you are what you eat/but you also are what you want/and that is why your feed/is different from mine/and your reality/is algorithmically partnered/with what you seek
if you stopped using your handy phone/to find out about stuff/you would find yourself starving/craving/and going through ego-reinforcement withdrawal
but there is a weird way to turn this to your advantage
start seeking wonder and betterment/seek thought-provoke and challenge/seek compassion/seek utopia
–hey wait; you HAVE been doing that, consciously or not!
once upon a time there was a man named paul myron anthony linebarger
he wrote a magic book called Norstrilia and one of its chapters was headed “Counsels, Councils, Consoles and Consuls”
and he nimbly interwove advice dispensation and diplomacy convening and computer interfaces and “Lords of the Instrumentality” in that one astonishingly brief chapter
.
such wordplay danced through the novel at the service of a story of mind-bending majesty of scope
and i am forever grateful to the man whose pen name “Cordwainer Smith” is itself wordplay since a cordwainer makes shoes and a smith forges metal
so by way of riding on his coattails or paying him hommage my poem ties together five like words
the guilty man was hung/and from his sad life sprung/his dying breath turned cloudy in the cold
insurance for his widow/encountered har-maggido/with allegations flying truth be told
but she had an attorney/who helmed her courtroom journey/and proved no suicide nor breach of trust
so forthwith she was paid/and all thought she had made/the best of things…as we all can, nay, must
.
cordwainer smith was a punster/as am I/and in Norstrilia he named a character Houghton Syme/whom the protagonist Rod McBan called “Old Hot and Simple”
and now i have an odd confession/that demonstrates how dr. linebarger has influenced me
eighteen years ago i worked for the healthcare system then known as scottsdale healthcare
whose ceo at the time was a man named tom sadvary
and i thought of him as “Old Sad and Various”
.
please do look into Cordwainer Smith dear reader/if you are at all curious
and if you find “No, No, Not Rogov!” in your investigations/reflect on how now there is a thing called “Neuralink”
This page was done especially for my friend Missy Pruitt, who has devoted a great deal of her time and energy to that noblest of causes, that of finding loving “forever homes” for forsaken felines. She is conducting a gala event in the Valley of the Sun this weekend devoted to the furtherance of her cause, and she asked me to compose an acrostic poem for the occasion. It was she who supplied the title that forms the “bookends” of this double acrostic.
Friends, a fine way to reduce suffering and increase joy in our suffering-saturated, joy-starved world is to provide a home for an abandoned cat. Don’t do it on a whim, for it is a lifetime commitment. But I urge you to do it at least once in your life. I did, long ago, and my life was ever after enriched.
stand and your eyes are less tidally pulled/by the center of gravity near the core
and the earth will not notice but your eyes will be higher
jump and you push the earth away/land and your feet do a smackdown
change your lifestyle and you marginally add to or subtract from the ecological despoilage/and now we are getting somewhere
do you want to adjust the earth toward health? good!/get some garbage bags and fill them with your trash/but meticulously record item by item what you have in the bags
your camera can hold near-unlimited images so snap away for a week/and weigh the week’s worth of trash and then toss it away
multiply by 50 and you have a good idea/of how much of a garbage beast you are
One with Clay, Image and Text 