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Mary McCray Apr 2015
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 30, 2015)

The tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people, or to be able to identify more cognitive biases in others than oneself.

These are the vents of my being a self.
I am aware of my twain selves.

I witness the movie that is my life.

My atoms mingle with the worlds atoms.
My slutty atoms.

My feet ache. My chest hurts.
I suffer, therefore I am.

But then I forget I exist
and that this movie is me.

My own self has sold me out.
Genetically modified me.
Made me over with mascara.

The building blocks of me
are ancient. I duly notice
all my hot air.

I suitably put on the suit
and cling to the suit.

The suit sticks to me like an ad campaign.

I constantly need new technology
to explain me to me

when the new version is launched.
America is ceaseless newfangled versioning.

I am dying
but I don’t know where I am.
Jeesh that was rough! Exhausted with this year’s project! Today's news: undersea vents brought building blocks of life to earth planet: http://uncovercalifornia.com/content/24284-undersea-vents-may-have-created-basic-building-blocks-life-life-formed-earth
Mary McCray Apr 2015
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 29, 2015)

The phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong. Also known as the sunk cost fallacy.

The Donner Party refusing to stay put,
Mark Twain’s  four million dollar investment
in the Paige Compositor, an early automatic
typesetting machine, Paige taking Twain’s money
for 14 years while other machines prevailed.

A project of biases like this.

It is the broken heart bias, the grit bias.
Tenacity like a tin ear. The fellow who completes
what he has, ******, set out for.

Does it take decades anymore? Months across
the mountain pass? A lie you tell yourself
as fast as a tweet?

In times like these a robot could grab it—
your timely mistake and capitalize
your catastrophes . No leak. No hack.
No time to adjust to fortune’s funny ironies.

What happens too fast, what happens slow and long—
there’s always a spot of space to stop for,
time to consider time itself in your hand
with its diamond faces. What are you doing
and should you not pivot slightly to the side?
Twitter just lost $4 billion dollars due to an untimely tweet: www.bbc.com/news/technology-32511932
Mary McCray Apr 2015
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 28, 2015)

The urge to do the opposite of what someone wants you to do out of a need to resist a perceived attempt to constrain your freedom of choice.

Devaluing proposals only because they are purportedly originated with an adversary.



Adversaries: we imagine them up
like dime store villains. The heroic "I"
discharging bullets at the caprock
until a quake tips the mudslide.
This is what we say when we say
the hero and the villain are one.
Violence is just or unjust;
the hangman is the madman.

Depends upon who holds the axe.
Depends on our reckoning
of your freedom and any estimations
on mine. There is no reason to it.
Only rationales and riots of biases,
sentiments knotted up in the noose,
the ethical choker worn to glisten
in the pageant, worn to crucify,
worn to suffocate.
Nepalese earthquake is causing mudslides today and riots continue in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray.
Mary McCray Apr 2015
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 27, 2015)

The tendency to over-report socially desirable characteristics or behaviors in one self and under-report socially undesirable characteristics or behaviors.

Putting on your face.
I call it Star Self-F**king.
Pitifully normal.
It is reported that FB and Google are helping to locate Nepal's earthquake victims so....I guess we can say that our Facebook face is simply a reflection of who we really are: narcissist or altruistic or something in between. (http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/27/technology/google-facebook-person-finder-nepal/index.html)
Mary McCray Apr 2015
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 26, 2015)

The tendency to want to finish a given unit of a task or an item. Strong effects on the consumption of food in particular.

The small bag of corn chips, the can of soup,
the box tray of pasta, studies of portion

marking progress through existence.
Units move from your hands to your body

whatever the form of consumption
like track loops, pudding trays and poems--

they all have their metrics, even nostalgic
collages hiding behind miscellany.

Even improvisation has its forms; every mess
and message has its borders like nuclear meltdowns

moving in waves to the California coast,
Nepalese earthquakes and the avalanche of Ever

through years of tremorfications.
The corner diatribist can always tell you

there's a horrific endlessness to it all
and many, many happy ends.
Nepal earthquake, an avalanche on Mount Everest....looks of earth talking today.
Mary McCray Apr 2015
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 25, 2015)

The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful omissions.

The tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was a good value.


It's late at night and I'm forty years into a very thorough and consumerist collection of the vast ouvre of Cherilyn Sarkisian, 60s street urchin turned enshrined Hollywood A-lister -- iconic up there with Halston, Bianca, Liz and Jackie.

Paper and vinyl and electromagnetic tape, discs and cassettes and books and blankets and dolls and perfumes and magnets. Words and music and ideas every one purchased from corporations and strangers and seven 7-inch picture discs bartered online from a friend I didn't know I would one day meet.

It's late and I've been the Wrecking Crew premiere, sitting in the middle
of an Albuquerque scene of sorts,  the documentary opening at the local art house with me wedged between California-Sound fanatics. I'm sitting next to an oldies DJ everybody in town seems to knows but me.

The DJ laments how political the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is, (but then aren't they all?), and how Chubby Checker has yet to be inducted. As I see Cher self-depricate through the movie, I know she's an outsider to even this outsider culture. And if we peruse the halls rosters, we can easily make her case. But omissions always mean something. My basement full of memorabilia tells me what ain't right. But that's the bias talking. The same bias that gets The Byrds inducted, those who we've just learned didn't even play on their own records, or the theatrics of Alice Cooper, or the season of Ricky Nelson, or the artifice of KISS, Madonna....I've spent a fortune but just wait until the book comes out.

Post-purchase rationalizations, aren't they all?
Go see The Wrecking Crew movie. Went to the Q and A tonight to listen to stories of directory Denny Todesco.
betterdays Apr 2015
it's all I have,
not much, to you, but all
and with my heart torn asunder
I watch my life, my labour,
resting here, for you to plunder...

ravage the fields,
torch the meadows
**** the bees
and watch the clover
wither...

count not the cost
of your rapacious greed,
see only your hearts selfish need
to be the sum the total, the all.

not knowing, in your victory
you become...the pall,
that settles in the room
and stops the conversation,
like smog and a locust infestation.

this is my life, my family
and we do, what we do
to remain free of heartache
and negativity.

we need not your benediction,
or blessing of our grace.
so...you look to yours and
shut your face....


**********
napowrimo2015
promp­t : write a parody or satirical
poem...utalizing a famous poem you know


"It's all I have to bring today –
This, and my heart beside –
This, and my heart, and all the fields –
And all the meadows wide –
Be sure you count – should I forget
Some one the sum could tell –
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell"

**Emily Dickenson.
started out as something different,
but ended up as apoem about my frustration with my brother's need
to compete and put me down...
when he visits....
he needs to be at all times
the king of the castle... middle child syndrome.....
(and yes it would be easier not to invite him....but my mother dotes on him.... family dynamics **** sometimes.)
so there it is.... in all it's pettiness.
Mary McCray Apr 2015
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 24, 2015)

*The tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves, such as furniture from IKEA, regardless of the quality of the end result.:

My press-board dresser is a found poem.
Partly not-me but traces of my DNA
all over the ideas of wood.

Pointing to it I say:
this is me, something more
than nothing.

It is my romantic grain to cherish this,
to value the mass produced artifice
alongside the singular sensation.

One. Many. Me. Them.
What’s it all worth?
Bullies of values poke us

to tears and craft and craftiness.
LA street art disparaged by NYC
fashionistas. Let us drill down

the spur of all gangland critique.
Face the mural as it lays. Park the car,
face the plane and listen

to what every one is saying,
even if it’s nothing but
a minute reclaimed.
Good article on LA Street Art: http://laist.com/2015/04/23/best_street_art_los_angeles.php
Mary McCray Apr 2015
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 23, 2015)

The tendency to underestimate the influence or strength of feelings, in either oneself or others.

The intellectual stone:
intrepid bravado,
indissoluble substance of certitude,
the very matter of suffering
unable to dissolve its own errors
and miscalculations of how we are.

Unmovable, it burns in the sun.
It sinks in the stream and rolls
only when the other stones roll.
We love our stones. We do.
But what about the rock’s soft
cradle of soil, the embrace of earth.

Goodwill we say, (because love
implies too much), is a practice,
a radial gradient of feeling
gripping, like a muscle, the joy
and sifting go of the hard ache,
the tight cerebral prizefight ropes,
the square platform comprising a ring,
soft gong that ends the quarrel  
which was always only
gray canvass in the brain.
New Study Finds Mindfulness Therapy As Effective As Meds Against Depression Relapse (Huffington Post)
betterdays Apr 2015
i open the door to the
crisp autumn air
the smell of eucalypt
and salt...

first frost has fallen,
a light fairy dusting
of sparkling crystals
shimmer beguilingly
on the green lawn.

dissected by trail of cat prints
leading to a mess
of blue and black feathers.
this was one early bird,
who should have stayed in bed?

and on the rocks,
near the koi pond,
framed by the early sun.
the black and white cat
from down the road,
washes it's face....
with long clawed paws.

inside the house,
my less ferocious two
settle for chicken biscuits
and the warmth
of recently vacated beds.

I sigh and mourn the loss
of yet another wren....
before cleaning the evidence away.

the black and white cat watches,
with golden, gleaming and wholly unrepent eyes.
before slinking off, behind the lilacs.

so now, peace is restored....
and the water burbles gently across the rocks.
while the frost melts away
and the sun gains strength
to face another...
glorious autumnal day.
prompt: write a pastoral style poem,
.... walk out your front door and write of nature.
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