"alarmists" poems
It’s Hard Not To Be Optimistic: An Updated Sonnet to Science
by Michael R. Burch
“DNA has cured deadly diseases and allowed
labs to create animals with fantastic new
features.” ― U.S. News & World Report
It’s hard not to be optimistic
when things are so wondrously futuristic:
when DNA, our new Louie Pasteur,
can effect an autonomous, miraculous cure,
while labs churn out fluorescent monkeys
who, with infinite typewriters, might soon outdo USN&WR’s flunkeys.
It’s hard not to be optimistic
when the world is so delightfully pluralistic:
when Schrödinger’s cat is both dead and alive,
and Hawking says time can run backwards. We thrive,
befuddled drones, on someone else’s regurgitated nectar,
while our cheers drown out poet-alarmists who might Hector
the Achilles heel of pure science (common sense)
and reporters who tap out supersillyous nonsense.
NOTE: I am a fan of both real science and science fiction, and I like to think I can tell the difference, at least between the two extremes. I feel confident that Schrödinger didn’t think the cat in his famous experiment was both dead and alive. Rather, he was pointing out that we can’t know until we open the box, scratchings and smell aside. While traveling backwards in time is great for science fiction, it seems extremely doubtful as a practical application. And as for DNA curing deadly diseases ... well, it must have created them, so perhaps don’t give it too much credit!
Submitted to U.S. News & World Report
Dear Editor,
While I’m usually a fan of your magazine, as a writer I must take to task the Frankensteinian logic of the excerpt I cited, and I challenge you to publish my “letter” as proof that poets do have a function in the third millennium, even if it is only to suggest that paid writers should not create such outlandish, freakish horrors of the English language.
Somewhat irked, but still a fan,
Michael R. Burch
Keywords/Tags: science, fiction, quantum, physics, Hawking, Schrodinger, cat, DNA, infinite, monkeys, typewriters, Shakespeare, lab, animals, new, features
May 8, 2020
May 8, 2020 at 4:11 PM UTC
1.
The scent; amber
The color; pine
The touch; echos
The sound; blind
They are
All
of the senses
Intertwined.
2.
Sweet Robin, alight... takes to wing
Bruce's laughter, a booming thing.
Mark serenades, Michelle My Belle
Rog recants exploring tells
Scott japes, and keith's ad libs
Karen oh Karen, heaven forbid!
Artists Dreamers Escapists Poets.
Jesters Lovers Genius Knowers.
Alarmists minimalists
Extroverted introverts
Fighters flighters
Together
Loners
Nov 10, 2014
Nov 10, 2014 at 10:25 PM UTC
Americans for Prosperity?
Please provide some clarity
Prosperity for who?
Surely not humanity
This is pure insanity!
They’re Koching the books
And if we cared to look
We would see
They’re nothing but a couple of crooks
Putting profits before prosperity
Oh, the humanity!
Imagine the insanity
Resulting from the vanity
Of big money induced calamity
A disaster
Wielded by the master
To accelerate climate change faster
Those ********
Now I’m not a pastor
And this is no sermon
Just a simple plea
From little old me
We must become a citizens united
No longer can we be divided
Or derided
As mere alarmists
Climate change WILL harm us
So we must arm ourselves,
With the truth
Even if we must constantly ask
What’s the use?
It’s the youth!
So open your eyes to the proof
And sing it with me
Carbon tax me mister government man!
Apr 25, 2015
Apr 25, 2015 at 3:05 AM UTC
linguistic *********** as the emergence of furor poeticus
:: out of phonetic oral *** comes lyrical transcendence
/
acacia thorns pierce the skin
while shittim pierces the veil of the perceivable
as golden incense weaves across the sky
to a sanctuary where we unwind space & time
prophet's write of the vapor turning on lights
and horns shining in rays of synesthesia
magi mixed herbs under the desert moon
which mapped a path through golden the sand
bundle's of wild harmel wood burns
as sparks flicker & dance with stars
in a moon reaching bonfire
under autumn shadows
in the harmonic hum of the aboriginal didgeridoo
drifting on the streams of wattle-seed smoke
gazing down as the earth unfolds and refolds
in a cymatic origami cardtrick
out of the soil grows the ship
which flies above the starry skies
fruit of biblical implications
with seeds of knowledge
& keys to ghostly dimensions
//
Thomas Aquinas
& Meister Eikhart shared the same eye
as you & I
peel wide the smokescreen
& spy through the looking-glass used by god
which saw god
which was the eye through which the son of god saw
& wept at the stale state
of the collective unconscious bots
lost in spirals of consumption & mirror reflection ************
this is not the godless wasteland
advertised by the screaming anchormen
fear-mongers & alarmists
who sell panic by the gallon
with electrodes probing their temporal lobes
the prophets & shaman's
are in the asylums
labeled as schizo's for their visions of angels
& demons
& messages from the god's
an amnesiac species
chasing the neurochemical highs
shaped by evolutionary design
as a means to survive
barrel of monkey's biologically
swinging about nuclear powered technology
alienated
that far removed from nature (forest. desert. ocean)
planning to leave the planet entirely
Om Mani Padme Hung
OM
Om Mani Padme Hung
OM
Nov 16, 2022
Nov 16, 2022 at 10:03 AM UTC