Strum Duck (Haiku)

Are you not afraid

that the more you learn, the less

you'll have to say? Yes.

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. 

Dependent Upon (Self-Reliance) Emerson

*This poem is an assemblage and reconstruction of various fragments of text from “Self-Reliance” (Essay) written by Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841. (See photo credit below)

Dependent Upon (Self-Reliance) Emerson

All philosophy is at fault

Plastic and permeable principles

Perception is not whimsical, it is fatal

Our reading is medicant and sycophantic

What is called life and what is called death

We know not how in the soul, is not diverse is explained

Life has no memory, is only for itself

What petty oracles

Wicked dollar alms: sots

Life not only avails, not the having lived

Cannot spend the day in explanation

A great man is coming to eat at my house

To be great is to be misunderstood

Rich men poets are not

Greatness appeals to the future

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence

Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions

My giant goes with me wherever I go

I must be myself

Do not seek outside yourself

Trust thyself

Do that which is assigned to you and you cannot hope too much or dare too much

Besides, all persons have their moments of reason

We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death and afraid of each other

We are parlour soldiers

By now we are a mob

Society is a wave

History resolves itself

The great genius returns to essential man

As if everything were titular and ephemeral but he

That man is the word made flesh

He who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude

Grief too will make us idealists

Foolish face of praise

The intellect is vagabond and out system of education fosters restlessness and indebtedness

So that the walls of the system blend to their eye

It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means and machinery

The magnetism which all original action exerts

The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree

From things, from space, from light, from time

The sum total of both is the same

Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes but the soul is light.

In the remote horizon with the walls of the universe

Advancing on chaos and dark

A Greenwich nautical almanac he has

No other data for computing our orbit

Requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design

All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being

Insignificant to the curve of the sphere

The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation

Scatters your force, loses your time, blurs the impression

All philosophy is at fault

Do not believe it

A man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head

Image of Son of Ralph Waldo Emerson via Houghton Library @ Harvard University. By Photographer unidentified [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. ( Please include this citation: "bMS Am 1280.235 (706.17), Houghton Library, Harvard University" as its source. In the event that any of the media files infringes your rights or the rights of any third parties, or file is not properly identified or acknowledged, we would like to hear from you so we may make any necessary alterations. In this event, please contact: Houghton_Library@harvard.edu)

A (One) Way with Words

Bang my head on the keyboard
or Edit, and it's still not there.
Stab myself with a pen-
blood doesn't flow like ink.
I'm not going deep enough.
Wrestle with words and choices,
so many I swoon, dizzy with dialect.
Research always interrupts, conniving
cuts the line midsentence.
Doubt-well, you know.
If I stop all together it's too much.
If I let go completely it's too much
evasive etymology
and not just the words that wander...
I'm led all over elsewheres, other places
by memories, imagery, crap-aphony noise
vying for my prompt attention!

And then, when I push hard enough
to leave a mark.
By means of suffocation,
I can feel the pulse intensity.
The louder the heart beats the page
blue and red
and when it's read
I know my fear shows
how I really feel
as I instead tell you
taking my final breath
choking on my ink.
Finally, dead and gone,
without ever leaving a mark.




Image of painting by Henry Wallis [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, 1856. 

An Other Song on the Jukebox Baby

Today seems like a good day to burn a bridge or two.

The sky resembles a backlit canopy with holes punched in it.

In California with my toes in the sand, head in the clouds but my gravity centered,

‘Cause I’m sick of not living to stay alive.

And I’m just a student of the game they taught me-

Maybe I’m a different breed. Maybe I’m not listening.

Breathe out so I can breathe you in…

We will burn inside the fire of a thousand suns!

…but everything looks perfect from far away, Come down now,” but we’ll stay.

And what about your soul? Is it cold? Is it straight from the mold and ready to be sold?

Just a drop of water in an endless sea...

It’s something unpredictable, but in the end it’s right. I hope you had the time of your life.

Lyric song/artist credits by line:

1. Beautiful Disaster/311

2. Wish you were Here/Incubus

3. The Neighborhood/Sweater Weather

4. All I Want/Offspring

5. When they come for me/Linkin Park

6. AWOLNation/ Sail

7. Foo Fighters/Everlong

8. Requiem/Linkin Park

9. Great Heights/Postal Service

10. Jack Johnson/Gone

11. Kansas/Dust in the Wind

12. Time of your life/Green Day

Image By Highsmith, Carol M. (http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2011630479/) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, described as Juke box museum in Texas.

Simpatico (Syn.)

By 'association' (Miriam Websters Thesaurus)
                          -to assume-ah-to make an-
No-it says next: -to seize, to snatch (and grab)
-I presume my position-
Resume my judgement
             my angle, view, slant
Take        (it for what it is)  It=Is
standable (under-un)
incomprehensible
inconceivable
get it?
Believe you me!
You would not believe me if I told you-
what's Next?
It could happen.
What is It?
What does It mean?
By definition, used to refer
Chaos by Random, Assoc.




Image By Lewis Hine [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, Boy Studying 1924.
               
         

A Skybroom or Windwisk

Where there is wind
Why not-
Fill the air with nothing
but conflicting directions?
Roar with static,
bumping jabs of hot-cold
thrust through if it must
as though it is nothing but
A natural occurrence.
A nuisance. Non-sense
of white noise, endless sighs
of discontent, lamenting
leaves fray like nerves.
Shooting blanks, synapses short
fireback with backfeed too high.
Determined to go Nowhere,
Now with haphazard intents,
mischief is made,
trepidation is mistaken as
raw with ennui.

There it all goes...
This too shall pass...
Giving the barbaric wind
a safe place to play,
with words like To and Fro
and don't forget, Let Go-
Blowing away
my uprooted mind
freed from knowing
how heavy
we should have been
bolted down.



Image of painting by John William Waterhouse [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.