I got fascinated with words when I read in grade school a biography of Noah Webster who was the first person to publish in the early 1800s the first dictionary of American English. I began reading dictionaries for fun. Each new word excited me. As I grow older, my interest in new words got, not surpisingly, more sophisticated, more nuanced. My goal was not to become pedantic--far from it. I collected words like other people collected stones or stamps or coins. Each new word I discovered had a different timbre, a different tone, a different color--one might say a subtly different chiaroscuro. When I began to feel poems welling up inside of me in my early 20s, literally writing themselves as they emerged into my consciousness, my job was to find a pen and piece of paper and "record" what was coming out of me. If I did not act immediately by "recording" this stream of words and phrases, I would lose that poem forever, for each of these poems was ephemeral and belonged to the Cosmos, not I. These processes are how my poems see the light of day and why they are precious to me--at once so powerful and so delicate. In the end, I find my unconscious in some mystical way finds the "precise" word to insert into the exact spot. Therefore, never force a poem into existence. Letting your inner-self create your poem effortlessly, for poetry is like making love: if you have to force either, stop.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

The following is not a paid advertisement. It is the truth. It is arguably plausible for me to state that I received the best secondary and higher education in the world.

I graduated from Phillips Academy (more commonly referred to as Andover now), the oldest boarding school in America founded in 1778, two years after our nation was founded. Andover and its sequel, Exeter, it seems, now take turns being voted the best high school in the United States.

Though I received an essentially unequalled secondary education at Andover, I paid an exorbitant social and emotional cost to receive it. The years I spent at Andover were the worst of my life.

I chose to matriculate to Columbia College, the tradional undergraduate liberal arts school of Columbia University, over Yale
for principally two main reasons:  the Core Curriculum and New York City. More years at Yale would be like returning to Andover, anathema to me.

The Core Curriculum, now over 100 years old, is a rigorous, two-year course of studies that include philosophy, literature. art, music, language, frontiers of science, and writing. All College students, regardless of her or his majors, must take all the Core courses, which, in turn, make them learned for life. Columbia College is the only Ivy school to have anything like the Core. Living in and exploring New York City, the veritable capital of the world, for four years makes one a Citizen of the World for life, even if one decides to reside elsewhere after graduating, as I did. I now live in Boulder, CO. Columbia College's 2019 admit rate was 5.1%. Columbia College admitted a few over 2,000 applicants out of slightly over 42,000 applicants worldwide, making Columbia College the second most selective school in the Ivy League. 5.1 % admit rate:  that's about 1 out of 20.

But even Columbia has its "bad apples:"  Roy Cohn comes to mind readily. So does William Barr. But it also has Barach Obama. 84 students who studied or professors who taught there won the Nobel Prize.

So what to do with this piece CAN WE PROFIT OFF IT?

It sees to me that the maxim  DO UNTO OTHERS...is rapidly being supplanted by CAN WE PROFIT OFF IT? Our political leaders, who have never been paragons of virtue, have for 3 1/2 years have become, in a word, corrupt. The Washington Post has authenticated more than 15,000 lies emanating from the Oval Office, not to mention the cheating, the racism, and the ******.

CAN WE PROFIT OFF IT? is the new adage these days.

I say "Make America A Democracy Again!" should be.

How do you spread peace across Earth? First, start with your heart. It matters not where or how you begin. Love is in everyone's heart. Your heart has infinite seeds of love in it, as do the hearts of every other human being on Earth. Toss these seeds of love everywhere. It is amazing, miraculous where they may land, and wherever they may land, they wll sprout. Those with megawealth, those who control global corporations, those who compesate their unconscious lack of self-esteem, because they were not loved enough, if at all, as they were growing up, beome not the bestowers of kindness and caring and magnanimity, but are twisted into despots and tyrants and dictators. Throughout their entire lifetimes, they know no love. Hydrogen bombs and all other weapons they know, because they absorb and pervert worldwide the invaluable recources that could feed the starving, shelter the homeless, heal the sick, educate the unenlightened. Humanity has spent millennia killing each other. Now it is time to take the real power on Earth, Love, and live and love as one. Fling your infinite seeds of love from your hearts everywhere and watch them sweep over all of Earth and watch Peace on Earth bloom forever before your eyes.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

Every Christmas Day in the tiny town of Niwot, Colorado, the Niwot Tavern (and Restaurant) opens its doors all afternoon to all-comers (3 shifts) and serves for free a full Christmas Day dinnrer (this is not a picnic) to all lucky enough to make it inside during one of the three shifts. Those serving the "customers" are the owners who spend their whole (long) day in the kitchen preparing all the food (e.g. prime rib, ham, etc.);  the children who take the orders;  and the teenagers who deliver the different meals and (non-alchoholic) drinks.

Christmas Day, 2016, I was one of the lucky ones to get in. I was by myself. I was 74. No seating was assigned. At right-angles to me sat down a beautiful, young woman. Her name, I was to find out, was Yana (a Russian name). She had spent her early years there, eventually moving to the United States with her family. Almost instantly, we began chatting. She, I found out, was 32. The age difference didn't seem to matter at all. We talked about everything, non-stop. We almost forgot to eat our meals. I had never experienced like this before. Instant rapport. No, something even deeper than that:  it was as though we had known each other eternally, not chronologically, not physically, but spiritually.

Yana now lives in Massachusetts on the ocean. We continue to com-
municate from time to time, mostly by phone or email. I have known this young woman, as bright as she is beautiful, that if you counted up the hours we have chatted, the sum of which equals not even a day.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

As the wave of Coronavirus rolls toward us, we rush into the arms of
our beloved ones to protect them, to hug them, to tell them how much we
love them. This apparition of potential death threatens all us indeed,
but paradoxically, at the same time, it is perforce bringing families
together, both genetically and non-genitically. Certainly grandfathers
and grandmothers, wives and husbands and their chilren, aunts and uncles
and cousins and nieces and nephews form centripetal emotional groups that
are held tight be love. Dear friends, co-workers, golfing buddies, Thursday night poker players, congregations of different religions, various fraternal organization, sowing and knitting gatherings-- every imaginable kind of
group will bond. Out of this worldwide castastrophe, the whole world
could learn the limitless scope of love, and when we discover a vaccine
for it, or when the pandemic finally dissipates, humanity could remain
bonded by love, and there would finally be Peace on Earth, forever.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

As I write this poem, billions around the world are getting
terribly sick from this pandemic. As I think on this gross,
unforgiving wave of sickness and potential death possibly to
billions of others, strangely and paradoxicallly, my mind
turns to LOVE. LOVE, it strikes me, is possibly the most
underused, and underappreciated most positively powerful
force not only on Earth, but also in the Cosmos. For as long as
**** sapiens have roamed this Earth, it seems to me that the vast
emerging, expanding, elvolving beings that eventually became
what we now call human beings were inordinately, but under-
standably, preoccupied with their own survival, and not so much
with the well-being of all others. I think, somehow, we human
beings missed that critical mark, and consequently took the wrong
fork in the road of humankind's journey into the future that took us
toward the most unfortunate destination we could have consciously
chosen, which we did, rather than consciously choosing the most
fortunate destination, which we did not. We would up chooing "We
versus Them" instead of "We Are All One." The good news is that it is
not too late to have this everlasting epiphany, the culmination of which
is LOVE, and the ramifications of which will not fail to touch all of
us. If we come to love Earth, we shall ineluctably come to love every
single part, every single particle, of Earth, and all living creations upon
it:  human beings, animals, plants, the air, the oceans, the raindrops--everything--because LOVE encompasses everthing in the Cosmos.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

Kristallnacht in now every day in America.

**** Trump is now America's full blown ******.

Goebbles was ******'s minister of propaganda. Goebbles said if you tell the people a lie big enough and often enough, they will begin to believe it.

The Washington Post has authenticated over 15,000 **** Trump lies in the past 3 1/2 years.

**** Trump's evil, egregious acts of irresponsibility, his gross incompetence, his de facto criminal decisions not to act at all to protect his 350,000,000 fellow citizens from the death-dealing coronavirus is akin to ******'s hatred of Jews and other groups he also detested and killed.

At the end of WW II, there were estimated to be 15,000 death camps across Europe.

Now **** Trump has his own death camps in America: nursing homes, huge meat-packing plants, prisons and jails, VA hospitals, the homeless, the poor, and especially the Blacks.

Among **** Trump's first statements about the pandemic reaching America included that all this was a "Democratic hoax," that there were only 15 cases in America, and by the end of that week, there would be zero, and so on.

And like the vast majority of the German people under ******, way too many Americans are afraid, I think, to speak out against **** Trump who wants to be, and is becoming, America's dictartor.

Those Americans who still remain rabid supporters of **** Trump are at best simply deluded, and what is even worse, those who support **** Trump, but choose to remain silent, wear cowards' clothes.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks.