Herpetologist meets actress (Cameron Diaz).
If he's funny he's me.
South America or Africa (on location).
In a diamond mind.
The protagonists (lovers), the diamonds, the miners and the minders.
By minders we mean watchers, organizers, supervisors.
As all art must: choose a focus.
The personal is political said Cameron on the night bus to Quebec.
I had never met a girl so willing to make love in public.

To what extent is violence necessary? And
is that the essential question or
should violence be accepted as man's state, fate
a more essential question existing beyond or below
peace or war. Perhaps
the religious and (for the irreligious) sacred injunction
against egregious violence exists
to still ourselves
to open ourselves
to the deeper question. That Cameron Diaz is funny and beautiful
is hopeful. And the telescope and microscope have extended
the eye's appreciation. Under the microscope
Cameron becomes a collection of foreign, alien, uncompassionate,
      selfish, self-organizing
organisms. Frightening, inexorable, fascinating
to the scientist in you!

To the telescope
vanishingly small, infinitesimal as the farthest sun
only smaller
smaller by magnitudes of magnitudes of ten
and incinerated in a nanosecond. Gone
from the movie (photographs the contents of which move
for the naked eye).
I cannot help what I do or hope.

Anyway, it's a love story
or science project, socio-political documentary. An essay.
An essay about how it is actually impossible to say what you mean
but it is possible with a lifetime of meditation and study to shut up
and know what you meant.

Now I'm deaf.
I can see Cameron Diaz but not hear her.
The guy, the herpetologist, at first colorless turns out to be
colorful as a bird or snake!
He knows a lot about snakes, and birds! Not only how they mate
but what they eat
(amateur botanist)
where they rest
what they do with their pain. Do they get depressed?
Can they have guests?
How do they judiciously employ violence to organize and defend
the nest.

The international collective remains insufficiently organized
resulting in violence and threats of violence that interrupt
commerce, procreation (love) and the pursuit of happiness (Cameron
      Diaz)
at least for certain populations, sometimes.
Otherwise, most men, most times, live in peace excepting
flood or fire God or man may
choose to impose.
I lay in my bed and listen naked.
Have a good day (Diaz).
The goddess does not exist, except as bone.

Around this time (July)
the queen yellow jacket (redcoat) searches
blind and deaf
for a ledge or cavity to build a city of her descendants
safe, that they can defend.
Most cities
prosper, undisturbed
and sleeping peacefully, overwinter. We, however,
remain active, Cameron Diaz makes winter movies or
love stories in South America, and I
delight to imagine her herpetologist. Or one who
discovers the sun
around which a habitable, understandable, compatible
orb orbs. Or
maybe the movie's about the revolution, soldiers dying defending
this dictator or that dreamer
and the movie completely failing, not even trying, to explain how
the sons and daughters of the dying soldiers (miners) feel
fishing alone, hunting for wisdom, thereafter.
Sure, these men chose violence, not Cameron Diaz, and were not
farmers, botanists or herpetologists
their tools could have been and should have been the telescope or
      microscope
but are there enough microscopes and telescopes to go around
and did we not (taxpayers, moviegoers) encourage them to
defend Cameron Diaz?

Man's world is insufficiently organized to preclude violence
in allocating resources (Cameron Diaz).
When we invade Iraq
to defend our allies and interests
with rockets and rocket throwers, Rockettes and Cameron Diaz
each man (each Diaz) must make his
own individual choice
whether this war
is worth fighting for or the next or the worst.
Go to jail, go directly to waterboard, at the hands of
your local police, chamber of commerce.
Learn how to walk the desert and the universe.
The names of rocks and planets,
that being the only answer to the hyperorganization that is a cancer on
      our insufficient organization.

I was reading Foreign Affairs
The Case Against the West by Kishore Mabubami (Cameron Diaz).
How can I relinquish my privileged position
sit still, lie naked
until what constitutes consent of the governed and non-violent change,
      Cameron Diaz,
to her herpetologist
is known.

Masculinum Hyppeastrum,
monstrum;
the man eating
botanica,
the endlessly flowering plant,
had enough of me.

Went to sleep,
or worse,
he perished.

I must have said something nasty
about his size;
doesn't flower anymore,
all dried out,
doesn't do a thing,
his onion is weeping.

Christmas roses,
as I call the girls,
lost the will
to live.

All my,
previously green, flora
is pointing her leafless finger
at me.

I've done nothing,
that's the problem.
I forgot all about my green plants;

the environment is wrong,
there is too much acidity,
and that's my fault.

I will search
under the garden snow
for snow drops,
I left to themselves
two years
February,
my snow tears.

For colour,
I have lemons and limes,
green and yellow;
sitting on a traditionally,
blue, hand-painted
Chinese china platter.

River Yangtze
is still running through my mind.
Chai,

Lemon tea and lemonade.

~
Author Notes
Flowering plants from Bahia : Hyppeastrum sp.
From the 1970s, many plant novelties from Bahia
came to light with the expeditions carried out
by Howard Irwin and collaborators
of NYBG (USA) and by Raymond Harley
from RBG-Kew (UK). This provoked a renewal
of interest, among botanists, in the flora of Bahia

(3-1-07)

we really have created a new equivalent of a phone-book (remember, the english language utilises hyphenation for compounding two words as an antidote to its Saxon origins, whereby all German compound words: noun interchanging with verbs, and more nouns is not accustomed to the utility of the hyphen... but then again the english tongue is shrapnel off german, all these conjunctions and prepositions of limited spelling: and those two Dajjal eyes, the one protruding (the definite article), and the other, an emptied cranium socket (a-, the indefinite article, or, as expressed with a missing eye - thus treating the indefinite article by making it a prefix with a hyphen is what's revelatory). i wonder though, of the finite and infinite articles in language... could the possessive article ('s) tell us more? re-categorise these scraps and you get two very different vectors: the definite is plotted within algebraic form a straight line incrementation, y = x... the indefinite article, mathematically speaking? razor-blade (0, 0) coordinate fizzing chaotically about to explode in a direction no one knows exactly which one.

Antisθeνes and his prodigy Δioγeνes (yes,
yet another optometry appointment),
the former beat the latter with a stick when asking
for wisdom, both under the rubric of cynics and
sceptics, Antisθeνes: i rather be mad than delighted,
or awed.
               give the English atheists, botanists and
biologists all the delight and awe they can muster and
digest... the City State is on a comeback,
speak the words London, Paris... you're mentioning
city states... but you'll hardly hear of a 101 year old
in some obscure village drinking extra ****** olive oil
in the vicinity of the Tuscany region...
Diogenes who's faeces were featured on the coinage
of Frank Sinatra's pennies from heaven,
'better the faeces than some mugshot of a king on
this base metal!' Nietzsche: trans-valuation of all
bases: form the coin and you ask a blacksmith for a sword,
ask for a banknote and all books turn into toilet paper.
Cynic, derived from *canine, Diogenes was such,
Greek buddha without a statue, instead, a burial urn...
thank god we can write about philosophers:
my fear of losing the luxuries i accumulated are due
to me shutting the window at 5 a.m. detested by
birdsong... and my lack of interest in brick-walls,
the luxury of having a book to ease the strain
of a summer sun... Arabian more or less, black fudge
burning and my scraps of what's hardly predictable thinking.

i have these different people,
that all live inside of me.
and i wait and wait for the day when just one does.
when i have one heart,
the same wishes,
one vision,
all hope,
but today several still interchange everyday.
i can't be an author, an athlete, and an admirer of botanists.
i can only be an athlete for an hour
then at night, an author,
and from 12-2 an admirer.
when will the many people combine so i can just be one?
so i can be all.
so i can finally be all of me,
all at once.

Charitable devotion will invite others to settle on the edge of the periphery of the cartibulum table, surrounded by onlookers who wanted to taste the foods that fell from the sky like manna, on the scamunes that made resonances with notorious reverberations in the points of the polygonal ones that were made parallel, with the bisellium chairs where the exciting appointments of the orb reflected in the sky appear, to ring the bundles or sashes of bread with oils that were raffled in the triklinios that continued to be installed for the arrival of the guests of the Judah. The vessels were adpressed to the shape of the furniture, as a combination of bakeries, moving and disorganizing the geographical nomenclature of these twelve polygon islands of the Dodecanese. With breads that came from Leros or Pserimos, while Rodas and Cos, the largest and most cosmopolitan islands, were the goal of the migrations of Blue Pelicans throughout the year, bringing blue wine on the legs adorned with gold rings and Iaspis, on the grasses sheared by the heels of the myriads of Petrobus and his pelican minions. In this dancing herbage, she could feel by his arms in the dances with Gag Bread, which dances on all the hips of the maidens of the Sousta and the Canephores. From the highest levels to the lowest, everything became a silent conventual, where the acolyte was read to culminate in the potters of a wayward path of Áullos Kósmos where the capital of Vernarth's throne was petrified, having already placed on some images that were reflected from the heaven, a device prepared for rhetoric, to represent it with its Himation above the Megaron dome that was already levitated, spreading through its base and column that gave it antipodean edification, with sources of scope and keywords to welcome everyone, in special attention on the altar that was available to the actants. The lap in his sight was pointed out at the edge of the sea, which was the frequent topic that draws attention to all the sayings, which denote the prostration of language on the actant who organizes the trans visual mandate, on the imaginary bell towers that became thrones of rams with legs of furniture of klismos, which descended from the head of Wonthelimar that was the last to arrive, after sealing the tubular of the wind tunnel that was closed before all who came when the capital of the dome was founded, which configured the first part of the Carolingian device, when myriads of Bayards were observed, in sections where the hemispherical Jacobian light was filled with Gothic archivolts, ending in the gables that Carlo Magno brought in his plans to make them superimposed on the acrotera of the dome, which was already levitated ahead of time before they started building. The majesty of light that decorated the chiaroscuro, oscillated from the heptalobulate of the astragali that Lochnit carried in his hands, farther away than a miniaturistic shadow in its variable crackle and the progress of its size, when he walked precipitously over the vignettes that carved in the reflections. botanists of the Astragalus, pointing out that their forms were gaseous leads of Cherubs thinkers, who perched on the ardacas or flying buttresses, which followed the main Gothic forms of the heptalobulate of the flowers that began to diversify in their growth.

Senryu

Bending trees in storm
The resistance of survivors
Another winter gone

Senryu

A sandhill removed
The oak had no protection
Roots in sandy soil

Senryu

Glowing almond tree  
Do not resist the tempest
Unfused let it pass


Senryu
Upset almond tree
Someone called it a bush
****** botanists

I (a youthful sexagenarian)
can no longer quip being
a country boy at heart,
but me as urban cowboy,
I declare would never
so fuhgeddaboudit dear reader
nothing 'cept bucolic existence
laboring organic garden
harvesting fruits and vegetables
by the bushel and quart
constitute an appropriate start.

Don't get me wrong;
Every cell comprising
body electric of mine,
would yearn to prolong
and relish those bygone salad days,
whereat (R)oute (D)elivery #2 Level Road
also known as "Glen Elm"
or hundred acre wood,
when Mister Leiper and family
originally owned vast estate
(turn of twentieth century)
once awash, flush, and plush
with webbed wide world

analogous to miniature Hindu Kush;
one of the great watersheds of Central Asia
forming part of vast Alpine zone
that stretches across Eurasia east to west;
and runs northeast to southwest;
and divides valley of the Amu Darya
(the ancient Oxus River)
to the north from
Indus River valley to the south.

Rather than complain about mein kampf
and hard times,
which ain't no Christmas Carol,
fraught with the battle of life
amidst great expectations,
yours truly much prefers
crafting poetic verses
precariously perched on edge of chair
clicking Macbook Pro keyboard;
Every now and again taking stretch
to access excellent outlook
from powerfully pointed bedroom window.

Thus yours truly doth
poetically lightly kvetch
or tease out commonplace natural phenomena
nevertheless unremarkable flora and fauna,
or maybe even a dog
and her/his owner playing fetch.

His immediate observation when peering out
rectangular pane (more long than wide) of glass
constitutes plethora of dandelions
populates the greensward;
said wildflower proliferated nearly overnight,
cuz smattering yesterdays ago
Taraxacum officinale, the German "lowenzahn"
(which means "lion's tooth"),
and French "pissenlit"
Ligules the yellow “petals” of dandelion flower
carpeted the lawn, and quickly regenerated
soon after landscaping crew cut the grass.

A dandelion seed is the plant's mature fruit,
known as a cypsela to botanists,
and its parachute-like structure
known as a pappus.

The pappus develops
as calyx of each floret dries and matures.

There are usually 150-200 seeds per flower
and up to 10 flowers per plant.

Seeds can be dispersed long distances
by wind because they move in updrafts,
yet upon making landfall
scant number squarely take root.

A trip to Malé
Through the Indian Ocean
Absorbing Chinese relation
Tasting the umami of station

Repudiate the hedonists
And liberate the botanists
We dance in the finery of lilies

All flowers bloom in their season
Anything is permitted in the realm of reason

Salvage your respect
Muster your self-contempt
In the land of paradox
Left is right
And all that’s right is left

They came first for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I am not a Communist

Then they came for the immigrants
And I did not speak out
Because I am not an immigrant

Then they came for the feminists, and gays, and lesbians
And I did not speak out, never shouting out that Love is love
Because I was not a woman, neither a gay, lesbian, nor a feminist

Then they killed the blacks
And I did not speak out
Because I am colored, but not black.

Then they persecuted scientists just like in Bolshevik Russia, Chinese Cultural Revolution, and ignored, defunded them just like in present-day strongman regimes
And I did not speak out, never shouting out that Science is real
Because I live in a democratic state, with advanced science and technology.

Then they killed botanists like Leonard Co and companions
While doing fieldwork in the Philippines
And I did not speak
Because I am not a botanist, and I don’t go on fieldwork in those places.

Then they killed Lumads, and burned Lumad schools
And I did not speak,
Because I am not a Lumad, and I went to a prestigious university.

Then one day, they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.

Minimum wage

The olive trees in the landscape
near the village,
Have working-class trunks
and no illusion
Of becoming middle-class trees.
They refuse to grow
in a plant- nursery and be tampered with
by botanists.
They do not envy tall palm trees.
Good luck to those who see the world
through an elevated height.
Good soil and water the plebian olive tree wants
it has deep roots and will not fall
in a storm.