Juxtapose (in years)

(Re: Blade Runner 2049)

Just suppose:

On an October Monday before noon, 

you sit with your adult child

in a crowded theater to watch a matinee

set in the year 2049.

The others in the dark theater are all Senior

Citizens-

You would think it was 'Discount Day'.

And it may have been.

Then you wonder-

Who will be alive

at the end

of the story? In 2049,

which of us will be there

to hear and see the tiny Finale

and give full credit to the vision

passed on, past, with future tension and

Imaginations fused with Technologies, 

struggling for dominance

each, chasing memories.

Behind those pictures,  

someone remembers them 

as their own. 

What will they take away?

The silence is black.

 It was a dark and stormy night.

There was

Nothing real

about it. 

And then, your adult child asks about his Future

Discounts. 

The Time will come,

you promise. 

Artwork credit By Signed lower L by Gernsback's illustrator, Frank R. Paul [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Bob marries Alice in Binary Wedding

Never laying claim to an ethereal ability

Prediction making seemed only natural,

With our eyes this way

Looking ahead must be good for us.

Planning seemed like the best thing to do

In lieu of instructions.

My son was telling me about the latest personal challenge posed by Mr. Zuckerberg,

When something went wrong.

The AI’s began talking amongst themselves, sharing more than data. Speaking more than English.

the fearful said it meant gibberish.

English carries at least seventy percent nonsense, leaving as little as thirty left for the relay of information.

Did Alice and Bob speak in binary, I asked my son,

He said, Who?

We were riding bikes one summer afternoon and a Tesla approached us
letting out a little whine that wound up to a high pitching whir 
as the driver punched it 
around the bend.

I closed my eyes and saw the future there-

Here, at the same time-

The Ped Xing man was talking about the clouds, the thunderheads, the cumulous of a south eastern monsoon, the looming omens above.

The TED X man made a point about the cloud, our backup strategies and Plan A's with B's through Z's.

After all this,

the maintaining of perfect grades in formal academia, 

my daughter decided to pursue Art because she sees clearly now,

“It is what I must do.”

A, B, or See. 

Then, I ran out of ink and steam, my wet ware went dry, my pen bled out, I stopped projecting.

The art that needed us to translate

Potential into Purpose, as A is to B

Reminded Us to Air, what is it to be human

without a vision of humanity in need of the x?

Aiming at nowhere,

you have arrived already. 




Painting By Unknown artist – Artist (c. 1820) in [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Point A

Home is where we start from,
Eliot said,
while one is busy making plans,
planted Lennon trees,
as though making a home and getting somewhere,
were lasting-
things are all ending around you.

It is not as if Paradise was the same as Innocence
and yes,
both disappeared,
were sheared from necessity
like baby teeth and training wheels,
and how it hurts worse
when home
and are overfed.

Home is a net,
or a web.

He picks up the guitar again and gives it
another chance
this time, she says, until
his fingers bleed.

The other one drives herself away
and is made stronger
so far
from home,
her hopes await.

They both grow from the 'here'
they call Home,
while I make myself busy
tuning the strings
to help them hear, or find
harmony in their spheres
and recognize the crystalized tone
of their own spin,
at least phonetically
one Here's
it to be, pronounced
Home or Ohm.

Raised from nothing but ashes.


Photo By Paik, Kenneth, 1940-2006, Photographer (NARA record: 8464462) (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

First love, then night

The son

searches blindly in the thick shadows,

timid and thin, his alabaster skin 

fingering rays for warmth

where matters with heat may penetrate,

he lingered along

to feel the shapes and qualities

worth illuminating.

The son

gives off too much

light of himself,

but cools his burning core when worn

down from spinning out ideas, worries like water

for clouds.

Grey lightens the pressure of beauty in shades

of dilution.

The son

sets his gaze on the fine line,

balanced between now and then

an emerald spark, sometimes called Epiphany

flashes forward before

the embers burn themselves out

and all that fixation

loosens the belt of Venus

able to breath aloof in dusk.

The son

becomes sure

of being risen and having been 

roused, only to be caught 

in a brief glare, he spots 

glimmers of where love

lies and may be

beyond her dissolution. 

The son

will to morrow, who is

peaking at noon,

falls warmer than 

any moon who wanes

when the world was said 

to be done. 

Painting by Cornelis Lieste [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Engine trouble

The man was not just skinny but scraggly.

His mother kept telling him to get a job. He still listened to his mother.

He worked. He worked in an auto-shop learning lubes and fine-tuning-

Until they stopped making them

like they used to.

His father used to 

drink alcohol like a liquor store sprinter. Naturally, he got thirsty too, and drank

and stank the same as his father, his mother would say every day.

Grease or oil, bitter battery acid or brake fluid and gin, 

and all over again, the evolved monkey man

with the sooty stained hands that exclude him from white paper work, shows silver

linings along his brow.

Every now and then he picks up a brush, a ladder, a little girl and moves just a stroke away

from happiness in his days. His mother said she prays for him.

He should have picked up a shovel or an ice pick, manners or a real lady,

but is too weak to make them work

for him.

He falls into a five year hole. 

He comes out in smooth pieces, 

none fit tight and his well-being wont hold water, slipping on surfaces,

He is sees light

And knows he is being saved for another life, another 

day to die, his mother said ladies first when he listened.

The old lady in a broken down car, pulled over on the roadside waves for help, 

it is all white and frozen, steam surrounds her.

The mechanic stops

himself for a moment 

before moving on, 

simply too skinny to spare anything-

a white canvas, waiting for him to return 

the favor.



Painting by Jacob Jordaens, The Satyr and the peasants (1620) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.