Beyond the farms
of my troubled fears,
a path weaves through
icy slivers of bone,
glossed by Winter’s breath,
who sits enthroned
aside her onyx pond,
reflecting.

“The challenge you face is twofold:
confront me and confront yourself.”

A black jaguar saunters from
her ivory throne, holding
my gaze in the vice
of its assured indifference.

“That which you seek may not be found,
but earned.”

My dagger shakes,
frozen tightly in
my sweating palm.
The lush snow absorbs
the crush of my knees
as the jaguar closes.

“Your unearthed answer, clean of instinct or knowledge,
bids closer reflection.”

At arm’s length,
the jaguar stops.

“Change does not ride the wind,
for the wind has direction.”

The jaguar’s breath
warms my quivering lips,
and I exhale
my unbidden thoughts.
My eyes, still fixed in place,
are not aware
of my rising hand.

“To understand is to forgive,
and to forgive is to love.”

Her words chill the blood
pooling in my outstretched palm,
quivering closer to my host.
The ferric scent tickles its whiskers,
and the jaguar laps up my gift.

“Love, and you'll belong.”

Volcanic fury spies my bane,
Fragment the skies for ****** rain.
Malaise, ire, eclipsing lunar wane,
Taste ferric gore of inner vain.

Cannot expel this rotten stain,
Neural nets collide with a train.
My brain is made of candy cane,
Fake a smile lest I turn insane.

Murky shadows caress my mane,
While scintillating colors reign -
Supreme blades seek to slain..
That argent asp from memory lane.

Once scattered amidst the grain,
Mellow peace stole away my chain.
Find me some red paella in Spain,
Bask in sunny shine by the Seine.

Living a lie, what would I gain?
Revel in glory, yet there is pain.
Carpe diem, the future I disdain,
All aboard the seismic hydroplane.

how sensible it all seems, how crew-cut and with enough
anaesthetic to k.o. an elephant - outside the laboratories
the populists in whatever guise march on - as with any
congregation, atheists also muster up enough social muscle:
they too have their bouncers and other
gob-smackers with knuckle dusters -
as long as science is popularised it pushes
the boundaries of insensible chasms elsewhere -
                             but with so futile popularisation:
shortages in respective sectors: mandatory,
or as suggested: no longer rich bachelors and
         private laboratories - a science of regurgitation -
once they burned heretics, now the subtle
        championing of mingy sedatives - and since
Joan of Arc's heart no longer aspires to passion
and its all consuming fire, it turns into a wet
piece of coal - reining in the crowds of pop culture
zombies - said before, said again - but how
dislodged the feelings not ranging into absurdity
or at least nibbling on the zest of Dionysus;
but how things changed from that year, 2006,
everyone is asking, the poncy pope with glamorous
attire, the stiff-necked scientists - the pendulum
of guilt swinging in both directions - half of
the 20th century prescribed a fear magnanimously:
oddly enough - as implying: we forgive your
puny religious swooning and answering with
the easiest answers possible... here's a bomb -
so who are the sacred ones? they too are human -
the magazine dissected into:
a. what is reality? (can we be sure that the world
  we experience is not just a figment of our
    imagination) by roger penrose
     b. do we have free will? (the more we find
out about the brain works, the less room there
  seems to be for personal choice or responsibility)
     by patricia churchland
c. what is life? (if we encounter alien life,
chances are we wouldn't recognise it - not even
if it was here on earth) by robert hazen
d. is the universe deterministic?
   (however you look at it, the answer seems to be "maybe")
       by vlatko vedral
   e. what is consciousness? ("my soul is a hidden
    orchestra... all i hear is the music" - fernando pessoa)
            by paul brooks
f. will we ever have a theory of everything?
    (2000 years of rational inquiry may be approaching
  their crowning glory. just one more push could
   be enough...)
                            by michio kaku
   g. what happens after you die? (we have all
  wondered if there is an afterlife, but only a few are brave -
or foolish - enough to try and find out)
                                by mary roach
  h. what comes after **** sapiens?
  (all species are fated either to die out or to evolve
  into something else. all except humans, that is)
                   by james hughes -
so there we have it - the respective pillars of science,
whereby science replaces core beliefs into
core questions - to not hold firm, but to constantly
sway - the 8 founding questions - no more,
  no less - but how many people can perpetually sway?
   the supposed 8 universals, i.e. that every human
  being might, might not, will or will not ask -
     and for these 8 universals, exponential functions
of particulars: because that's how it's supposed
to be: chaotically democratic -
thus everyone knows the objectivity standard:
at its core is awe, outside the core pathology and
apathy - or let us say: passions and indifference -
then subdivisions of (+) and (-), and in general:
   however it is you feel: compensated or left starving.
in 2006, they congregated at a round table and
spoke god-this, god-that - no minority report,
  cold evidence never went down with women (or
so i'm told), three questions, question 1:
                 should science do away with religion?
oddly enough R. Dawkins said:
               "no doubt there are many people who do need
religion, and far be it from me to pull the rug from
under their feet." - we know that the bestseller
              the god delusion came out shortly after.
a physicist (S. Weinberg) similarly (c me la ri lee):
   "science can't provide a sense of magic about the world,
or a community of fellow-believers. there's a
religious mentality that yearns for that."
  L. Krauss: the success of science does not encompass
the entirety of human intellectual experience.
on and on this goes - i guess they have to debate for
the sake of debate - as i am sure everyone is aware:
   a debate can overpower the point of prayer -
confessions? i treat it more like poetry - but in saying
that... where is the medical profession in all of this?
we have astronomers, ecologists, biologists,
physicists, astrophysicists, planetary scientists,
cosmologists, philosophers... what's the odd one out?
it's a bit suspicious that this magazine does not
cite any chemists... and that's ****** obvious...
they're the ones making pacts with the devil -
whether Goethe's or Marlowe's Faust -
then at least to the more obscure rendition
of Pan Twardowski (Herr Tvardovsky) -
         but how odd it already is that chemists haven't
joined ranks with other scientists in their little
Friday night debating club meetings - seriously?
are those boffins serious about all of this?
            or as one said it:
i came from learning to write CO for carbon monoxide,
   and FeO for ferric oxide - or drawing electron migration
  diagrams when two compounds interact (a nice
playground of symbols) and went my way into
   some form of linguistics - primarily working on
          the tetragrammaton - i have no major interest
beyond this definition: would i debate the most
difficult metaphysical assumption of the omni-variations
in terms of ascribing the variations to a being?
i'd stumble in the metaphysical world on omnipresence,
meaning i would be a pantheist - meaning god
    would be anything and everything from the moon,
a mouse, an ant colony, my **** and what not -
            the all-in-one: for one thing, that's already much
too hellish to comprehend, let alone make comedy from.
but they haven't told you about the painkilling
saliva that beats morphine - catherine rougeo:
proceedings of the national academy of sciences,
vol. 103, p. 17979) - the compound's name? opiorphin,
or the scourge of Afghanistan. they also didn't
tell you about Saracen sabres - their scimitars contained
carbon nanotubes - forged from Indian steel
called wootz - 17th century examples studied by
P. Paufler (Dresden) found the carbon nanotubes
and even nanowires (nature, vol. 444, p. 286) -
or is this becoming to look very much like traffic
on London's M25 during rush-hour? it certainly is,
as was intended -
                   1950s: age of optimism -
influenza wave from the east, the indestructible transistor,
   television without wires, baby computer the size of
  a piano, rubber windshields, genetic chemistry,
atomic aircraft, the neutrino, sputnik 1, strontium-90
(radioactive ash)  used by manufacturers of woven
and knitted fabrics to overcome fog markings,
the coleopter, polypropylene (the remnants of German
word-compounding revealed in chemistry, and
only in chemistry, elsewhere compounding is
replaced by hyphenation, i.e. hyphenating),
                  and so on and so forth until present day -
passing through Sir, Julian, Huxley, who reinvented
****** with "positive" eugenics - oh sure, it was still
alive and kicking - quark hunters draw a blank -
             i could reference all else that was involved
in making the last 60 years - beyond that people are
call it ancient history - or are Virgil and as Horace,
and as Ovid did - turned their back to the world,
         into their poplar groves and jasmine filled gardens,
and said: ta'oh!           ta'oh!                 Tao!
  but not until then, before embarking i'm already
dreading to embark with something to add, to even
voice this -                                     but i guess i might:
  as ever, the freedom of speech is never as grand a
                                      luxury as the freedom to think.

Gargling on the film of rain smatter
For what?
Into that blue, carve a square nest
That I can pour bar its clutter
Into my wrist
All but
Ruby blessed

Harrowed koi speckled and spatter
The semi colons
My indecisive pause or full stop
Leaves my head underwater
And the pop
Stolen
To offward hop

Glassy bottles, tubes of black
Know me well
A who that breathes this ending call
Can look and reaching back
From the fall
See fell
The absent bawl

Vanity violet and lied
Face me
The name of bunching petals different
As irises inside their wet ink hide
Back reflect
Come free
What I not expect

Matted layers compact swung panels
Either way
Open, to their cast of prisoned souls
Closed, to continue what may well
Unfold
A lily bay
Or ferric shoal

Jeweller for tonight has set
I am a bearer
Through murky depths resend no fact
And airless suspend the single bracelet
A pact
Sealed to wear
When I am lost in their black

all things consist as sounds consist
of the elements
[Here follows the history of the four]
evident then,
what we have said before
all men seek causes named
we cannot name any described before
not at all.
the Subject lisps
it is young and bone by virtue
the essence and substance of
flesh and tissues
the elements and
the names - fire and earth and water and air.
He has not said clearly.
Our views have been expressed before;
but let us return the difficulties
perhaps we may get some help towards
our difficulties.
The Subject of our inquiry:
we are seeking the universe.

the fire, forthcoming
as flame would follow
moth to candle
vapor to lust
lust to yearn
yearning to dust.
A fire’s flame, inquiries made
the perfect deep shade
of rust.

crumbling to ferrous, ferric
streaks in the Earth
the earth.
O humble, o depths
of rich and mysterious mud
o magnum mysterium
overturned with resounding
thud
and iron streaks richer than blood.

but crumble it shall
in many waters, rivers
the orbital, the oculus
the eye of all clarity
and all washed away
it is time
it is time
the Subject: washed away

into vapor
into air
into wind
the howling, the holy
the Subject lisps
and it is holy wind
holy flame
holy earth
holy water
wholly: the Universe
and nothing more
and nothing less
than its elements
than sound
Here follows the mystery of the four:
they are holy, inherently
and wholly, inherently pure.

a boxcar rooted in wheat
the laughing man finds solice
and shelter from the rain

faces on speed dial
weather and rot
why you caught up  
on a boy in a boxcar?        

acummulating dust
ferric oxide (rust)
acid-burning insides
decomposing through
living amongst
centipedes
and mice  

we have succumbed to a garden state
dig deep
for roots
or something to hold on to

My power on you
Is negligible
Yet you hold me tighter
Tight
Tightly to you.
We dance around
In endless rotation
I spin
Immortally.
I breathe you in
I walk all over you
Yet you don’t know
I exist.
I am one piece
Of the puzzle
Of your skin.

You are hot and cold
Oscillating my emotions
Tidally locking me
Ensnaring me
Into your brilliant bath.
She is jealous.
Stronger and brighter than
I am smaller and feeble.
Her light shines luminous,
My glow is conditionally a specter
Unseen.
Eons ago she was yours,
And the crawl of seconds
Pulled her away
And the crawl of seconds
Birthed me upon you

Given the chance
She would wrench the blood
From my veins as she
Tugs on your arteries
Yet the iron given to me
By you, residing in my
Bones and beating chest
Holds strong, touched by
Your lifesaving magnetism
Your ferric ferocity shields
Me.  In an invisible
Aromatic atmosphere of
Blanketing love.

You swirl me
Rotate and revolve me
Wake and quake me
Birth and waste me.
Mother and Father providing
The soul within me, the
Soul beneath my feet.
My planet, my world
You are my Earth.

Beneath the autumn trees that sway with auburn hue,
Beneath the gilded leaves that laugh on silver bough,
Beneath the roots that never knew,
The sunlight shine or taint of plow.

Beneath the prizes of the land that lay in beauty raw,
Beneath the remnants of the ones who came aeons before,
Beneath the raging fire of flaw,
To purify her ferric core.

There lies a heart of molten girth.
That's been companion since our birth
To every life that's come or past,
And every life that's lived to die.

Of Baseball, Poetry and the Human Condition




~~

From  “The Art of Fielding.”* by Chad Harbach

"You loved it,” he writes of the game (baseball), “because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about the Human Condition.

The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not."*

~~
  thus, the circle grows ever small,
binding the obvious and unblinding the oblivious

more than the mere, poetry in baseball, for both forms of art,
knowledge intuited from watching the catcher's body weave
this way and that, a dancer en pointe, arms raised in worship,
addressing the heavens with a body's broad brush strokes,
all to catch with concentrated skill, a lazy, towering popup,
climaxing oft with an exclamation point
a perilous desperation leap
into the dugout encampment of the inimical opposition

yeah, you knew that,
tho verbalizing same,
before the age of thirty,
presumed maturity,
was not an act of the sane of heart,
or the sound of mind and body melded

what you dared not admit was that the conditional principle,
was primal and not tangential, though perhaps,
some itinerant fathers foolishly mumbled incoherently
of a life linkage parallel motifs
of
that desperate beauty, the ferric magnetic irony,
that our full access pass to envisioning the finery,
imaging the stuff of our own daily creation genesis,
whether concocting undisciplined disassembled parts, words,
into a line, a stanza that froze your lungs from
the boredom of the regularity of heaving and breathing,
was in no way different
than the curvature of the boy's arm
in desperation outstretched, seeking spectacular safety for
a well hit ball of cork into a worn leather mitten and thus
confirming his humanity to the watching tribal membership

and these momentary moments of momentousness,
will live forever until we die, judged of equal stature,
a soldiers stripes, ribbons of his theaters of service,
medals of the honor and the errors of his own
human condition

Creepy dolly thingies like
Chunky Chucky upchucks

Melody box ballerinas
Mesmerizing, hypnotizing

Rat-a-tat-tats splatter spats
To the music of sax and violins

Little ******’s pursing lips
Seducing the sinner in me

Or ending it all at the end of
The barrel of a long, ferric gun