in certain junctures of a life/to stave off disbelief
the best thing to say is nothing
the best thing to do is nothing
the best thing to feel is nothing
.
not even Grief.
stunned
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one jan
o to survive the two oh two four hajj
now gives us riches like unto a raja
enabling empathy for jean valjean
Wabi and Sabi Squabble over Dabi
“Acceptance,” said Sabi, “is paramount.”
“Albinos,” said Wabi, “are weird.”
“You’ve weirdness yourself. Quite a fair amount.”
“You’re one to talk,” Weird Wabi sneered.
.
“Look. She’s got some eggs. Instant family!”
“Good point. I would be down with that.”
“Hey, Dabi, you’re IN,” Sab said hammily.
Thus ended the brief, perfect spat.
year today, gaunt a-morrow
they’re not making tinderboxes anymore/o well not as many as in years of yore
but we do not have a dwindling
of a huge supply of kindling
in the form of fissile weaponry in store
we never’ve really had a peace on earth/and of enlightenment there is a dearth
but december thirty-first
will see fireworked missiles burst
since we all still live & breathe for all we’re worth
and saith the preacher let us feast & drink/after all our time on earth is but a blink
and throughout our raddled history
there’ve been cliffs and here’s the mystery
we have always muddled past them don’t youAAAAAaaaaa a a a a…..
Happy New Year, Friends, especially to those of you who keep Doom from devouring us all. Here’s hoping that the coming years bring a hard-won maturity to our efforts, and that we the people of this globular starship stop making deadly, life-ending contraptions that perpetuate conflict and hinder our attainment of the Peace On Earth we all so passionately desire.
Personal note: I am ending 2024 having written at least one poem or quasi-poem or fable or reflection every single day since July 25th, making 160 consecutive days. Doing so helped me understand what it would be like to be the mythical Sheherazade, weaving word-nets nightly under penalty of death. Here is a link to that story about storytelling.
Come-On
President-Elect Donald Trump (not a Hoax! not a Dream! not an Imaginary Tale!) now warns…
Drum-roll and eye-roll, please…
That unless the Biden Administration acts to address the debt-ceiling issue before he takes office in three weeks and a day, there will probably be a Depression.
Some people still take him seriously, even though “baseless claims” is one of the favorite ways journalists describe things he says.
Oh, by the way, in case you didn’t notice, he wants to buy Greenland and make Canada the fifty-first United States of America. And just in case you didn’t notice the historical record, this is consistent with the dark side of American History known as Manifest Destiny. Thieves in power have throughout American history stolen or swindled or otherwise indecently acquired just about all of what is called America. The short answer to the question “Why, in the name of all that’s decent, do they do this?” is “Decency has nothing to do with it.”
He is also reported to be “walking back” many of his more apocalyptic campaign promises.
And his bromance with Elon “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Musk continues, enraging a few of his minions.
And George Stephanopoulos apologized to him for calling him a rapist and not merely a sexual assailant.
There is poetry in this. After all, “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg is considered just as much a poem as is “To My Daughter” by Weldon Kees, which follows the Sonnet format down dark, corrosive corridors. And Ginsberg started his poem by asserting that good minds have been driven mad.
I don’t know how good my mind is, but I do know that I am a lot madder that I was half a year ago.
Writing a screed about the Great American Come-On is the least I can do, since I am anti-violence but am just as virulently anti-being-violated, both as an American and as a child of Mother Earth.
And, speaking of Mother Earth, does everyone notice that the land Trump covets will be the last havens north of Antarctica from the ravages of global warming? The same global warming that “Drill, Baby, Drill” will exacerbate?
Coincidence, Friends…or Co-Incidents?
Literally, and urgently, I implore all with a conscience and courage to get The Hell out of Here
before it’s too late.
hand
with one hand we can speak. with two we can applaud. a surgeon cited hands as proof
of the existence of God.
a hand with age might hurt and hurt. arthritis, carpal tunnel. but a chrono-synclastic infundibulum
is a fictitious, time-warping funnel.
that last may seem quite off-the-wall with from-the-subject strand, but it all ties in when you are told
that this arthritic, Carpal-Tunnel-Syndrome-blighted admirer of Kurt Vonnegut wrote this thing you are reading just to give Kurt a posthumous
hand.
.
Note: The Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum and its fascinating properties may be found in The Sirens of Titan, one of the richest, most entertaining flights of imagination I have ever read.
Trudgedown
A Touchdown is Attainment of a Goal.
There are many ways to describe the gaits we have used in the course of a long lifetime. No single word can capture how a marathoner whose calves cramped up at the seventeen-and-a-quarter point of the race and who wrestled with despair and dehydration the other nine-plus miles of the footrace at last crosses the finish line, but the invented word Trudgedown is a fair approximation.
A Trudgedown is Redemption of the Soul.
sobbing uncontrollably
a baby sobs uncontrollably after unrequited hunger or hurtful startlement smite her.
a young lover sobs unrelievedly in the face of permanent, preventable, hormone-driven loss.
a soldier sobs for the rest of his life, haunted by the phantasms of life-changing mayhem.
ah, but the ocean throbs and sobs with the orphaning of her children and the unsustainable slaughterhouse her depths have become, and she weeps more tears than ever humanity has.
let us not sob for that. let us atone.
new and used genies
two genies walk into a bar. they look like father and son but are in fact twin brothers. the one who looked older had had a callous, uncaring master, whose wishes involved interference in the laws of nature and whose wish-fulfillment took its toll on his genie’s very essence. the other genie, the one in the thousand-dollar business suit, had for a master an investment banker who required only personal training and insider knowledge.
they had both been recently freed by a celestial equivalent of an ethics committee, who granted them amnesty from thralldom but also reduced their reality-shifting powers to a mere trickle. they were going to the bar to discuss what they ought to do.
“”what’ll it be, fellas?” the busty, intricately-tattooed bar lady asked them.
“do you know how to make a cloaked scarab?” inquired the genie who looked older.
“i don’t yet…” she said, but then scrunched her eyes, and a boingy sound straight out of I Dream of Jeannie accompanied the eye-scrunching, “but now i do. sorry, i don’t have all the ingredients. a Scorpion with a dash of worcestershire sauce would be close.”
“that, then,” said the “father.”
“make it two,” said the “son.”
in an hour they were half-drunk, professing their love for each other, weepy-eyed. the “younger” grabbed his brother by the back of his neck while looking deeply into his eyes. “share and share a like.” there was a flash and suddenly they were truly identical twins again, splitting the wealth and the age disparity, so that they both had salt-and-pepper hair and well-cut but off-the-rack suits.
“time for grand adventures,” said the bar lady. she pulled out a lamp from under the bar and rubbed it.
HER identical twin came out of the lamp, conserva.tivrly dressed and u tattooed.
sparks flew. the two pairs of twins paired up. the bar lady flipped the neon OPEN switch off, drew the blind, locked the door, and whistled. a rolled-up carpet in a corner went aloft, scooped them all up, and took them through the skylight to their Destiny
ffff-kus
four-eff means unfit/for military service./hannibal lecter.
(If closed captioning transcribes the bone-chilling sound Anthony Hopkins improvised in Silence of the Lambs, I suspect it would read “F-f-f-f.”)
.
fluff a pillow/to enable attainment/of its potential.
.
festival vestments/and their divestiture/invest foofoorah.
.
freelance fred free-falls/fleeing felonious/fierce flighty fighters.
.
compassionate giant/hesitates whilst Jack escapes:/”fee, fie..foe….fumfuh…….”
(one nifty aspect of the use of lowercase in poetry is that when you throw in something uppercase it becomes oddly emphatic. Since Jack is the star of the fairy tale “Jack and the Beanstalk” it’s appropriate to emphasize him.)
(Grateful acknowledgment to the late author Harlan Ellison for using the Yiddish-derived “fumfuh” in one of his talking-to-the-reader introductions. It is more commonly spelled “fumfer” but I like Ellison’s variant better.)
.
“fini” means The End./”Finito Mussolini”/may well describe…
(The ending of the final ‘ku is left as an exercise for the reader. [smiley face])
One with Clay, Image and Text 