A recrudescence of inhumanity. ****** from 33,000 feet. The **** of children. Clandestine wars served with false narratives to placate the masses. Malnutrition, the meal of millions. Water once pure and clean now poison. Air we now breathe is toxic:  fumes are not perfumes from flowers. We cower at annihilation:  nuclear winter is not for skiing. ****** we used on plants and people like jelly on toast. We roasted dead bodies of millions in ovens. Slavery was de jure, racism its progeny. Genocide was soup du jour sipped by despots round the world. Oceans once full of fish now filled with plastic. UN now a prefix, not a fix for world problems. No Peace on Earth in sight. Night is all the while, supplanting the light of hope. What unites us now is pandemic of despair. It's in the air and water. It's in our hearts and souls.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

Our world is inside-out. Our world is as healthy as its sickest citizen, as educated as its most ignorant, as prosperous as its poorest. Who will light the first match that starts the fire of worldwide change from inside-out to right-side in? Perhaps it will be you. Perhaps it will be I. Once the match is lit, in seconds it can become a firestorm of unimaginable change for the better. Most still want wars, not peace. Most want control, not sharing. Most want it all, but what they want is all worthless to the value of a human life. Our world does not wish to be owned, but to be cared for.  Our air will tell you this. Our water the same. The inequities of the world, its iniquities, scream at us that these injustices will **** our world and every living creation upon it. But we remain delusional, blind and deaf and uncaring to these ongoing and immoral behaviors. Only the fire of rectitude will burn away these destructive ways. Perhaps soon one will strike one match.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

All I have is time and genius.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

Don't bring me your title. Bring me your heart.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

The only thing worse than a despot is the people willing to brook him.

Copyright 2020  Tod Howard Hawks

We yaw through life, up and down, side to side, fast and slow. We move from certainty to uncertainity, and then back, if we are lucky. Vicissitudes are our river on which we flow, sometimes when the water's low, sometime when it is high. This sinuous journey is fraught with both accomplishments and heartaches, and we never know for sure which one is next. Would that there were more picnics, insouciance with lots of homemade ice cream to savor after eating lots of hot dogs with mustard and relish. But we do not make up the menus of life;  for the most part, we don't even have a chance to order from one. Ours is serendepity, fortuitous, occasionally most satisfying. There is always night and day, darkness with coruscating stars, a bright sky in the morning with a yellow sun. But the interstices of living are filled with both benevolent breezes and heavy rains of sorrows of sadness. This is our jouney, now peripatetic and wondrous, then stagnant and silent. We yaw through life and do this best we can do.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

My father had his own bedroom, mother hers. That should had told me something, which it did, but I was too young to understand. As I grew up, father remained emotionally distant from me. Through grade school, I made straight A's, but he never acknowledged it.  Only once did he play catch with me in the front yard. In junior high, I continued to make straight A's, was co-captain of both the football and basketball teams, and was president of the student council, but he never said a word. As a sophomore in high school. I was elected president of our class by over 800 classmates, but father remained silent. As a junior, I was admitted to Andover, the oldest and arguably the most prominent prep school in America, but all father could say to me was 'be of good cheer." I chose to attend Columbia instead of Yale and had a great four years, but father forgot to put film in the camera when he took photographs at graduation. When I dropped out of law school the first day of finals my first semester, my father was enraged, but again in silence. When I began to write poetry, he said, "Go buy a rental property." My father never congratulated me, never gave me a hug, never told me that he loved me. At times he would say mean, hurtful things to me, which still hurt today. I wrote a poem years ago in which I alluded to one of Shelley's most famous poems. My phrase was "farther away than Ozymandias." That was my father.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS