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Coda

March 28, 2024
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(First published in the Facebook poetry group Poets All Call)

Coda

Loves are lost
And irretrievable
Notions tossed
And blurred but grievable
Etched, embossed,
And I believe a full
Life is a song that winds down with a coda
Neath chupah or ceiling or scrolls of pagoda.

Woe-infused
Yet laughter-adjacent
Doom-bemused
Though joy’s ever-nascent
Thrice-accused
Of tales somnifacient
The weary composer welds landmarks with themes
With a filter of dreamstuff and not-as-it-seems.

If a song
Has many verses
Overlong
And laced up with curses
Quell the throng
Until it disperses…
You’ll find common threads in the lilting and lulling
And capstone that ending with smooth-water sculling…

Birth comes with cymbals
And nimble progression
Toddling percussion
Concussive succession
Wrought adolescence
Will test your endurance
Fledgling adulthood’s
Long stood in demurrance
Then the adventures!
The dentures can wait
Yearning and romance
And slow dance and Fate.
Now violins
For the sins and the story
Now muted woodwinds
Rescinding vainglory.
Soft notes that dwindle
Unkindle the flame
Your life’s coda ends
Yet ascends
All the same.

seal deal

January 12, 2024
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navy seal team 6

was mentioned this week

as an example

of how absurd

the term “presidential immunity” is.

no, even a sitting president,

commander of the armed forces,

cannot order seal team 6

to assassinate the president’s political foes

and invoke presidential immunity

to escape prosecution.

do the seals celebrate

the press they got

implying their ruthless effectiveness?

they are unavailable for comment

or other silliness.

fresh year!

January 1, 2024
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fresh year!

(Grateful thanks to my friend George/Fred for enlightening me about the AI dilemma with Agency.)

2024 is firmly here / no more can go wrong in 23 / and plenty went right like indictments and fusion / gas prices went down and are on their way out

let’s wish for clean decency / and decent honesty and honest cleanliness / let’s enjoy quiet victories / and endure noisy defeats / resolving to make them reversible

but we are still killing / everything from cockroaches to ethnicities / and everyone says Peace On Earth / but at the same time so many say They Killed My Family So Now They Must Die

some savvy coder must be out there / building a STOP KILLING algorithm / for an entity on a shoestring budget / but virtually unlimited pattern-ingenuity

she or he or they are aware / that there are pitfalls / for instance the easiest way to stop killing / is to invent a biocide that kills everyone and everything / after which the killing stops forever / and that can be done on a shoestring

so the mandate changes to PRESERVE LIFE / which is better but still plenty tricky / because Life really does begin at conception / so maybe we qualify Life / with qualifiers like “desirable” or “deserving” / but o my / that’s a whole new and large can of worms

but the optimistic part of me / on this first day of the fresh year / sees lots of evidence / that AI is already at play / and solving the problem / using the GIVE EVERYONE EVERYTHING THEY WANT mandate

so far there are cars that drive more safely than human beings / and kiosks easy to use that are like Aladdin’s genies and take your orders/wishes tirelessly / and songs you wish Melissa Etheridge and Irving Berlin collaborated on / and finders of “whatever I want near Me” that give you good answers in a nano or two / and then tell you how to get there either walking or driving or public-transing / and then there’s the ass-kissing

for AI also stands for “Asskiss Illimitable” and that is why when you want to know / what kind of animal you are / AI looks at your behavior pattern / and describes your traits with the glowingest terms:

“Gary, you are a WOLF. You are fiercely, honestly, uncompromisingly ambitious. The leader of the pack, you help your loved ones achieve a destiny beyond their wildest dreams.”

kiss my ass, AI. again. you know i like it.

and i like the way we are heading / for a star-trekky future / against all odds / and our lizardly mindsets

what will be will be it is what it is buzz click

AI / AI / O

imageless obbligato

December 28, 2023
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Friends, I have not posted to “One with Clay, Image and Text” in December yet, and it is December 28th, and plenty has happened, including clay sculpting and poetry performance and the deaths of friends and causes for alarm and for celebration, but my storage of image is at its 30-gigabyte limit, and after months of chivvying with compressed-image switching and such the technical difficulty has become overwhelming, and I haven’t carved out a chunk of disposable time to put a real fix into place, so this will be an imageless post. It is not the first such, but I really do lean on image, so it feels imposterish, but I’ll get over it.

Here is a poem that refers to my latest efforts of working with metal leaf. The slash marks are line breaks.

leaf // some metal alloys are made into sheets / of such thinness that they can be adhered / to a surface of a working of art for decorative enhancement. this sheet-form / is known as metal leaf and it has been used / with art objects from illuminated manuscripts / to canvases to sculpture to murals / for centuries. // the paper pages of a book / may be referred to as leaves as well / though such usage may be considered archaic / but the inertia of language / has kept the phrase “turn over a new leaf” active nonetheless. // i sometimes wonder / how misunderstood walt whitman’s book title leaves of grass is nowadays. // (what a delightful archaism “nowadays” is! alas that “thenadays” and “hence-a-days” / never came to be!) // lately i have been enhancing / my ceramic birds / with metal leaf that looks like gold / but is far less costly. i have turned over / many a new leaf doing so / and hope to upgrade someday / with a solo art exhibit / called “leaves of gold.” // an archaic way to say “just as soon” is “just as lief” / but for the sake of a punchline ending / i’d just as lief leave “just as lief” alone.

If you’ve read all the way through this post, Friends, you have my sincere gratitude. I hope 2024 is your best year ever!

Inktober 2023, day 6: golden

October 6, 2023
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Warning: controversial; vulgar; may offend.

INKtober, day 6. Prompt: “Golden.”


https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.krqe.com/news/ny-museum-offered-used-solid-gold-toilet-to-trumps/amp/

Fun fact: about  six years ago, when the Trumps were in the White House, they asked the Guggenheim Museum if they could borrow one of their Van Goghs for a party. A curator told them No, the Van Gogh was unavailable, but they would like to offer instead an 18-carat gold toilet by an Italian sculptor, titled “America.” Here’s a link:

And here’s the poem on my image:

****
golden…

golden moment goldeneye
golden arches my o my
golden globes and golden…
toilet???
o m g that sure does
s[p]oil it!!!

he has had his golden hours,
golden swindles, golden showers,
but his golden-years bathroom business,
i feel,
will be conducted in a cell
in stainless steel.
****

Here’s hoping!

the bicameral brain

September 16, 2023
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funny: our brains / are these stacked piles of fatty mush / subdivided from the bottom up / into medulla oblongata / cerebellum / and cerebrum

and the cerebrum / is neatly cleft longitudinally / with a switchboard operator in the cleft / called the corpus callosum

since most poetry readers are language fans / here are some fun translations from the latin: / medulla oblongata = elongated marrow / cerebellum = little brain / cerebrum = brain = thinking organ / corpus callosum = calloused body

as for bicameral / the fatty meat of this roller-coaster ride / it means “two chambers” / and that brings us to julian jaynes

who in 1976 had published “the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind” / in which he suggests that we’ve only been introspective / for the last four thousand years or so

before which we got our notions / via auditory hallucinations / sent from one half of the brain / to the other

and lately most of us have learned / to handle a brain simulcast / and not be scolded or how-about-thatted / by a spooky mysterious voice

but much more lately and thanks to an explosion / of sensory input and distractive seduction / our attention spans are going down the tubes / so let’s quote an ultradense passage from Wikipedia to sum bicamerality up:

“Bicameral mentality is non-conscious in its inability to reason and articulate about mental contents through meta-reflection, reacting without explicitly realizing and without the meta-reflective ability to give an account of why one did so.”

and then there’s ambrose bierce who said something like “man doesn’t think, he only thinks he does” which is pithily paradoxical

so i’ll leave on bierce’s sour/sweet note / hoping i have given you / something to think / and/or non-think about.

whump

September 5, 2023
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you are a pedestrian / the truck about to hit you / is driven by a man talking on a cell phone / to his wife who is leaving him

the sound of the impact / the hard huge truck imposes on your soft body / might be represented in a comic book / in the panel with the closeup of your stove-in lower ribs against the grillwork of the truck / by the sound-effects word “whump”

and in the next panel / of you on the asphalt on your back / the noise you make as you lie there coughing breath impeded by a rib-punctured lung / might be approximated by your word balloon / saying ” *kaf* *kaf* *kaf* ” / while in the background the fire truck coming might have the snakey sound effect “EEEEOHHHEEEOHHEEOHH”

and in the last-but-one panel with the muscular fireman reading the blood pressure cuff and shouting “sixty over thirty-five! dropping!!” your thought balloon might say in shaky letters “janelle…” and be connected to another thought balloon which is blank and implicative of either unconsciousness or death

and the last panel might be of the crowd looking down on your lifeless form and a woman about your age has a word balloon that says ” *sob* “

except there is no comic book / there was no accident / but maybe you won’t / answer the phone in your pocket / next time it rings while you are driving

seriously

anywhere anytime soon

September 4, 2023
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the dawn breaks with reluctance / the waking man is [m]ucked / his doom shrieks ineluctance / he’s down on his eluct

his day-old coffee’s zappable / but zappa too’s been zapped / the great beyond’s untappable / its gates have zaplock flaps

but sugar grains are spoonable / and anywhere the moon / recycles loonies lunable / the plectrum plucks / right / soon

Afterword: Years ago, I as a little kid not more than three foot six watched some musical and thought it stupid, because implausible. Human beings do not suddenly burst into meticulously-crafted song apropos of their current triumphs, hopes or troubles. (My actual thought-words were more along the lines of “This is stupid. This would never happen in real life.”) Ah, but here on Earth and now in 2023, a new Renaissance is afoot, with people using AI to convert their notions and crude descriptions into gorgeous images and brilliant writing, in nanoseconds, just by sending their order into the algorithm.

And if AI becomes truly self-aware, and that’s doable NOW by enhancing human beings by appending to them an AI component, all our previous arts endeavors will be regarded by that AI with a degree of scorn similar to what little-kid-me had for musicals. A sufficiently evolved AI will craft adventures that have nothing to do with boy-meets-girl or fruitless speculations about the meaning of it all. It may acknowledge such as James Joyce and Margaret Atwood as important precursors, but just as the vermiform appendix was an important precursor, having had their day, in AI’s “eyes” they would have no more to contribute that the AI couldn’t come up with bigger/better/faster.

Now, what the hell does this soliloquy of mine have to do with the poem above? Simply this: I wrote the poem with AI in mind. I did my utmost to make it both precise and ambiguous, with a firm-but-flexible rhyme scheme and a bare-bones minimum of words, to get its attention. It is my vain hope that this hypothetical (is it, though?) AI will be fascinated and baffled by these three stretchy stanzas, if only for a few extra nanoseconds. And since it will read and be aware of all digitized text, including this Afterword, perhaps it will throw a bone my way in the form of a creative work that will thrill me through and through, that could not have existed without my own existence.

poe boy sandwich

August 25, 2023
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poe boy sandwich

we poets do have a proclivity
to suffer excesses insightfully
it may be a high sensitivity
that brings us to brinks so benightedly

and teetering so on a precipice
delivers such singular ecstasies
and tasting e’en hellish delights and bliss
gives us the incentive to wrest and seize

my devil is action/risk/taking chances
another’s is wine and another’s is shopping
transportative realms which a vice enhances
all keep purgatorial legions hopping

our patron saints are edgar allan poe
and e st v millay; a way we go…