead
The news went unannounced
the morning after
nothing significant happened
overnight, like the falling
of a star
none had ever heard
of.

All extermination outside
control is an infinitesimal iota
or inkling of discontentedness.

People are anxious and sad-
ly digressing.

These people around us,
called Friends,
dwell in a hive,
it is known to be
unsafe to stick one's arm
or neck out-
side.

Neither milk nor honey were effective
remedies
for the human condition
of bread and blood and jealousy and revenge.

Fact check: adding prescriptions won't remove you-
unless taken as instructed.

Poetry is often, by Anonymous.

All gossip is fast food.

There were reports of random rhymes and recently
too much illicit alliteration which went awry from
strict poetics, dismissed originality, refused mint-
ability and silently went about matching cases
where poetry became art and art made life
(more) poetic.

And yet it was always so,
documented.

Footnote: the value of 1,000 words has decreased significantly.
All photos have become 'Public Property'.

Religion has been resurrected for persecution.
Nothing is sacred.
Nobody is scared.
All coincidence is evidence of Magic.
And maybe
it was miraculous
and newsworthy,
Poetry was written
encoded into our genetics,
like the language
found on the tip of our tongues.

It feels good to roll your R's.



Painting by Francis Luis Mora, 'Morning News', c.1912 in San Diego Museum of Art in Public Domain.





Thursday, February 15, 2018

Scissor Sprinter


This poem is dedicated to Shaun White, who won his third Olympic gold medal in the Men's Half-pipe snowboarding competition February (12) 13, 2018.


While everyone watched frozen under flat light,
the announcers named the tricks as if they had
a secret menu with special combination numbers;
"Double McTwist twelve-sixty, front-side double cork
fourteen-forty, backside one-eighty" and on and off
from -helicopter height, the windows were rolling up,
and up and- they kept saying, it's like
"Running with Scissors",
"Running with Scissors"-

And on the rails,
the blades were dicing ice cubes into flakes
and carving deep lines no body falling
under Newton's law should follow.

As if the white backdrop was not ghastly enough,
the fretted intensity was only further
ratcheted around by the foot-pound, experience
is no receipt and injuries, grand slams, more curdling visions of
gore galore, with winces and
careening through the barrel came this dominant figure
with a thundering force of Nowness
and such intense Presence-
the crowd sensed this-
and like tea-kettles gathering steam the people
whined while he calmly rocks, they all speculate, he breathes
the wind screams, GO-
Now
outside of this high-pitched rapture-
white noise-froth and heartbeat-
he hurls himself aloft into the thin mountain air.
An Olympian finds himself folding and
forged with steel will, armed against all avalanches
gathering doubt,
gravity does not all ways
get her way.
Not today.

He insists his mortal self against the elements,
in hot white floods of force and musculature
tightened to the verge of splintering and fraying
at every fibrous ending,
without terminus, such as manifest dreams
repeat victories, underdogs and hometown hero's-
ending up, and up- upon frozen water afloat
and mindful of sharp edges,

-Suspended-
in the plane

gliding

victorious and humbled,
the competitor maintains his position
needing more blank space to trace his lines,
he finds reams of paper to shred,
and this Scissor Sprinter salivates
gathering the gauze of this paper plane pulp
to soak up the blood of mistake with stars and stripes.

So Sochi seems like destiny.
Challenge accepted.
Regret is erased with White.

Sweeter, this time, his sheer act of execution
in this balancing craft of the one versus self,
trenches a pipe-line between seeing
and being seen, striking gold
and going for gold,
performance and performance,
tomatoes being thrown at you
or being known
as the thrown one
at eighteen, twenty-two and thirty-one.

Overcome,
he has raised the gold bar.

[The Olympian brings waves of joy to quiet homes
on a Tuesday evening in the seaside town of Carlsbad.
The residents run to get the Wednesday paper
whereby, 
front and center, the Golden Boy
brings home the rarest thing of all-
(Real) Good News from Korea!]



Photograph By Sarkavagyan (Own work), 'Winter in Armenia' in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.




Monday, September 11, 2017

The Benefits of Oatmeal


Murder with breakfast, a sig alert for a fatality on the 5
before noon, then murder at dinner, leftovers again
as my heavy head hits the pillow-
Murder one-more time-a crime scene.
Alibi? Where was I? Lying low, while racing through thoughts,
I can feel my pulse-and stop and start-and I wonder,

am I feeling empathy? Guilty? Ceaseless. Peaceless.
Is this some sort of social
conditioning or mental shampoo?
We have all been too close to death
by now to tell each other Murder is not new News.
Another full round moon awaits
ahead. Some body’s namesake, a chunk off
The old rock.
There is a natural selection, population control,
denizens of indifference, disinterest, in de-
sensitizing the kind man.

Now Brand New! Tried and True!
Oatmeal is good for your heart.
It’s better with bananas-if you do not mind starch
All day strong on mushy trails while mixing
Cement for filling ruts.
Routines, like rituals, are set-up hopefully.

Warm and heavy, we live despite ourselves
simply not wanting to die.
The rest is bleeding out,
One drop per second
or all the mushy stuff
That caulks our gaps and seals our
fate, satisfied

Until tomorrow.


Painting by Willard l. Metcalf, The ten cent breakfast, 1887 in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Friday, November 20, 2015

Blunting the News



(November 13th, 2015) Paris, France, along with the entire world watching, was violently terrorized by radicals. After recently reading an essay by George Orwell titled, "Politics and the English Language", originally published in 1946, I noticed Orwell was on to something. The author notes in his essay the abundance of cliched, trite, jargon and excessive emotive vocabulary particularly found in political writings, news pieces infiltrating the mainstream media's messages. Linked here in its entirety, it is a thought-provoking read 70 years later. Powerful, meaningful language does not lose potency (poignancy) with time.
The following poem was composed by using the text of a CNN article and omitting all excessive, (what could be construed as) vague, or frivolous, emotive words. Those eliminated, discarded words (sometimes strings) are presented in order here, in the form of a poem.


Blunting the News


The prevailing emotion is now fear.
Fear that anywhere and anyone could be a target.
A sudden noise, the air is thick with sirens.
Controlled suspect terror
took the lives.
The French capital is in a somber mood.
Dozens, tripling France’s ability to bomb,
sweeping powers were
rallied with massive demonstrations.
A celebration of diversity,
a coming together of faiths and ethnicities,
most cultural, but fractious.

A dozen leapt.
The landscape has changed.
Tens of thousands
of would be abandoned,
blighted by conflict, trekked.
Vast and also shown ever greater
ambitions beyond.
Now sounds much more menacing,
Erosion of trust.
Quiet, some in tears, queued
A subdued, eloquent, leading, loose, inflicted, sophisticated
and presumably financed and infiltrated.
Shocking display, young, wage, more disturbing still
at least four plots this year alone.
Candid about the security situation,
clear, have chastened.
Palpable episodes will follow
promised after months later.
Anxiety has been heightened the by comments,
according to United States officials, equipped concern,
exploiting products, reforms of intelligence, bear fruit.
The threat is immediate.
External borders, deflecting blame,
criticizing the border controls of others,
senses an opportunity, will bring terrorism.
Hoping to benefit mentality regional
sense of siege, perhaps best demonstrated by the declaration
passed almost unanimously, gives, allows,
invariably in the blighted banlieues that ring many towns.
Especially the young, divorced and disowned by society,
inhabit a world, become radicalized, shabby
neighborhood, placed whole, an hour’s drive away
looks down on the world’s media.
Holds surrounded, representing liberty, equality and fraternity.
The second time this year flowers are being laid-
perhaps ideals.




“…modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.” 
-George Orwell

Image of painting by Édouard Manet [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, At the Cafe, circa 1879. 

Friday, October 30, 2015

Bugging me (Tanka)


The paper hits the
floor, under the fold it says
loudly, a purpose,
look inside, between
last words: splat, flat, gnat, take that!













Image by Yva [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Tres (trace)

Water Today, warm raindrops glass blurs, the blurry glassy, sharp sparkles sugar. Behind Evening, it was good. Leaves all turned into shadow...