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The Parker Brothers game of world domination

hostile takeover risk assessment

the game of risk involves countries and troops and weaponry

and chance in the form of cards and dice

and is vaguely analogous to historical conquest

but the parker brothers game of risk

is a much better fit to corporate hostile takeovers

in that they that have gold make the rules

and it is a zero-sum game with winners and losers

..

but in the horrible game played by the current regime

rules of engagement have gone out the window

cheating isn’t cheating if you win

lies told are just more pieces on the board

..

fellow people of earth

there are too many downtrodden as it is

letting this situation continue to deteriorate

is much

too

risky

I like Cate Blanchett and Ben Stiller and Mandy Patinkin and his loving wife and Gabby Giffords and her loving husband

So when they ask me to stop scrolling and pay attention and cough up I feel so bad when I only do two out of three

Having exceeded my 2025 charitable contributions budget by a factor of 2.5 or so

But I wish them well

And I’ll catch them in 2026 after I complete my expensive uprooting and transplanting

If conditions still obtain

If the world remains unexploded

If I and my loving Sweetheart are still here and together

..

Meanwhile the only thing I ask of you and the rest of my friends

Is ask yourself:

“Have I done as much giving as taking?”

It is the one thing that will rightly inform your actions regarding charitable contributions

And it’s healthy

To pay attention

To yourself.

O how I want The Ed Sullivan Show

I want good cheer and decency

James Stewart and Donna Reed (and The Donna Reed Show)

I want civil rights and equal opportunity

Double-feature movies

Bazooka Joe gum for a penny and you got a tiny comic strip too

I want moms yelling for their kids for supper from the front porch

Hide-And-Go-Seek

John F. Kennedy after the Cuban missile crisis and before his assassination

..

For the record America has always been deeply flawed

There has never not been racism

Never not been corruption in high places

But there has always been a beating, striving heart

And now all the strings are being pulled by the heartless

And in the Oval Office is a megalomaniac who makes Alexander the Great almost look like a shrinking violet

It is not the country I grew up believing we could have

It is the country worse than my nightmares

..

Good people are fighting tooth and nail to get my country back

Bad people are threatening them with death

And have in fact killed some of them

We The People includes saints and murderers

And You The Person have the power to fight the evil

Please fight

Be decent and good and stand up to bullying

Be thoughtful and kind and march and pray and vote

Be heroic

It is not too late

let’s pick a warning label

homicidal if exposed is succinct

the boy king asked Russia to find her e-mails

and his henchman says ‘kill them all’

..

transparent if scrutinized works too

boy king wants Greenland

which in a heartbreakingly few years

will become one of the last livable places

and he works tirelessly to make this planet less inhabitable, with the grinning help of the prince with the bone saw fetish, equally homicidal if exposed

but there’s not enough room on Greenland for former legal US residents and the Saudi Arabian royal family too

so he’s imposed a quota of 3000 deportations a day

to thin the herd before he herds the rest

to the last bit of green

..

boy king got in a little trouble for boinking a porn star

and then killing the story with 130 grand

so that he could become king

..

he is a real prince of a king

with his trading cards and other ikonography

a wannabe pope and gunslinger and superman too

and yet ask a follower and they thank God he is king

and add that the despicable Left

would destroy our country if we let them

..

something is rotten in non-Denmark, my friends

it is time to scour the Shire

o flow and ebb go lofty thoughts go interest rates go astronauts and like the tide the beach is littered with driftwood kelp and dreams embittered

we school we strive we get professional as hair and hopes become recessional whilst meters run and turnstiles click and pinpoint chaos makes us sick

home stretch is full of yawn and laze and cortex blurs our minds to haze as vultures wheel as heirs lick chops to flutter in when heartbeat stops

but i am here to tell you reader that your fine self is your best leader and striving’s in you for to go into the midst

turn ebb to flow

first let’s establish what SOTM stands for/and later i will beg for it to stand for something else

SOTM stands for Show Ourselves The Money

and is pronounced, unsubtlely enough, Sodom

I felt SOTMized this last election cycle/because i wanted a few candidates to win so badly/that i contributed modest amounts to their campaigns

and to this day, almost seven weeks after the election,/ALL of those candidates,/and some of their pals as well,/are hounding me/and pleading with me/and guilt-tripping me/and badgering me

to Show Ourselves The Money/(the Ourselves being the candidates, of course)

to give them more for next time/because the bad guys are outspending us

i want this bloodsucking buggerish nonsense to stop

because the implication is Whoever Has The Most Money Wins

and Decency and Right vs. Wrong do not seem to matter

so i am begging everyone to change the paradigm

and please make SOTM stand for Something Other Than Money

.

other more civilized countries put money in its place/and limit campaign spending

let us learn from their example

for i cannot sit comfortably with this going on–

can you??

isogi

the gun carnage now includes
sympathy for the devil

the devil’s base is fortified
their bloodied hero
using the same word he used
to get them mobbed up
and storming the citadel of the Republic:

‘fight’

the good guys are stunned
and wondering what body blow is next
and how our country
can possibly avoid
a repressive dictatorship

since ‘fight’ has already been appropriated
here is another effort-word:

‘isogi’

it is medieval Japanese for ‘pull’
and saw service in the novel SHOGUN
by james clavell
when pilot Blackthorne had his ship
in the jaws of a typhoon
and the only chance for the crew’s survival
was for the oarsmen to pull on the oars
with all of their might;
with more than their might; with
superhuman effort

“ISOGI!!!” screamed the Anjin-San
and put into his demanding voice
an elixir of strength

and in so doing
was himself transformed
from a foreign devil
into a formidable ally

and the ship and crew were saved
because the oarsmen
did the impossible

so you
you who are worried sick
that the country as we know it
is going down in flames

you have a job to do
you have the impossible to do

but your weapons are sense
and REAL patriotism
and the sure knowledge
that your cause is just

so let us grip our oars
let us defy the typhoon
and pull beyond all

I S O G I

2022 0523 ak15

Part of love of country includes acknoledgment and ownership of its failings. My country, the United States of America, has a shameful record of gun violence against schoolchildren. It goes back decades. And every time a fresh incident heartbreakingly occurs, the sellers and fanatical owners of guns trot out the same arguments, including “Guns don’t kill people–people do.”

Well, that’s nonsense. Guns literally WEAPONIZE people, enabling the evil and deranged to do far more grievous bodily harm than with just about anything. The gun makers strive to make the guns effective, and that includes ease of use, kill capacity, and, thanks to gun lobbyists, convenient to obtain.

The drawing I made today isn’t pretty. It is meant to not be pretty. This is an ugly side of my beloved country, and I do not wish to prettify it.

Our lawmakers have been more driven by profit motive and campaign chances than by common sense and true care for constituency. I have no money, no political influence, nothing but a voice and the heartbreak that drives it now. So this post is the utmost I can do. Readers, please, if you have the ear of lawmakers, please urge them to do the right thing and not the sleazy, money-grubbing thing.

2021 0513 mikel w

I had done A-for-Azalea and B-for-Begonia, and was going to do C-for-Chrysanthemum for Mother’s Day, but this Mother’s Day, as all three ( 🙂 ) of you faithful readers know, I directed my efforts elsewhere. Today I realized it has been almost exactly a year since Mikel Weisser’s untimely, life-ending heart attack. Alas, he did not live to see his efforts as an advocate to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, to which he devoted the last eight years of his life full-time, result in the passage of the bill that legalized recreational marijuana in his home state of Arizona. So C is for Champion of Cannabis Sativa. C is for Cheerful, Compassionate, Cacophonic Mikel Weisser. (The Cacophony may be heard in his superb denunciation of expansionism, “Manifest Destiny.”)

Mikel, wherever you are, ya done good and I thank you. I was thinking of you when Ted C and I fired up some Train Wreck, celebrating legalization. Your legacy lives on. And I hope you forgive my goofiness with the riff on “Abby Normal” from YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN. I think you and I shared a little of that zaniness.

Aye Be NORML

An Anodyne 4 grief & pain
Yet shunn’d–relief went down the drain. O
Enterprising HEROES for
Bestirment took the Law by Storm
Ending cycle. THANK you MIKEL

2020 0412 triolets

Friends, National Poetry Writing Month is in full swing, no matter how many earthquakes or tsunamis or volcano eruptions or pandemics try to stop it. Here is a compilation of the three Facebook posts I made for today, Day 12, including prefatory and postpoem comments. They get increasingly political, you will see. My country, Number One in the WORLD for total COVID-19 cases, and total deaths, is being mismanaged horribly, and my poetry cannot but be affected. I am urging my fellow Citizens of the United States of America to Vote Blue this November, all ways that I feasibly can, and my poetry is at the service of this cause.

****

National Poetry Writing Month 2020, Day Twelve. Challenge: Write a triolet.

Triolet: Iambic tetrameter, eight lines, abaaabab rhyme scheme, lines 1 and 2 are repeated (or nearly repeated) with lines 7 and 8, and line 1 is also repeated (or nearly repeated) with line 4.

In a perfect Verseworld I would now write a trio of triolets. Trouble is, it’s been a long day, I’m physically and mentally beat, and I only have juice for one, though I have the key words for all three. So I’ll do one, call it a night, and let my refreshed brain tackle the other two sometime before midnight.

The three words are FORMALDEHYDE, ACETYLENE, and INCOMPREHENSIBILITY. So here comes

formaldehyde

formaldehyde plays hide and seek
it poisons and yet it preserves
it makes those things in jars look bleak
formaldehyde plays hide and seek
it humbles, silences, makes meek
as doctor jekyll hydes and swerves
formaldehyde plays hyde and sikh
it poisons what it then preserves

And on that cheery note, Friends, good night and sweet dreams!
Here’s Number-Two-Of-Three of a trio of triolets for Day Twelve of National Poetry Writing Month.

acetylene unsettling

take oxy and acetylene
to spark and now you have a torch
to weld an empire’s mezzanine.
take oxygen and fettled green
and cee-oh-two and ways unclean
and now your scene may heat, may scorch…
that oxy and acetylene
sparks conflagration with its torch.
Here is my third and final triolet, completing my Triolet Trio for National Poetry Writing Month 2020, Day Twelve.

inn comm pre-hen sib ill: a tee

incomprehensibility
enables bafflement and crime
with podium non-jabber-free.
incomprehensibilty
is reprehensible as we
descend into a fear-fraught time.
incomprehensibility.
in free-fall it is hard to climb.

Yes, political. Vote Blue. Because we Libtards, we Card-Carrying Commie Socialist Globalist Illegals-Loving National Workers Party Ninnies have another mess to clean up, just like the one we inherited in 2009.