US versus They

It is a plot to divide US

It is a ruse to stimulate a surplus of national pride in US

It is a ploy, we are the toys.

They use trigger words to incite, to goad and prod US along

As though branding were everything, to US

As though we wanted nothing more than blue fescue, rather than

greener grass, voracious verdant vines with bosky blades as tall as bamboo, success.

They use hot keys to gain entry into our pockets and private dark places.

They use races sorted by skins as friendly competition

They pull heart strings and the wrong note reverberates.

Here.

The game must have players who want to win.

The business must have buyers who need to lose some extra cash.

The nation needed a nemesis, they wish hate was more common than sense,

It was

Easier

To fight

US.



Artwork By Lily Furedi (Smithsonian American Art Museum) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Captains Log: February 9th 21st century

Marine fog has come

and gone all day, it is similar, the same,
the way Gaston B was obsessed with this very mist

I muse over its movements in particulate.

Blue skies peek through,

a thin cloud rolling by,

and it has settled, for Now

rested thick, wet and multiple times

it is a clear day, others say, just on the other side…

It does stop us, coordinately 

from believing what we see. See evidently

I am most grateful for our limited scope,
as far as hope floats

it is the certainty we would choke
on the very air we need

if only we could see how Primo Levi detects the miasma
that hovers above all smoky cities. 

A gritty plume, caustic and lye, and lie like

light always gets to you.

No machete necessary, under a chenille throw of clouds.

No doubt it always will get through to someone,
as it has always done,
before the big banging and seed sowing.

Before the smoke there must be fire,

Before we could relate to the sky speaking in sea,

Collecting the mood in glimmers and vapors

The fog finally makes it all clear.

It was something in the air, where the light broke in

And scattered array.

Image credit by Tuxyso / Wikimedia Commons, via Wikimedia Commons.

Where Art thou Writer?

I tried to paint black cows on a moonless night,

it never came out right, 12 times out of ten,

but then I added blue and I knew

I was not a painter,

so I quit for a bit.

I tried cleaning

Once

I tried mapping, lists, and other gists of things,

All of which turned out were wrong.

then I wrote, and wrote and wrote

without periods,

and tried and tried to stop the words whizzing

by, arrest and test, to find the best ones.

I was fooled, I failed again and again

picking pyrite on sight,

my carbon spilt into lead,

took nothing out but blood,

a flood of it and died on the page.

Now the cows can sleep peacefully,

if only I could see.

Artwork by Paulus Potter (c. 1647) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

A more & A greater than

Z sing iz, the buzz on thee,

Love is too little, jolie, jolie, jolie,

Je t’adore. Je t’ aime. Jest a phaze

Pshaw, lust must pass away.

Love’s haze, amazes me, truly,

enamored in deceitful enamel,

this shine, all mine, in Love.

Trivial, no? Failure in this,

is mans kind demise,

dismissal of duality

a potential of casualty-

could be more…

In love,

first, then find.

F is force, for P, probability

E is of course our energy, and

why, z axis, a spot on a plane

two dimensions entwined,

I find lines hold space,

needing each other just as much

for meaning and definition,

listen...

it sounds like hummmmm

with i 

and feels like u.


Painting by Joshua Reynolds, 'Mrs. Abington as Miss Prue in Love for Love' (1771) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. 

Some Irk & Blaspheme

That is it, 

what really bothers me is those,

those people with those thoughts 

that are so sheltered, she steamed at me.

Yes, that is what I said, 

the soul is located in the brain, pointing to his head, 

this older man said.

Why must you always go so deep, rhetorically, another time she fumed.

Free! Relatively...another he replied to me on a different day.

How obnoxious! 

My son observed an erratic driver cutting everyone off, he was late that day anyway. 

Dad got a raise. He splurged on a bunch of stuff and bought a brand new bed, 

my son said recently.

It won’t help him sleep at night, 

cash cannot secure him peace, I did not say. 

Absurd. 

All           Of           It.

Blasphemy.

Words have holes 

to sift and sieve fluffing up

some irk. 

“Blasphemy is an intelligence-based skill gem that when linked to curses, turns them into auras with 35% mana reservation.”- http://poehub.info/blasphemy/


Painting by Gustave Courbet, (1843-44) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

How the ship went down

He wont go in, I asked him.
He said it is too c-c-cold.

It is February, someone said.

I thought it was warmer here,
that's what you said,

Spoke the brother man
I just met,
he then looked at
me.

He pretended to be misled
by the change in latitude.
Lightly making light
of this ceremonious process.

I looked around
for any familiar
faces.
The sun setting
cast a candle glow
on all of them.

The wind picked up
random pieces,
stirring us
salt and water
with mixed drinks.

Fifty-five and a half million lives lost
every year-two dozen ships sink.

"Relatively," I confessed,
unrelated to any
body.

And we were oceanside
all together,
a family,
not mine but with me doing this rite,

the ships sailed back to the harbor,
we all watched the pterodactyls pass
hugging the shoreline,
then seagulls in vees
watching us hug back.

We saw him now
scale down the riprap,
clutching the carved wooden box
in his left hand,
the waves rushed in to
meet him first

and he did not look back at us
looking over the edge
once.
He would not hear
the group of us
cheering
this man, these two men in the sea

fighting to stand,
fighting to let go
the sand, the ashes

and I saw that he was sobbing.
Silently, softly,
his shoulders shook
against the crisp horizon
in the last light
of that day.

He would have wanted it that way
is all his golden child could
grasp onto long enough
to say...

(This evening now gone,
peaceful bones, now resting deep
I thank the tide
for the grainy souls
it keeps
moving us
to live
without
wasting any more time)


Painting by William Bauly Lithography by Sarony, Major & Knapp [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Making myself scarce

When the door latches,
when it is only me
in this shrinking body,

when all I must do
is what I must,

when I start to feel lucky
I must be blessed,

when I am rested
I think of aging,

when I am tired
I remember dying,

when I wake up
when I reach for a pen,

I am alive. I am living.



Image credit Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, 1840 self portrait in[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.