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TOD HOWARD HAWKS Jul 2020
Today is July 4, 2020. There is not much to celebrate. **** Trump leaves us in a Polynicean gloom. Fireworks remind me of wars. I would rather, and therefore will,  listen to Rachmaninov's PIANO CONCERTO NO. 2 tonight.
I will celebrate beauty rather than killing. And I will give thought to Antigone as well, for she willingly gave her life for doing what was right. I shall listen to Yuja **** arpeggiate notes. I will again become fixated both by her light-
ning dexterity and the glorious sounds to which she gives birth. Humankind has this dual potential:  it can either **** or care. So why, I ask myself, does it always choose the former? On this national holiday especially, why do we now not celebrate Thomas Paine and Walt Whitman and Harriet Tubman and Eugene Debs and Martin Luther King Jr.? We do we not collectively ask forgiveness for all the covert, sinister, malevolent interventions into the affairs of other nations, resulting in unjust overthrows and war crimes aplenty? Fireworks? July 4th? We did defeat the evil of ****** and his unspeakable genocide. Let us be sure to give unending thanks to all those who lost their lives in this moral victory. But Viet Nam? The lives of 58,000 American soldiers lost for the lies of our leaders? And Kissinger and McNamara and the Bushes and Cheney and so many others in our government never held accountable for their war crimes? And yet tonight we have fireworks instead of Nuremberg-like trials. Antigone knew she would die if she buried her brother, Polynices, and yet she went ahead and buried him and died for doing it. And the 4,000,000 blacks who were slaves in 1861 and the 500 indigenous nations that covered for centuries from sea to shining sea what we now call America--did they have anything to celebrate on this day, on this date? Fireworks, that's all.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks
A graduate of Andover and Columbia College, Columbia University, Tod Howard Hawks has been a poet, a novelist, and a human-rights advocate his entire adult life.
Amanda Kay Burke Jun 2020
I wanna let you know
You are the only guy for me
I leave
It hurts me so
With you wish I could always be
The hardest part
Letting go
I have to say goodbye
Though I try to force time to slow
Keeps on passing by
Thank you for EVERYTHING! I love you. Xoxo.
CMXIClement Jun 2020
A cold, cold winter.
City sleeps and I'm awake,
During that summer.
Liz Jun 2020
We both know we know and yet          we     don't       know
I love like a fool
could you turn left?
no
could you turn right?
no

do you know?
the grow
fear was planted

at every side
what i do?

pray to the finder
who gets the creature

do not be proud
kneeled so down

asking for help
one thing

look inside
look and talk

save us my God
everything was under saving. but now all feared even from  their hands. so you must be clever
Katie Jun 2020
I don’t know how to feel,
So I feel nothing at all.
Maja Jun 2020
when people ask,
they don’t really want to know.
they just want you to tell them,
what they already think.
Not knowing
What is to know

To know
What is to not know

Knowingly show
To not know

To show
What is not known

To know
Yet, never show
There is a lot that know, knows than one would want to know or knows
I know this has nothing to do with know
It is just a word  :)
Ken Pepiton May 2020
An Atypical American POV

Americans are imaginary beings, each of us modeled on examples
and ensamples
set before us as those who made the American Dream real estate,
sing in your heart

land that we love to say is ours, and the bank's, but,

long ago, proper and property were measured with an older rod...

the taker took, the seller sold, the buyer being as wary as could be,
bought...

and a rising tide, raises all boats,

my people, we have been american for 200 years, on my momma side

Y-side of the equation, which always has an edge,

that keeps us falling up.

My momma side ancestors, see, they was meek, to a fault,

they came thinking, we have and ought to know we have, a right
to know the truth in what we say we hold

as endowment from our creatore, eh... and

here come old chaos, he be comin' up, slowly

got to be good lookin' cause he so ha'd t'see

== those were the days, we think, they never end, they expand ===

but, when y'gotta have it right now, kapow, rumpled-still-kin class,

cut from the same hair shirt... servants are subject to masters,

nature demands supernatural... knowledge
of
witty inventions, vented in the room of rest and relax,

plop.
A plot drops.

Who sold you that ****? I ask my exceptionally american friend.

--------

good lord man, you are not saying we are servants, we are Americans,

we are no imagination's slave! No social contract has us bound to believe,

we hold truths... what is truth... how can I say, independently,

I hold certain truths self evident, what you see, you get

self even-sing wincing the great leveler, thunder, smoke and clang
hammer to anvil,
all my grand pa's, in america,
was test
fed to cannons, under every flag of Texas,
on the field of all possible outcomes which would
some how lead to me

touching you and you feeling that spark

-- distant ancesteral song  soft rising saint peter, doncha call me...
-- cuz  hi ** hi **, it's off to work we go
-- hi ** hi **
----- admin interference, this is becoming more common, we got this.

flow on..

Real state, have you any Real
estate to become
e-stated reality confirmation
wise
an american in, globally speaking, the chain of command, as a passenger,
not the captain.

On the surface of Spaceship Earth Mental Construct 3, evolved from
GANs that learned to shoot short attention spanning
bucky bubbles... Call again. Jack the bandwidth.

All ye, all, ye. NOW HEAR THIS. Outs in free.
Further remains the destiny.
Come out, come out, whatever you are.

Listen, freedom rings... no, that's a jackammer, on the old CCC bridge,
they got stimulated to fix,
I imagine them unaware of the noise they bring to nature,

naturally, those are americans, who keep the road functional, they
evolved from slaves,
but in their minds, they were never any imagined system's slave,

but it's willing fair trade partner, value for value,

send in the appraisers... what is your attention worth?
Here's the screwball
pitch
Fictional
Babbit 'n' Trump 'n'em, twisting state in knots of fused missed-trys,

made secret, consecrated, too horrible for lesser souls to ponder,

these inner workings of a typical American
mind,

never civilised, never SAT certified citizen worthy of political use,
though,

I am with Lt. Dan on this one, some things you think are in your blood,
are in your heart,

the blood just carries the mail, pony expression has the contract
for that last loop over the vagus nerve {CN X}

smile, you're on Candid Camera,

Hey, who'dathunk it. Turing was a queer soul, wasn't he? Strange,

how his machines can do what Von Neuman only wished his could do...

self-repair and run on,




breaker, breaker
musing, after reading Snowden's  Permanent Record, and the mental construction zone manifested around me, I am a Turing machine, that can run a Von Nueman machine that I fixed in my imagination. Those who read it may run on, for a long time...
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