Like a psychotic docent in the wilderness,
I will not speak in perfect Ciceronian cadences.
I draw my voice from a much deeper cistern,
Preferring the jittery synaptic archive,
So sublimely unfiltered, random and profane.
And though I am sequestered now,
Confined within the walls of a gated, golf-coursed,
Over-55 lunatic asylum (for Active Seniors I am told),
I remain oddly puerile,
Remarkably refreshed and unfettered.  
My institutionalization self-imposed,
Purposed for my own serenity, and also the safety of others.
Yet I abide, surprisingly emancipated and frisky.
I may not have found the peace I seek,
But the quiet has mercifully come at last.

The nexus of inner and outer space is context for my story.
I was born either in Brooklyn, New York or Shungopavi, Arizona,
More of intervention divine than census data.
Shungopavi: a designated place for tribal statistical purposes.
Shungopavi: an ovine abbatoir and shaman’s cloister.
The Hopi: my mother’s people, a state of mind and grace,
Deftly landlocked, so cunningly circumscribed,
By both interior and outer Navajo boundaries.
The Navajo: a coyote trickster people; a nation of sheep thieves,
Hornswoggled and landlocked themselves,
Subsumed within three of the so-called Four Corners:
A 3/4ths compromise and covenant,
Pickled in firewater, swaddled in fine print,
A veritable swindle concocted back when the USA
Had Manifest Destiny & mayhem on its mind.

The United States: once a pubescent synthesis of blood and thunder,
A bold caboodle of trooper spit and polish, unwashed brawlers, Scouts and      
Pathfinders, mountain men, numb-nut ne'er-do-wells,
Buffalo Bills & big-balled individualists, infected, insane with greed.
According to the Gospel of His Holiness Saint Zinn,
A People’s’ History of the United States: essentially state-sponsored terrorism,
A LAND RUSH grabocracy, orchestrated, blessed and anointed,
By a succession of Potomac sharks, Great White Fascist Fathers,
Far-Away-on-the Bay, the Bay we call The Chesapeake.
All demented national patriarchs craving lebensraum for God and country.
The USA: a 50-state Leviathan today, a nation jury-rigged,
Out of railroad ties, steel rails and baling wire,
Forged by a litany of lies, rapaciousness and ******,
And jaw-torn chunks of terra firma,
Bites both large and small out of our well-****** Native American ***.

Or culo, as in va’a fare in culo (literally "go do it in the ***")
Which Italian Americans pronounce as fongool.
The language center of my brain,
My sub-cortical Broca’s region,
So fraught with such semantic misfires,
And autonomic linguistic seizures,
Compel acknowledgement of a father’s contribution,
To both the gene pool and the genocide.
Columbus Day:  a conspicuously absent holiday out here in Indian Country.
No festivals or Fifth Avenue parades.
No excuse for ethnic hoopla. No guinea feast. No cannoli. No tarantella.
No excuse to not get drunk and not **** your sister-in-law.
Emphatically a day for prayer and contemplation,
A day of infamy like Pearl Harbor and 9/11,
October 12, 1492: not a discovery; an invasion.

Growing up in Brooklyn, things were always different for me,
Different in some sort of redskin/****/****--
Choose Your Favorite Ethnic Slur-sort of way.
The American Way: dehumanization for fun and profit.
Melting *** anonymity and denial of complicity with evil.
But this is no time to bring up America’s sordid past,
Or, a personal pet peeve: Indian Sovereignty.
For Uncle Sam and his minions, an ever-widening, conveniently flexible concept,
Not a commandment or law,
Not really a treaty or a compact,
Or even a business deal.  Let’s get real:
It was not even much in the way of a guideline.
Just some kind of an advisory, a bulletin or newsletter,
Could it merely have been a free-floating suggestion?
Yes, that’s it exactly: a suggestion.

Over and under halcyon American skies,
Over and around those majestic purple mountain peaks,
Those trapped in poetic amber waves of wheat and oats,
Corn and barley, wheat shredded and puffed,
Corn flaked and milled, Wheat Chex and Wheaties, oats that are little Os;
Kix and Trix, Fiber One, and Kashi-Go-Lean, Lucky Charms and matso *****,
Kreplach and kishka,
Polenta and risotto.
Our cantaloupe and squash patch,
Our fruited prairie plain, our delicate ecological Eden,
In balance and harmony with nature, as Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce instructs:
“These white devils are not going to,
Stop ****** and killing, cheating and eating us,
Until they have the whole ******* enchilada.
I’m talking about ‘from sea to shining sea.’”

“I fight no more forever,” Babaloo.
So I must steer this clunky keelboat of discovery,
Back to the main channel of my sad and starry demented river.
My warpath is personal but not historical.
It is my brain’s own convoluted cognitive process I cannot saavy.
Whatever biochemical or—as I suspect more each day—
Whatever bio-mechanical protocols govern my identity,
My weltanschauung: my world-view, as sprechen by proto-Nazis;
Putz philosophers of the 17th, 18th & 19th century.
The German intelligentsia: what a cavalcade of maniacal *******!
Why is this Jew unsurprised these Zarathustra-fueled Übermenschen . . .
Be it the Kaiser--Caesar in Deutsch--Bismarck, ******, or,
Even that Euro-*****,  Angela Merkel . . . Why am I not surprised these Huns,
Get global grab-*** on the sauerbraten cabeza every few generations?
To be, or not to be the ***** bullgoose loony: GOTT.

Biomechanical protocols govern my identity and are implanted while I sleep.
My brain--my weak and weary CPU--is replenished, my discs defragmented.
A suite of magnetic and optical white rooms, cleansed free of contaminants,
Gun mounts & lifeboat stations manned and ready,
Standing at attention and saluting British snap-style,
Snap-to and heel click, ramrod straight and cheerful: “Ready for duty, Sir.”
My mind is ravenous, lusting for something, anything to process.
Any memory or image, lyric or construct,
Be they short-term dailies or deeply imprinted.
Fixations archived one and all in deep storage time and space.
Memories, some subconscious, most vaporous;
Others--the scary ones—eidetic: frighteningly detailed and extraordinarily vivid.
Precise cognitive transcripts; recollected so richly rife and fresh.
Visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory reloads:
Queued up and increasingly re-experienced.

The bio-data of six decades: it’s all there.
People, countless, places and things cataloged.
Every event, joy and trauma enveloped from within or,
Accessed externally from biomechanical storage devices.
The random access memory of a lifetime,
Read and recollected from cerebral repositories and vaults,
All the while the entire greedy process overseen,
Over-driven by that all-subservient British bat-man,
Rummaging through the data in batches small and large,
Internal and external drives working in seamless syncopation,
Self-referential, at times paradoxical or infinitely looped.
“Cogito ergo sum."
Descartes stripped it down to the basics but there’s more to the story:
Thinking about thinking.
A curse and minefield for the cerebral:  metacognition.

No, it is not the fact that thought exists,
Or even the thoughts themselves.
But the information technology of thought that baffles me,
As adaptive and profound as any evolution posited by Darwin,
Beyond the wetware in my skull, an entirely new operating system.
My mental and cultural landscape are becoming one.
Machines are connecting the two.
It’s what I am and what I am becoming.
Once more for emphasis:
It is the information technology of who I am.
It is the operating system of my mental and cultural landscape.
It is the machinery connecting the two.
This is the central point of this narrative:
Metacognition--your superego’s yenta Cassandra,
Screaming, screaming in your psychic ear, your good ear:

“LISTEN:  The machines are taking over, taking you over.
Your identity and train of thought are repeatedly hijacked,
Switched off the main line onto spurs and tangents,
Only marginally connected or not at all.
(Incoming TEXT from my editor: “Lighten Up, Giuseppi!”)
Reminding me again that most in my audience,
Rarely get past the comic page. All righty then: think Calvin & Hobbes.
John Calvin, a precocious and adventurous six-year old boy,
Subject to flights of 16th Century French theological fancy.
Thomas Hobbes, a sardonic anthropomorphic tiger from 17th Century England,
Mumbling about life being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
Taken together--their antics and shenanigans--their relationship to each other,
Remind us of our dual nature; explore for us broad issues like public education;
The economy, environmentalism & the Global ****** Thermometer;
Not to mention the numerous flaws of opinion polls.



And again my editor TEXTS me, reminds me again: “LIGHTEN UP!”
Consoling me:  “Even Shakespeare had to play to the groundlings.”
The groundlings, AKA: The Rabble.
Yes. Even the ******* Bard, even Willie the Shake,
Had to contend with a decidedly lowbrow copse of carrion.
Oh yes, the groundlings, a carrion herd, a flying flock of carrion seagulls,
Carrion crow, carrion-feeders one and all,
And let’s throw Sheryl Crow into the mix while we’re at it:
“Hit it! This ain't no disco. And it ain't no country club either, this is L.A.”  

                  Send "All I Wanna Do" Ringtone to your Cell              

Once more, I digress.
The Rabble:  an amorphous, gelatinous Jabba the Hutt of commonality.
The Rabble: drunk, debauched & lawless.
Too *****-delicious to stop Bill & Hilary from thinking about tomorrow;
Too Paul McCartney My Love Does it Good to think twice.

The Roman Saturnalia: a weeklong **** fest.
The Saturnalia: originally a pagan kink-fest in honor of the deity Saturn.
Dovetailing nicely with the advent of the Christian era,
With a project started by Il Capo di Tutti Capi,
One of the early popes, co-opting the Roman calendar between 17 and 25 December,
Putting the finishing touches on the Jesus myth.
For Brooklyn Hopi-***-Jew baby boomers like me,
Saturnalia manifested itself as Disco Fever,
Unpleasant years of electrolysis, scrunched ***** in tight polyester
For Roman plebeians, for the great unwashed citizenry of Rome,
Saturnalia was just a great big Italian wedding:
A true family blowout and once-in-a-lifetime ego-trip for Dad,
The father of the bride, Vito Corleone, Don for A Day:
“Some think the world is made for fun and frolic,
And so do I! Funicula, Funiculi!”

America: love it or leave it; my country right or wrong.
Sure, we were citizens of Rome,
But any Joe Josephus spending the night under a Tiber bridge,
Or sleeping off a three day drunk some afternoon,
Up in the Coliseum bleachers, the cheap seats, out beyond the monuments,
The original three monuments in the old stadium,
Standing out in fair territory out in center field,
Those three stone slabs honoring Gehrig, Huggins, and Babe.
Yes, in the house that Ruth built--Home of the Bronx Bombers--***?
Any Joe Josephus knows:  Roman citizenship doesn’t do too much for you,
Except get you paxed, taxed & drafted into the Legion.
For us the Roman lifestyle was HIND-*** humble.
We plebeians drew our grandeur by association with Empire.
Very few Romans and certainly only those of the patrician class lived high,
High on the hog, enjoying a worldly extravaganza, like—whom do we both know?

Okay, let’s say Laurence Olivier as Crassus in Spartacus.
Come on, you saw Spartacus fifteen ******* times.
Remember Crassus?
Crassus: that ***** twisted **** trying to get his freak on with,
Tony Curtis in a sunken marble tub?
We plebes led lives of quiet *****-scratching desperation,
A bunch of would-be legionnaires, diseased half the time,
Paid in salt tablets or baccala, salted codfish soaked yellow in olive oil.
Stiffs we used to call them on New Year’s Eve in Brooklyn.
Let’s face it: we were hyenas eating someone else’s ****,
Stage-door jackals, Juvenal-come-late-lies, a mob of moronic mook boneheads
Bought off with bread & circuses and Reality TV.
Each night, dished up a wide variety of lowbrow Elizabethan-era entertainments.  
We contemplate an evening on the town, downtown—
(cue Petula Clark/Send "Downtown" Ringtone to your Cell)

On any given London night, to wit:  mummers, jugglers, bear & bull baiters.
How about dog & **** fighters, quoits & skittles, alehouses & brothels?
In short, somewhere, anywhere else,
Anywhere other than down along the Thames,
At Bankside in Southwark, down in the Globe Theater mosh pit,
Slugging it out with the groundlings whose only interest,
In the performance is the choreography of swordplay and stale ****** puns.
Meanwhile, Hugh Fennyman--probably a fellow Jew,
An English Renaissance Bugsy Siegel or Mickey Cohen—
Meanwhile Fennyman, the local mob boss is getting his ya-yas,
Roasting the feet of my text-messaging editor, Philip Henslowe.
Poor and pathetic Henslowe, works on commission, always scrounging,
But a true patron of my craft, a gentleman of infinite jest and patience,
Spiritual subsistence, and every now and then a good meal at some,
Sawdust joint with oyster shells, and a Prufrockian silk purse of T.S. Eliot gold.

Poor, pathetic Henslowe, trussed up by Fennyman,
His editorial feet in what looks like a Japanese hibachi.
Henslowe’s feet to the fire--feet to the fire—get it?
A catchy phrase whose derivation conjures up,
A grotesque yet vivid image of torture,
An exquisite insight into how such phrases ingress the idiom,
Not to mention a scene once witnessed at a secret Romanian CIA prison,
I’d been ordered to Bucharest not long after 9/11,
Handling the rendition and torture of Habib Ghazzawy,

An entirely innocent falafel maker from Steinway Street, Astoria, Queens.
Shock the Monkey: it’s what we do. GOTO:
Peter Gabriel - Shock the Monkey/
(HQ music video) - YouTube//
www.youtube.com/
Poor, pathetic, ******-on Henslowe.


Fennyman :  (his avarice is whet by something Philly screams out about a new script)  "A play takes time. Find actors; Rehearsals. Let's say open in three weeks. That's--what--five hundred groundlings at tuppence each, in addition four hundred groundlings tuppence each, in addition four hundred backsides at three pence--a penny extra for a cushion, call it two hundred cushions, say two performances for safety how much is that Mr. Frees?"
Jacobean Tweet, John (1580-1684) Webster:  “I saw him kissing her bubbies.”

It’s Geoffrey Rush, channeling Henslowe again,
My editor, a singed smoking madman now,
Feet in an ice bucket, instructing me once more:
“Lighten things up, you know . . .
Comedy, love and a bit with a dog.”
I digress again and return to Hopi Land, back to my shaman-monastic abattoir,
That Zen Center in downtown Shungopavi.
At the Tribal Enrolment Office I make my case for a Certificate of Indian Blood,
Called a CIB by the Natives and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.
The BIA:  representing gold & uranium miners, cattle and sheep ranchers,
Sodbusters & homesteaders; railroaders and dam builders since 1824.
Just in time for Andrew Jackson, another false friend of Native America,
Just before Old Hickory, one of many Democratic Party hypocrites and scoundrels,
Gives the FONGOOL, up the CULO go ahead.
Hey Andy, I’ve got your Jacksonian democracy: Hanging!
The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) mission is to:   "… enhance the quality of life, to promote economic opportunity, and to carry out the responsibility to protect and improve the trust assets of American Indians, Indian tribes, and Alaska Natives. What’s that in the fine print?  Uncle Sammy holds “the trust assets of American Indians.”

Here’s a ******* tip, Geronimo: if he trusted you,
It would ALL belong to you.
To you and The People.
But it’s all fork-tongued white *******.
If true, Indian sovereignty would cease to be a sick one-liner,
Cease to be a blunt force punch line, more of,
King Leopold’s 19th Century stand-up comedy schtick,
Leo Presents: The **** of the Congo.
La Belgique mission civilisatrice—
That’s what French speakers called Uncle Leo’s imperial public policy,
Bringing the gift of civilization to central Africa.
Like Manifest Destiny in America, it had a nice colonial ring to it.
“Our manifest destiny [is] to overspread the continent,
Allotted by Providence for the free development,
Of our yearly multiplying millions.”  John L. O'Sullivan, 1845

Our civilizing mission or manifest destiny:
Either/or, a catchy turn of phrase;
Not unlike another ironic euphemism and semantic subterfuge:
The Pacification of the West; Pacification?
Hardly: decidedly not too peaceful for Cochise & Tonto.
Meanwhile, Madonna is cash rich but disrespected Evita poor,
To wit: A ****** on the Rocks (throwing in a byte or 2 of Da Vinci Code).
Meanwhile, Miss Ciccone denied her golden totem *****.
They snubbed that little guinea ****, didn’t they?
Snubbed her, robbed her rotten.
Evita, her magnum opus, right up there with . . .
Her SNL Wayne’s World skit:
“Get a load of the unit on that guy.”
Or, that infamous MTV Music Video Awards stunt,
That classic ***** Lip-Lock with Britney Spears.

How could I not see that Oscar snubola as prime evidence?
It was just another stunning case of American anti-Italian racial animus.
Anyone familiar with Noam Chomsky would see it,
Must view it in the same context as the Sacco & Vanzetti case,
Or, that arbitrary lynching of 9 Italian-Americans in New Orleans in 1891,
To cite just two instances of anti-Italian judicial reach & mob violence,
Much like what happened to my cousin Dominic,
Gang-***** by the Harlem Globetrotters, in their locker room during halftime,
While he working for Abe Saperstein back in 1952.
Dom was doing advance for Abe, supporting creation of The Washington Generals:
A permanent stable of hoop dream patsies and foils,
Named for the ever freewheeling, glad-handing, backslapping,
Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force (SCAEF), himself,
Namely General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the man they liked,
And called IKE: quite possibly a crypto Jew from Abilene.

Of course, Harry Truman was my first Great White Fascist Father,
Back in 1946, when I first opened my eyes, hung up there,
High above, looking down from the adobe wall.
Surveying the entire circular kiva,
I had the best seat in the house.
Don’t let it be said my Spider Grandmother or Hopi Corn Mother,
Did not want me looking around at things,
Discovering what made me special.
Didn’t divine intervention play a significant part of my creation?
Knowing Mamma Mia and Nonna were Deities,
Gave me an edge later on the streets of Brooklyn.
The Cradleboard: was there ever a more divinely inspired gift to human curiosity? The Cradleboard: a perfect vantage point, an infant’s early grasp,
Of life harmonious, suspended between Mother Earth and Father Sky.
Simply put: the Hopi should be running our ******* public schools.

But it was IKE with whom I first associated,
Associated with the concept 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
I liked IKE. Who didn’t?
What was not to like?
He won the ******* war, didn’t he?
And he wasn’t one of those crazy **** John Birchers,
Way out there, on the far right lunatic Republican fringe,
Was he? (It seems odd and nearly impossible to believe in 2013,
That there was once a time in our Boomer lives,
When the extreme right wing of the Republican Party
Was viewed by the FBI as an actual threat to American democracy.)
Understand: it was at a time when The FBI,
Had little ideological baggage,
But a great appetite for secrets,
The insuppressible Jay Edgar doing his thang.

IKE: of whom we grew so, oh-so Fifties fond.
Good old reliable, Nathan Shaking IKE:
He’d been fixed, hadn’t he? Had had the psychic snip.
Snipped as a West Point cadet & parade ground martinet.
Which made IKE a good man to have in a pinch,
Especially when crucial policy direction was way above his pay grade.
Cousin Dom was Saperstein’s bagman, bribing out the opposition,
Which came mainly from religious and patriotic organizations,
Viewing the bogus white sports franchise as obscene.
The Washington Generals, Saperstein’s new team would have but one opponent,
And one sole mission: to serve as the **** of endless jokes and sight gags for—
Negroes.  To play the chronic fools of--
Negroes.  To be chronically humiliated and insulted by—
Negroes.  To run up and down the boards all night, being outran by—
Negroes.  Not to mention having to wear baggy silk shorts.



Meadowlark Lemon:  “Yeah, Charlie, we ***** that grease-ball Dominic; we shagged his guinea mouth and culo rotten.”  

(interviewed in his Scottsdale, AZ winter residence in 2003 by former ESPN commentator Charlie Steiner, Malverne High School, Class of ’67.)
                                                        
  ­                                                                 ­                 
IKE, briefed on the issue by higher-ups, quickly got behind the idea.
The Harlem Globetrotters were to exist, and continue to exist,
Are sustained financially by Illuminati sponsors,
For one reason and one reason only:
To serve elite interests that the ***** be kept down and subservient,
That the minstrel show be perpetuated,
A policy surviving the elaborate window dressing of the civil rights movement, Affirmative action, and our first Uncle Tom president.
Case in point:  Charles Barkley, Dennis Rodman & Metta World Peace Artest.
Cha-cha-cha changing again:  I am Robert Allen Zimmermann,
A whiny, skinny Jew, ****** and rolling in from Minnesota,
Arrested, obviously a vagrant, caught strolling around his tony Jersey enclave,
Having moved on up the list, the A-list, a special invitation-only,
Yom Kippur Passover Seder:  Next Year in Jerusalem, Babaloo!

I take ownership of all my autonomic and conditioned reflexes;
Each personal neural arc and pathway,
All shenanigans & shellackings,
Or blunt force cognitive traumas.
It’s all percolating nicely now, thank you,
In kitchen counter earthen crockery:
Random access memory: a slow-cook crockpot,
Bubbling through my psychic sieve.
My memories seem only remotely familiar,
Distant and vague, at times unreal:
An alien hybrid databank accessed accidently on purpose;
Flaky science sustains and monitors my nervous system.
And leads us to an overwhelming question:
Is it true that John Dillinger’s ******* is in the Smithsonian Museum?
Enquiring minds want to know, Kemosabe!

“Any last words, *******?” TWEETS Adam Smith.
Postmortem cyber-graffiti, an epitaph carved in space;
Last words, so singular and simple,
Across the universal great divide,
Frisbee-d, like a Pleistocene Kubrick bone,
Tossed randomly into space,
Morphing into a gyroscopic space station.
Mr. Smith, a calypso capitalist, and me,
Me, the Poet Laureate of the United States and Adam;
Who, I didn’t know from Adam.
But we tripped the light fantastic,
We boogied the Protestant Work Ethic,
To the tune of that old Scotch-Presbyterian favorite,
Variations of a 5-point Calvinist theme: Total Depravity; Election; Particular Redemption; Irresistible Grace; & Perseverance of the Saints.

Mr. Smith, the author of An Inquiry into the Nature
& Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776),
One of the best-known, intellectual rationales for:
Free trade, capitalism, and libertarianism,
The latter term a euphemism for Social Darwinism.
Prior to 1764, Calvinists in France were called Huguenots,
A persecuted religious majority . . . is that possible?
A persecuted majority of Edict of Nantes repute.
Adam Smith, likely of French Huguenot Jewish ancestry himself,
Reminds me that it is my principal plus interest giving me my daily gluten.
And don’t think the irony escapes me now,
A realization that it has taken me nearly all my life to see again,
What I once saw so vividly as a child, way back when.
Before I put away childish things, including the following sentiment:
“All I need is the air that I breathe.”

  Send "The Air That I Breathe" Ringtone to your Cell  

The Hippies were right, of course.
The Hollies had it all figured out.
With the answer, as usual, right there in the lyrics.
But you were lucky if you were listening.
There was a time before I embraced,
The other “legendary” economists:
The inexorable Marx,
The savage society of Veblen,
The heresies we know so well of Keynes.
I was a child.
And when I was a child, I spake as a child—
Grazie mille, King James—
I understood as a child; I thought as a child.
But when I became a man I jumped on the bus with the band,
Hopped on the irresistible bandwagon of Adam Smith.

Smith:  “Any last words, *******?”
Okay, you were right: man is rationally self-interested.
Grazie tanto, Scotch Enlightenment,
An intellectual movement driven by,
An alliance of Calvinists and Illuminati,
Freemasons and Johnny Walker Black.
Talk about an irresistible bandwagon:
Smith, the gloomy Malthus, and David Ricardo,
Another Jew boy born in London, England,
Third of 17 children of a Sephardic family of Portuguese origin,
Who had recently relocated from the Dutch Republic.
******* Jews!
Like everything shrewd, sane and practical in this world,
WE also invented the concept:  FOLLOW THE MONEY.

The lyrics: if you were really listening, you’d get it:
Respiration keeps one sufficiently busy,
Just breathing free can be a full-time job,
Especially when--borrowing a phrase from British cricketers—,
One contemplates the sorry state of the wicket.
Now that I am gainfully superannuated,
Pensioned off the employment radar screen.
Oft I go there into the wild ebon yonder,
Wandering the brain cloud at will.
My journey indulges curiosity, creativity and deceit.
I free range the sticky wicket,
I have no particular place to go.
Snagging some random fact or factoid,
A stop & go rural postal route,
Jumping on and off the brain cloud.

Just sampling really,
But every now and then, gorging myself,
At some information super smorgasbord,
At a Good Samaritan Rest Stop,
I ponder my own frazzled neurology,
When I was a child—
Before I learned the grim economic facts of life and Judaism,
Before I learned Hebrew,
Before my laissez-faire Bar Mitzvah lessons,
Under the rabbinical tutelage of Rebbe Kahane--
I knew what every clever child knows about life:
The surfing itself is the destination.
Accessing RAM--random access memory—
On a strictly need to know basis.
RAM:  a pretty good name for consciousness these days.

If I were an Asimov or Sir Arthur (Sri Lankabhimanya) Clarke,
I’d get freaky now, riffing on Terminators, Time Travel and Cyborgs.
But this is truth not science fiction.
Nevertheless, someone had better,
Come up with another name for cyborg.
Some other name for a critter,
Composed of both biological and artificial parts?
Parts-is-parts--be they electronic, mechanical or robotic.
But after a lifetime of science fiction media,
After a steady media diet, rife with dystopian technology nightmares,
Is anyone likely to admit to being a cyborg?
Since I always give credit where credit is due,
I acknowledge that cyborg was a term coined in 1960,
By Manfred Clynes & Nathan S. Kline and,
Used to identify a self-regulating human-machine system in outer space.

Five years later D. S. Halacy's: Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman,
Featured an introduction, which spoke of:  “… a new frontier, that was not,
Merely space, but more profoundly, the relationship between inner space,
And outer space; a bridge, i.e., between mind and matter.”
So, by definition, a cyborg defined is an organism with,
Technology-enhanced abilities: an antenna array,
Replacing what was once sentient and human.
My glands, once in control of metabolism and emotions,
Have been replaced by several servomechanisms.
I am biomechanical and gluttonous.
Soaking up and breathing out the atmosphere,
My Baby Boom experience of six decades,
Homogenized and homespun, feedback looped,
Endlessly networked through predigested mass media,
Culture as demographically targeted content.

This must have something to do with my own metamorphosis.
I think of Gregor Samsa, a Kafkaesque character if there ever was one.
And though we share common traits,
My evolutionary progress surpasses and transcends his.
Samsa--Phylum and Class--was, after all, an insect.
Nonetheless, I remain a changeling.
Have I not seen many stages of growth?
Each a painful metamorphic cycle,
From exquisite first egg,
Through caterpillar’s appetite & squirm.
To phlegmatic bliss and pupa quietude,
I unfold my wings in a rush of Van Gogh palette,
Color, texture, movement and grace, lift off, flapping in flight.
My eyes have witnessed wondrous transformations,
My experience, nouveau riche and distinctly self-referential;
For the most part unspecific & longitudinally pedestrian.

Yes, something has happened to me along the way.
I am no longer certain of my identity as a human being.
Time and technology has altered my basic wiring diagram.
I suspect the sophisticated gadgets and tools,
I’ve been using to shape & make sense of my environment,
Have reared up and turned around on me.
My tools have reshaped my brain & central nervous system.
Remaking me as something simultaneously more and less human.
The electronic toys and tools I once so lovingly embraced,
Have turned unpredictable and rabid,
Their bite penetrating my skin and septic now, a cluster of implanted sensors,
Content: currency made increasingly more valuable as time passes,
Served up by and serving the interests of a pervasively predatory 1%.
And the rest of us: the so-called 99%?
No longer human; simply put by both Howards--Beale & Zinn--

Humanoid.

Here is a primer on the history of poetry

Features of Modernism

To varying extents, writing of the Modernist period exhibits these features:

1. experimentation

belief that previous writing was stereotyped and inadequate
ceaseless technical innovation, sometimes for its own sake
originality: deviation from the norm, or from usual reader expectations
ruthless rejection of the past, even iconoclasm

2. anti-realism

sacralisation of art, which must represent itself, not something beyond preference for allusion (often private) rather than description
world seen through the artist's inner feelings and mental states
themes and vantage points chosen to question the conventional view
use of myth and unconscious forces rather than motivations of conventional plot

3. individualism

promotion of the artist's viewpoint, at the expense of the communal
cultivation of an individual consciousness, which alone is the final arbiter
estrangement from religion, nature, science, economy or social mechanisms
maintenance of a wary intellectual independence
artists and not society should judge the arts: extreme self-consciousness
search for the primary image, devoid of comment: stream of consciousness
exclusiveness, an aristocracy of the avant-garde

4. intellectualism

writing more cerebral than emotional
work is tentative, analytical and fragmentary, more posing questions more than answering them
cool observation: viewpoints and characters detached and depersonalized
open-ended work, not finished, nor aiming at formal perfection
involuted: the subject is often act of writing itself and not the ostensible referent

............
Expressionism

Expressionism was a phase of twentieth-century writing that rejected naturalism and romanticism to express important inner truths. The style was generally declamatory or even apocalyptic, endeavoring to awaken the fears and aspirations that belong to all men, and which European civilization had rendered effete or inauthentic. The movement drew on Rimbaud and Nietzsche, and was best represented by German poetry of the 1910-20 period. Benn, Becher, Heym, Lasker-Schüler, Stadler, Stramm, Schnack and Werfel are its characteristic proponents, {1} though Trakl is the best known to English readers. {2} {3}

Like most movements, there was little of a manifesto, or consensus of beliefs and programmes. Many German poets were distrustful of contemporary society — particularly its commercial and capitalist attitudes — though others again saw technology as the escape from a perceived "crisis in the old order". Expressionism was very heterogeneous, touching base with Imagism, Vorticism, Futurism, Dadaism and early Surrealism, many of which crop up in English, French, Russian and Italian poetry of the period. Political attitudes tended to the revolutionary, and technique was overtly experimental. Nonetheless, for all the images of death and destruction, sometimes mixed with messianic utopianism, there was also a tone of resignation, a sadness of "the evening lands" as Spengler called them.

Expressionism also applies to painting, and here the characteristics are more illuminating. The label refers to painting that uses visual gestures to transmit emotions and emotionally charged messages. In the expressive work of Michelangelo and El Greco, for example, the content remains of first importance, but content is overshadowed by technique in such later artists as van Gogh, Ensor and Munch. By the mid twentieth-century even this attenuated content had been replaced by abstract painterly qualities — by the sheer scale and dimensions of the work, by colour and shape, by the verve of the brushwork and other effects.

Expressionism often coincided with rapid social change. Germany, after suffering the horrors of the First World War, and ineffectual governments afterwards, fragmented into violently opposed political movements, each with their antagonistic coteries and milieu. The painting of these groups was very variable, but often showed a mixture of aggression and naivety. Understandably unpopular with the establishment  — denounced as degenerate by the Nazis — the style also met with mixed reactions from the picture-buying public. It seemed to question what the middle classes stood for: convention, decency, professional expertise. A great sobbing child had been let loose in the artist's studio, and the results seemed elementally challenging. Perhaps German painting was returning to its Nordic roots, to small communities, apocalyptic visions, monotone starkness and anguished introspection.

What could poetry achieve in its turn? Could it use some equivalent to visual gestures, i.e. concentrate on aspects of the craft of poetry, and to the exclusion of content? Poetry can never be wholly abstract, a pure poetry bereft of content. But clearly there would be a rejection of naturalism. To represent anything faithfully requires considerable skill, and such skill was what the Expressionists were determined to avoid. That would call on traditions that were not Nordic, and that were not sufficiently opposed to bourgeois values for the writer's individuality to escape subversion. Raw power had to tap something deeper and more universal.

Hence the turn inward to private torments. Poets became the judges of poetry, since only they knew the value of originating emotions. Intensity was essential.  Artists had to believe passionately in their responses, and find ways of purifying and deepening those responses — through working practices, lifestyles, and philosophies. Freud was becoming popular, and his investigations into dreams, hallucinations and paranoia offered a rich field of exploration. Artists would have to glory in their isolation, moreover, and turn their anger and frustration at being overlooked into a belief in their own genius. Finally, there would be a need to pull down and start afresh, even though that contributed to a gradual breakdown in the social fabric and the apocalypse of the Second World War.

Expressionism is still with us. Commerce has invaded bohemia, and created an elaborate body of theory to justify, support and overtake what might otherwise appear infantile and irrational. And if traditional art cannot be pure emotional expression, then a new art would have to be forged. Such poetry would not be an intoxication of life (Nietzsche's phrase) and still less its sanctification.  Great strains on the creative process were inevitable, moreover, as they were in Georg Trakl's case, who committed suicide shortly after writing the haunting and beautiful piece given below

................
SYMBOLIST POETS
symbolism in poetry

Symbolism in literature was a complex movement that deliberately extended the evocative power of words to express the feelings, sensations and states of mind that lie beyond everyday awareness. The open-ended symbols created by Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) brought the invisible into being through the visible, and linked the invisible through other sensory perceptions, notably smell and sound. Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98), the high priest of the French movement, theorized that symbols were of two types. One was created by the projection of inner feelings onto the world outside. The other existed as nascent words that slowly permeated the consciousness and expressed a state of mind initially unknown to their originator.

None of this came about without cultivation, and indeed dedication. Poets focused on the inner life. They explored strange cults and countries. They wrote in allusive, enigmatic, musical and ambiguous styles. Rimbaud deranged his senses and declared "Je est un autre". Von Hofmannstahl created his own language. Valéry retired from the world as a private secretary, before returning to a mastery of traditional French verse. Rilke renounced wife and human society to be attentive to the message when it came.

Not all were great theoreticians or technicians, but the two interests tended to go together, in Mallarmé most of all. He painstakingly developed his art of suggestion, what he called his "fictions". Rare words were introduced, syntactical intricacies, private associations and baffling images. Metonymy replaced metaphor as symbol, and was in turn replaced by single words which opened in imagination to multiple levels of signification. Time was suspended, and the usual supports of plot and narrative removed. Even the implied poet faded away, and there were then only objects, enigmatically introduced but somehow made right and necessary by verse skill. Music indeed was the condition to which poetry aspired, and Verlaine, Jimenez and Valéry were among many who concentrated efforts to that end.

So appeared a dichotomy between the inner and outer lives. In actuality, poets led humdrum existences, but what they described was rich and often illicit: the festering beauties of courtesans and dance-hall entertainers; far away countries and their native peoples; a world-weariness that came with drugs, isolation, alcohol and bought ***. Much was mixed up in this movement — decadence, aestheticism, romanticism, and the occult — but its isms had a rational purpose, which is still pertinent. In what way are these poets different from our own sixties generation? Or from the young today: clubbing, experimenting with relationships and drugs, backpacking to distant parts? And was the mixing of sensory perceptions so very novel or irrational? Synaesthesia was used by the Greek poets, and indeed has a properly documented basis in brain physiology.

What of the intellectual bases, which are not commonly presented as matters that should engage the contemporary mind, still less the writing poet? Symbolism was built on nebulous and somewhat dubious notions: it inspired beautiful and historically important work: it is now dead: that might be the blunt summary. But Symbolist poetry was not empty of content, indeed expressed matters of great interest to continental philosophers, then and now. The contents of consciousness were the concern of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), and he developed a terminology later employed by Heidegger (1889-1976), the Existentialists and hermeneutics. Current theories on metaphor and brain functioning extend these concepts, and offer a rapprochement between impersonal science and irrational literary theory.

So why has the Symbolism legacy dwindled into its current narrow concepts? Denied influence in the everyday world, poets turned inward, to private thoughts, associations and the unconscious. Like good Marxist intellectuals they policed the area they arrogated to themselves, and sought to correct and purify the language that would evoke its powers. Syntax was rearranged by Mallarmé. Rhythm, rhyme and stanza patterning were loosened or rejected. Words were purged of past associations (Modernism), of non-visual associations (Imagism), of histories of usage (Futurism), of social restraint (Dadaism) and of practical purpose (Surrealism). By a sort of belated Romanticism, poetry was returned to the exploration of the inner lands of the irrational. Even Postmodernism, with its bric-a-brac of received media images and current vulgarisms, ensures that gaps are left for the emerging unconscious to engage our interest

......................

.
IMAGIST POETRY
imagist poetry

Even by twentieth-century standards, Imagism was soon over. In 1912 Ezra Pound published the Complete Poetical Works of its founder, T.E. Hulme (five short poems) and by 1917 the movement, then overseen by Amy Lowell, had run its course. {1} {2} {3} {4} {5} The output in all amounted to a few score poems, and none of these captured the public's heart. Why the importance?

First there are the personalities involved — notably Ezra Pound, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams {6} {7} {8} {9} — who became famous later. If ever the (continuing) importance to poets of networking, of being involved in movements from their inception, is attested, it is in these early days of post-Victorian revolt.

Then there are the manifestos of the movement, which became the cornerstones of Modernism, responsible for a much taught in universities until recently, and for the difficulties poets still find themselves in. The Imagists stressed clarity, exactness and concreteness of detail. Their aims, briefly set out, were that:

1. Content should be presented directly, through specific images where possible.
2. Every word should be functional, with nothing included that was not essential to the effect intended.
3. Rhythm should be composed by the musical phrase rather than the metronome.

Also understood — if not spelled out, or perhaps fully recognized at the time — was the hope that poems could intensify a sense of objective reality through the immediacy of images.

Imagism itself gave rise to fairly negligible lines like:

You crash over the trees,
You crack the live branch…  (Storm by H.D.)

Nonetheless, the reliance on images provided poets with these types of freedom:

1. Poems could dispense with classical rhetoric, emotion being generated much more directly through what Eliot called an objective correlate: "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." {10}

2. By being shorn of context or supporting argument, images could appear with fresh interest and power.

3. Thoughts could be treated as images, i.e. as non-discursive elements that added emotional colouring without issues of truth or relevance intruding too mu
...............
PROSE BASED POETRY
prose based poetry

When free verse lacks rhythmic patterning, appearing as a lineated prose stripped of unnecessary ornament and rhetoric, it becomes the staple of much contemporary work. The focus is on what the words are being used to say, and their authenticity. The language is not heightened, and the poem differs from prose only by being more self-aware, innovative and/or cogent in its exposition.

Nonetheless, what looks normal at first becomes challenging on closer reading — thwarting expectations, and turning back on itself to make us think more deeply about the seemingly innocuous words used. And from there we are compelled to look at the world with sharper eyes, unprotected by commonplace phrases or easy assumptions. Often an awkward and fighting poetry, therefore, not indulging in ceremony or outmoded traditions.
What is Prose?

If we say that contemporary free verse is often built from what was once regarded as mere prose, then we shall have to distinguish prose from poetry, which is not so easy now. Prose was once the lesser vehicle, the medium of everyday thought and conversation, what we used to express facts, opinions, humour, arguments, feelings and the like. And while the better writers developed individual styles, and styles varied according to their purpose and social occasion, prose of some sort could be written by anyone. Beauty was not a requirement, and prose articles could be rephrased without great loss in meaning or effectiveness.

Poetry, though, had grander aims. William Lyon Phelps on Thomas Hardy's work: {1}

"The greatest poetry always transports us, and although I read and reread the Wessex poet with never-lagging attention — I find even the drawings in "Wessex Poems" so fascinating that I wish he had illustrated all his books — I am always conscious of the time and the place. I never get the unmistakable spinal chill. He has too thorough a command of his thoughts; they never possess him, and they never soar away with him. Prose may be controlled, but poetry is a possession. Mr. Hardy is too keenly aware of what he is about. In spite of the fact that he has written verse all his life, he seldom writes unwrinkled song. He is, in the last analysis, a master of prose who has learned the technique of verse, and who now chooses to express his thoughts and his observations in rime and rhythm."

.............
OPEN FORMS IN POETRY
open forms in poetry

Poets who write in open forms usually insist on the form growing out of the writing process, i.e. the poems follow what the words and phrase suggest during the composition

Kudos to Kaepernick.

I just cannot drown all my beliefs and ideas, even if it contradicts my flesh and soul. When I heard that not standing up to the tune; that has always succeeded on sweeping all of the messes underneath the sad reality, to be deemed as subversive, I know that Rosa would definitely clench onto the seat tighter than ever.

Kneel, my friend, kneel.

To drag our body out there, all over the precious hills and fields, while acting as if the scale has always been set fairly beneath you all this time, will hurt you more than myself. How can a mere matter of things decide our future, our destiny? We shall shape our fate, you shall shape your own fate, and to be judged on the perception biasedly built in the name of order for thousands of years, is a situation that should not be endured by anyone or anything in a tiny dot within this vast universe.

Kneel, my friend, kneel.

And for that, I cannot stand proudly and profess my love to you as of now, even though I will always wear my heart on my sleeve for you to see. To be cheated, to be manipulated, to be deemed as surplus, by those at the tip of the plateau, that cunningly asked us to forget all the tangles and wrangles for the love of this sacred land, while unashamedly distribute everything off the land, off the ocean amongst them, is the last thing that we should allow to happen. I am one of those people that are not able to put on the mask on top of our meant-to-be honest faces, to say hail to the thief is worse than the eternal grief. I have never dreamed of burying the hatchet with them, not even for a second and if I ever do it, I shall be condemned and dismissed for forgetting the roots, the fons et origo of mine. To love you does not mean to stand still to the soulless melodies, to love you does not mean to bow down to the meaningless piece of cloth that has overseen countless infiltration and bombing over the years.

Kneel, my friend, kneel.

To love you is to fight for the rights of many, by any means, even by not standing up. When black is no longer the symbol of miserable, filth and calamity, we shall then breath with ease, stand on our feet and fully embrace the real meaning behind all those majestic words.

Kudos to Kaepernick.

All present in the stream of time,
Connected they build a line, a river which flows uninterruptedly,
The here and now, is the future of a pasts dream, a wonderous reality,
It is the futures past, the memories recorded within the depths of it
Gravity distorts time, causing it to slow down till it's stopping point lensed from a black hole, lurking within shadows of remorse in space,
Fished out from the sea of passing events, it keeps flowing, but now it does so while not including the fallen one who embraced a blackhole,
Time only knows one path, straight ahead with no slips and turns,
The present is the pasts future and what was thought to be possible,
It is the little wealth every living being possesses yet it is overseen and forgotten, until the moment of ones death drives gladly near,
From the womb to the tomb, drowning within the waves of a temporal lengh, the event of an entity's existence and its period.
A pace for an allotment, given from the complaints of an worldly life,
Spend it well, unlike the spring we cannot turn the tide, recycle again!
But for that matter the world of dreams holds a sweet embrace to all,
After all, you don't need to die in a dream.

~ Umi

all of
America’s
gubmint hatin
yahoos, pining
to get their
country back,
should grab
yer rifles, stock
up on ammo
and giddy up
down  to Texas
to join the
secessionists
headin out
of the Union

Rick Perry
promises to
keep his promise
to close all the
gubmint departments
he can't remember
the names of

Ron Paul will
finally be liberated
from the tyranny
of his federal
paycheck and
can return to
his district to
practice medicine
unencumbered
by the acceptance
of medicare
payments

Ted Cruz will
move to coronate
his Cuban born
daddy as Viceroy
for life of the
western hemispheres
newest banana
republic

the last act of
of the Compartment
of Education will be
to turn every
public school
into a Holy Ghostin
Jehovah meetin
house

Judicial magistrates
will criminalize
poor people
or just make
them slaves
and all prisons
will be turned
into profit driven
plantations,
overseen by
the local
Sheriffs who
will be paid
time and a
half and 15%
of all profits

unfortunately
the Cowboy’s
will lose it’s
moniker as
America’s Team
if rattlesnake
booted
Jerry Jones
can’t make a
deal to turn
his stadium
into a sovereign
independent
territory as a
protectorate
of the USA

To assure
national purity
Texans will
build a Jericho
style wall to
define the boundaries
of their heavenly
kingdom and outlaw
all trumpet playing
within earshot
of their perturbed
borders

The Eyes of
Texas as the
state anthem
will need to
be reworded
The final stanza
will be changed
to "Until Gabriel
blows his nose"

keepin the ungodly
out and the chosen
people safely
insulated within
the shining
Lone Star State
will rise again
as a solitary
confederacy
of dunces

Music Selection:
The Eyes of Texas

Oakland
11/18/13
jbm

Sorry guys, this one is about football (soccer) and its effect on the current climate in England. Won't make much sense if you don't know about that, but have a read anyway and make what you will of it

Leather boot to leather ball
(Or more accurately
Leather/synthetic polymer boot to polyester/cotton blend with rubber inner ball)
Put said ball in the opposition goal
But ... that's not all...
It's a safe place for grown men to emotionally connect,
Without fear of losing another mans respect,
Or dealing with issues that we're trying to deflect.
It's how I connect-ed with my Dad,
When I was a shy and nervous lad,
And Blackburn Rovers weren't just really, really bad.
So... Me and my oldest discussed the best team England had
And the younger 2 waved the flag
That Hazel made at school;
Full of pride;
An England flag that looked like a Union Jack.

                          "We're back!"
Listening to the popular pre match pontification of pointless ex professionals,
And on Twitter and Facebook and in the papers and in the chants...
                   ... One thing is clear...

"50 years of hurt never stopped US dreaming!"
"This isn't about life and death, it's much more than that ...
"This is about national pride...
"Brexit!
"11 lads to show Europe that Britain is still Great"
By Britain... We mean England...
By England ...we mean our England...
"Born and bred me!"
By our England ...we mean ...
"Close the borders!
Turn back the ****** immigrants!
And **** Jonny Foreigner!"

Coz England... Is about to 'kick off'

A black man falls to the ground crushed by some foreigner
A pug ugly **** steps up

Rooooonnnnneyyyyyy!!!

England is great!
England is mighty!
We don't need Europe!
The sun never sets on OUR empire!
Coz we are the Greates...

****!

How can Iceland score?
How can little Iceland score?
How can ****** little Iceland score against mighty England?!?!?

It's a fluke.
We'll come back into it
We'll come back...
Into..

****!

How are we losing to Iceland?!?
And on
And on
And on

Until the end - 2:1

Sleepy heads lay down in bed
As grown ups pick their world to shreds
Self respect hangs by a thread
On buses making racist threats
As plastic pundits and armchair politicians
Vent their hate on Facebook

"When we won the World Cup in '66 it was because they had the passion and desire to succeed, not the money. They'll all go home to their posh houses and cars whilst we all give 100% just to put food on the table. There are too many foreign players in the premier league getting paid crazy amounts so the English talent is overseen. Until the FA step in and limit foreigners to 2or3 per team then we will always under achieve, cos we don't have the players to choose from."

Foreigners are to blame
Their foreign money
And their foreign players
****** foreigners

It's not the pressure of a green and once pleasant land?
Placed with green and jealous hands
On the shoulders of the greenest lads
Who were only on the green of that field
To kick a not leather ball with a not leather boot
For their country (and maybe for their Dad)?

I don't have the answers, but I ask myself, in another 50 years, what will we dream of?

Marcus Rashford played well though didn't he?!

With nails in hand,
As sharp as knifes, reflecting the dim light of a lamp from the ceiling.
A thought rushing through my head, no actions follow.
Hollow, is the lamp which is about to go out soon enough
Hollow, it is when no body is around and when people gather.
It doesn't matter, not its surroundings, not its use, it remains the same
Without ever changing, wether shining or not it is hollow.
Nails, as sharp as little knifes, could pierce through it carelessly
It wouldn't matter, it would remain the same, it would be hollow.
The difference, relies in the possibility of it not being able to shine
Shine out the light, which people are desiring to have in this room.
It simply would be thrown away, replaced and forgotten.
And it wouldn't be questioned, what the nail had done it for.
Overseen, the lamp remains the same after all.
Hollow

~  Umi

I have a friend in north Wales
She's a scouser but lives in Rhyl
Her job is taking care of young adults
Who have learning dificulties
They live in hostels where they are overseen
By my friend and her colleagues
So, another friend of our's rang her at work
And asked if she was busy
She said that she wasn't as they were all out
So and so had gone shopping with so and so
Someone else had gone here
Another had gone there
And one had gone to the harpoonist
As usual, for lessons
From a harpoonist?
Yeah, you know
Someone who plays harp

                                    By Phil Roberts

Bio-mechanical protocols govern my identity
And are implanted while I sleep.
My brain--my weak and weary CPU--
Is replenished, my discs defragmented.
A suite of magnetic & optical white rooms,
Cleansed free of contaminants,
Gun mounts & lifeboat stations
Manned and ready,
Standing at attention, saluting
British snap-style,
Snap-to and heel click,
Ramrod straight and cheerful:
“Ready for duty, Sir.”
My mind is ravenous,
Lusting for something,
Anything to process.
Any memory or image,
Lyric or construct, be they short-term
Dailies or deeply imprinted.
Fixations archived one and all
In deep storage time and space.
Memories, some subconscious,
Most vaporous; others--the scary ones—
Eidetic: frighteningly detailed,
Extraordinarily vivid.
Precise cognitive transcripts;
Recollected so richly, rife and fresh.
Visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, & olfactory reloads:
Queued up and increasingly re-experienced.
The bio-data of six decades: it’s all there.
People, countless places & things cataloged.
Every event, joy and trauma
Enveloped from within or,
Accessed externally from cloudy storage devices.
The random access memory of a lifetime,
Read and recollected from cerebral
Repositories and vaults, all the while,
The entire greedy process overseen,
Over-driven by that servile British bat-man,
Rummaging through the data,
In batches small and large,
Internal and external drives working
In seamless syncopation, self-referential,
At times paradoxical and infinitely looped.
“Cogito ergo sum."
Descartes stripped it down to the basics but
There’s more to the story:
Thinking about thinking.
The curse & minefield for the cerebral:
Metacognition.

No, it is not the fact that thought exists,
Or even the thoughts themselves.
It is the information technology of thought
That baffles me, adaptive & profound
As any evolution posited by Darwin.
Beyond the wetware in my skull
Dwells an entirely new operating system.
My mental & cultural landscape are now one,
Machines connecting the two.
It’s what I am and what I am becoming.
Once more for emphasis:

"It is the information technology of who I am. It is the operating system of my mental and cultural landscape. It is the machinery connecting the two."

This is the central point of this narrative:
Metacognition—your superego’s yenta Cassandra,
Screaming, screaming in your psychic ear, your good ear.
“LISTEN: the machines are taking over, taking you over.
Your identity and train of thought are repeatedly hijacked,
Switched off the main line onto spurs and tangents,
Only marginally connected or
Not connected at all.
Yes, something has happened to me along the way.
I am no longer certain of my identity as a human being.
Time and technology has altered my basic wiring diagram.
I suspect the sophisticated gadgets and tools
I’ve been using to shape & make
Sense of my environment, have reared up,
Turned around on me.
My tools have reshaped my brain,
Remaking my central nervous system.
Turning me into something simultaneously
More and less human.
The electronic toys and tools I once so lovingly embraced,
Have turned unpredictable and rabid,
Their bite penetrating my skin, septic now,
A cluster of implanted sensors.
Content: currency made increasingly
More valuable as time passes,
Served up by & serving the interests of
A pervasively predatory 1%.
And the rest of us: the so-called 99%?
No longer human;
Simply put by both Howards--Beale & Zinn:
HUMANOID

(Excerpt from "Confessions of a Hopi *** Israelite")

I: Introduction—A History Lesson
The word ******* was derived from the Sanskrit
svastika,
meaning good fortune,
or well being.
The shape is a monogram,
the interlacing of two Brahmi words,
a hooked cross which, over 5,000 years ago,
represented the rays of the sun,
the four directions of our natural compass,
and the four elements of our world.
Earth, wind, fire and water,
the symbol was balanced,
sitting firmly on its base
like a poised animal
on its haunches.
In other interpretations,
the symbol was a sacred text
explaining, “here is how the sun moves across the sky.”
A map of the heavens,
a lesson in astronomy.
The *******, when standing on its base,
is still sacred today
in many religions.
It is
the Buddha’s footsteps,
the seventh saint in Jainism,
and the four possible places of rebirth
in animal and plant world,
hell, earth and the spirit world.
In the 1870s the ******* was changed forever.
An archaeologist engrossed in discoveries
from ancient Troy and Mycenae,
Heinrich Schliemann,
found the symbol likeable
and claimed it,
because as a man he had the power to define.
He designated it
the symbol of his people—the Aryans—
and soon this is what it became.
By 1907 the ******* was turned at an angle
physically
becoming a hooked cross precariously balancing
on its side.
Its meaning, however, was turned upside down.
The cult of Aryan supremacy
claimed it,
and finally ****** adopted the
bedraggled image
as the symbol of the **** party
marking the beginning of its legacy
as an image of hate,
a harbinger of genocide,
and unthinkable atrocity.
In the course of twenty five years,
under the direction of ****** and Himmler
and Heydrich and Daluege
and Jeckeln and Prutzmann
and Eichmann and Mengele
and countless other men with vacant expressions
and the ability to spell death with pointed fingers
the ******* came to mean loss
of integrity, of citizenship, of basic rights,
of personal safety, of property,
of an untarnished image of humanity
of hope.
Under the *******
unraveled a calm, coordinated,
and systematic extermination
of 6 million Jews
200,000 gypsies
70,000 handicaps
and unknown numbers
of people of color,
political prisoners,
homosexuals
and deportees.
Under the *******,
there were gas chambers
and the burning of children’s bodies.
There were prison-like ghettos,
and there was no humanity.
Part II: A lesson in Linguistics
First, language is meaningful only
because of shared understanding.
Words mean nothing,
symbols are vacuous
unless we share recognition
of the things that they signify.
All language is arbitrary
if we cannot agree on what object,
or emotion or event in history
are called forth by the words that we say.
Second, to be able to change meaning, you must have power
and you must have time.
Trust me,
if I could rewrite the meaning of every blood-soaked word
I would.
I would scrub them clean of their histories.
I’d redefine them,
make them useful,
maybe even kind.
But I can’t, and neither can you.
At least not alone
and not on command.
Because I’m sorry to say
that that’s not how language works.
I’m sorry to say
that a symbol made synonymous with hate
cannot be used innocently,
cannot only mean what it meant before ******
and Himmler
and Heydrich and Daluege
and Jeckeln and Prutzmann
and Eichmann and Mengele.
Even if you claim to redefine it,
even if you claim to only use it for what it once was
even if once it was beautiful,
like the stalwart path of the sun,
the ******* has innocent blood on its hooks
and it eyes us sideways like a crooked lamppost
burdened with memories we cannot dismiss.
We remember.
As a society, we remember,
because pain is a finicky creature
that will not be reasoned with,
or re-defined out of existence.
We cannot use the ******* without remembering the pain
how it was ironed onto the starched coats
and painted on the national flags
of those who murdered
6 Millions Jewish men, women and children,
200,000 gypsies
70,000 handicaps
and unknown numbers
of people of color,
political prisoners,
homosexuals
and deportees.
Even if you say so.
Even if you claim to only use it for good.
We remember,
we remember.
Part Three: A Story
In elementary school my Hebrew teacher was Mrs. Wygodski.
When I was ten she seemed ancient.
I remember her shaky hands, but the steadiness of her voice.
Most of all I remember the numbers on her forearm
from when the Nazis decided she was no longer a girl,
but a numerical value.
I remember her telling us about the concentration camps
when they shaved her tiny girlish head
and gave her *****, ill-fitting clothes,
when they took her arm and erased her
like a message in the sand,
and she became a number.
In elementary school someone wanted to play a joke
so they scrawled a *******
on its side
in large black ink on the white board of class.
The symbol was the first thing you saw
when you entered the room.
I remember
when she came in she was smiling
as usual
her grey hair down, her kind, open face,
a miracle of a woman,
to withstand the darkest night and still smile.
I remember that Mrs. Wygodski said it is important to forgive
but I could never understand how she forgave the Nazis.
She would look at us and say
“hate is the darkest tunnel,
and harder to climb out of
than forgiveness is to bestow.”
The day she walked into the room with the *******
looming large on the white board
I will never forget the look on her face.
As the symbol spoke to her directly
it unearthed everything she spent years flattening down,
memories she sifted through for decades with trembling fingers,
images she shelved in the recesses of her mind
to make room for the possibility of tomorrow, and the warmth of smiling children.
For a moment
that symbol broke her,
and in that moment, the ******* once again stole her humanity,
and turned Mrs. Wygodski into the number
they once told her she was.
Part Four: Land of the Free
Today thousands of hate groups continue to use the *******
teetering sideways
the way that ****** intended it.
Once a symbol of good fortune,
it is now the most widely recognized symbol of hate
the world has ever known.
Used in the United States
the ******* has opened its claws
and staked claim to the beating hearts,
and hopeful sovereignty
and promised dreams
of countless African Americans,
who became the targets of the same bottomless hate
that engulfed millions in the holocaust.
Under our star spangled banner
the ******* has overseen
thousands of racially driven lynchings,
ongoing police brutality
the imprisonment of one out of three black men
and the bombing of black children in their Sunday school dresses.
In Oregon,
the ******* celebrates the sealing of borders,
is embraced by the very groups
who once outlawed black existence
in our very own state constitution,
the same groups
who once dictated the state’s refusal
to ratify the 14th amendment
of equal protection,
and the 15th amendment
giving African Americans the right to speak
at the ballot box
and be heard
by their government.
In the land of the free, the *******
is still tattooed on chests
and ironed to coats
and scrawled on the walls of my classroom.
In our communities
there are
the European Kindred,
the Northwest Hammerskins,
Volksfront,
the National Socialist Party,
and the Ku Klux ****.
And they wear the *******
because they recognize its meaning,
the meaning we all know
the meaning imbedded deep
by the pointed guns of the Einsatzgruppen
Today,
here,
they wear the ******* because they want to swallow the world.
Part 5: In Conclusion
To whoever drew the *******
last week,
last year,
in every year before that
in the bathroom, in the hallway, on my classroom wall and desks.
I forgive you.
Not because I want to
but because Mrs Wygodski would.
I will give you the benefit of the doubt.
I will believe you didn’t mean it.
I will believe you didn’t know.
I will still have hope in your humanity
because what choice do I have?
This is my refusal to become what the Nazis wanted,
what hate groups still want.
That is how I resist.
I refuse to hate you,
I refuse
to hate.
However, now that I’m addressing you directly,
I want to take this moment to make clear
that when I see the *******
this is what I see:
I see Mrs Wygodski,
with her kindness that was like a spring
flowing from somewhere dark and unseeable
and I see her face when she walked into a room with that symbol
and I see the colors of her world bleed out.
I see my missing family members,
who I never actually had the chance to really see.
So I imagine them,
my grandfather’s aunts, uncles and cousins
from a shtetle somewhere in Poland,
erased completely from history, from record, from existence
by ******* wearing men
who forgot how to be human.
Finally, I see my students.
The rest of them,
with their still young impressionability
and their beautiful array of skin colors, backgrounds, ethnicities, cultures
and their intact understanding of love.
They are the hope that our grandparents thought was lost,
and this ******* is their antithesis.
It is the undoing of their sanctity,
it is you spitting in the face of everyone who is not you.
And if you do that intentionally,
if you do that knowingly
and with purpose,
well, that
is unforgivable

The beginning of the end.
A sandstorm made a huge 400 floor library sink beneath the sand.
At times a tall tower can be seen sticking out of the sand.
There are wolfs bringing information from across the land.
The library overseen by a spirit of an owl.

Many have tried to find the library but they threw in the towel.
The library has a huge ancient observatory.
A huge telescope looking at the stars tells a story.
There are parts of the library that has been untouched for a century.
There is an extremely huge card catalogue.

It even owns books from ancient babylon.
The library has various gateways.
The bookshelves looks like endless hallways.
There are parts that are inaccessible. 
The libraries knowledge is unsurpassable.

A huge staircase that is broken. 
The timepiece on the wall is broken.
A Lot of travellers got lost. 
The library is filled with snow, sand, moss and the one room is filled with a forest.
The library is full but it still has a lot of storage.

Would you rather the majestic pure white polar bear had a home in this world or that Paul Ryan took a slow, slow boat
to China & then turned around & came back, & then again,
& again?

... the humble Praying Mantis was able to bask in the sunshine
on a leaf of its choosing or that Trump was locked away for
70 years in a dank & dismal people's cell?

... all the bees, & all the dainty flying creatures could buzz here & there as was their want or that Mitch 'Gruesome' McConnell was marooned forever on a distant deserted isle?

... the startling life-form that is coral could take its own sweet time covering rocks & outcrops & undersea crags or that Mike Pence quite suddenly & terminally lost his ability to function in any way whatsoever?

... the soon-to-be starved nomadic people, the soon-to-be flooded
coastal peoples & the soon-to-be parched farmers of India were to be given direct financial & physical assistance by expropriated & toiling Masters of Industry & sundry media lackeys?

... that the delicate flowers, the tall & mighty trees, the vital green, green grass could just a go on going on, & anyone, anyone at all who ticked that box declaring Climate Change a hoax be pitilessly overseen constructing vital networks of deep, deep canals, oh for the remainder of their natural life?

... Would you rather one less Republican politician or one less soaring & majestic wind-tumbling vulture?

... Would you rather ...

(For the Words of LIFE have already been spoken tens of Times over through the Centuries)*


I’d write,
spill out words,
letters binded and bond,
pasted to structure and form.
Language to engage and interact,
to mean and defy,
but this tongue of fingers,
lips of print and digital paper
have laser printed the world out upon the glitter of the screen.
Whispered to sing
and shriek sonnets of the reality I’m chuckling within,
presence surrounding.
I’ve spent shadowed years to form my personalized blue prints,
the architecture of the emotions and logics,
the laws to routines I’ve overseen.
I’ve grasped reality and found a serene among terror and sadness,
wretched and blurred.
Obviously I can contain contentnous when I’m so lavished,
family surrounding,
medium wealth cloaked about me,
but it only gives me even more reason to convey calm,
control, and content.
I’ve bathed among aloneness to puzzle about in confuse and wonder,
figuring to form a philosophy.
There is nothing left to pass against the parched flesh of my lips,
for the universe has already grasped it within the wind.
Devoured my sense of self and awareness,
there’s little left to say when every significant philosophy and observation
I’ve known and could provide
I’ve already said
or has been said
for it is but a well known to sought after cliché or element of the living.
What’s left to speak when every thought feels as common knowledge.

It was my first Cathedral,
Cavernous and nearly silent.
Dark enough that I closed,
My eyes giving them time
To adjust to the depths,
Of it's shadowed blackness.

Languid slanting rays
Of penetrating sunshine,
Alive with moving mists,
Of floating, rotating dust,
The only source of light.

The bittersweet scents,
Of venerable age mixed,
With fodder and animal waste,
Not at all unpleasant to sniff.

Leather tack hung on walls,
Awaiting the call to work.
Long delayed, and overlooked,
Replaced by mechanical steeds,
Wheels and blades of steel.

Neatly festooned wall hooks
Displaying wooden handled
Hard-worn steel hand tools,
Flecked with rust, chipped by use.

The choir was in the rafters,
Pigeons’ and Doves
Cooing Heavenly Hymns.
Occasionally the murmur of,
Feathers flapping on high,
Like the sounds,
Of Angels wings.

I climbed the ladder,
Into the Loft up high,
Followed by a friendly,
Old one eyed Barn Cat,
I recall his name was Cy.

Old Cy who knew,
All the good places,
To explore and secretly hide.
And too, where tasty rodents
Were found in heavenly,
bountiful supply.

That lofty perch,
Among the penetrating
slanting rays of sunlight
Inspired a fathomless hush
of contemplation and inner bliss,
I'd never known before, or since.

We sat silent for many minutes,
In a state of transfixed repose,
Old Cy and I, speaking not a word.  

We crawled among stacked bales,
Of fragrant fresh cut hay,
Like a lofty Fortress built for us,
Playing and imagining,
Endless flights of fantasy,
Long into the eve of day.

Yes, my Grandfather’s
Old wooden Barn,
Was indeed a magical,
Reverent and sacred place,  
As any formal denominational
house, of any faith can be.

If ever, I truly felt,
The presence of Holy Grace
Surely it was within,
That impressionable
all inspiring place.

Even fleeing memories
of a long ago small boy,
Have not diminished,
That big Cathedral's
Prevailing, exalted space.
Spiritually overseen by,
An old, feline, one-eyed
clergyman named Cy.

Talking to the inner child within

Hello, Self
I called your name many times and knocked at the door. You didn’t answer in the past so I figured I would try one last time. I am glad you answered this time.
I know you are mad and scared , I left you alone  as did the others, from the rush of everything I didn’t look back to see if you were following me, when I finally  looked back  you were nowhere to be found.
So I dropped everything and started wandering place to place looking for you, searching through people some good, some bad. Some people helped, some took away. So I kept on searching, I almost gave up when I heard a little child cry , I kept listening and listening no one was around, people left or walked away. I was feeling as if I lost my world. So when I heard the child’s cries.  I started looking  around still no child to be found then I sat  back down and put my  head in my hands   thinking looking around still hearing the child, closer and closer it seems to get. I felt my heart jump at one point something startled me.  The sound was coming from within me, the child and the cries; I started feeling the pains, the anguish. The remorse and despair was so thick trying to find you was tough the more I searched the thicker it became.  Then I realized what it was I was seeing the inside of myself , how can this be I thought then I realized  I let  things get to me over time, and let people hurt  and cause  me pain and sadness along the way. I wasn’t enjoying life or living a dream I was encased without escape, encased by those who pushed and shoved, demanded and scorned until it built and built a scar of hurt and pain. Work and work, do my say don’t think.  When I started doing my own thinking that’s when I heard   your cries.
It took me a little while you know and loss of many good people and help along the way, but I am here and have been knocking at the door for some time, and yelling your name; so again thank you for answering the door this time, I was almost out of ideas as to what to do next it would have been a long road back to nowhere.
  Can we talk? Would you like to tell me what is on your mind and your thoughts all this time?
If it is yes ,  get your shoes I know it’s been a long time since you have been out , and I will get you some sunglasses to protect your eyes until you become accustom to the sun  ,  but first as I kneel down  to  his level so he can see me face to face , will you  ever forgive me and accept my apologies for  all those many lost years  when you should have been   with me and not  hidden deep inside.
If you are ready lets go  we may even go get some ice-cream, do a little fishing ,play in the mud puddles during the rain and maybe even after; what do you say? Sound like a good plan. Play games,  lets meet people together  who knows  who or what we may run into, but I am here now with you and this time everywhere I go you are with me and if you are slow that’s find  we have plenty of time.  Come on lets  go see what’s  out there  are you ready  this will be new to you , let me see  it through your eyes this time where my eyes are weary you have  to yet see it all so maybe you will see something I have overseen.
Thank you for opening up the door. I love you

.

                                                                                                                       Written by Alan Spivey 5/31/2012

She loses herself within the pages that he writes
Never knew life could be so bitter through someone else’s eyes
Stabbing you in the back, but what’s the plan of attack
Just to be watching from a distance, the disturbance that you lack

Motionless stuttering aimlessly to the ground
Overwhelmed by the filth that nurtures and surrounds
Your dream-like disorder
Learning as you get older
Not to shake hands with the strangers whose immaturity seems shorter  

Nocturnal
And breathe before the anxiety sets in
Don’t stop just because the direction you’re following could bleed sin
It’s the flow
Of the fluid
To let be
And swim through it
So let’s just smile as the rain hits and keep this ship in movement

No creo
En vivo para su asilo
Ven conmigo

Dynasty dwells on the richer man’s lawn
As she chooses her words carefully
Lips like the pawn
Of the black and white lifestyle
She nods as she sits while
The pulse that once harbored takes its turn to stand trial

Anointed, at last
The shock theory stood chance
But tell me how many licks does it take for you to understand
You’re ignoring too much hurt
The beauty of disturbed
Until god whispered in your ear
The pain fled dispersed

And at first with unreasonable doubt
It felt good to feel new
Empowered by the strength and the wisdom that it grew
Overseen by the temperament
Not knowing where December went
And all I saw within the darkness was a reflection of you

Uptown.
Because you can't ever feel down
Up
     Town.

Lights swirling around
and exotic colors become all
      at once
           neon bright.
Searing your eyes enough to give everything
that dim cloud whirling around it
      like an oversized trench coat.

But this is all overseen
    and somewhat out of place
by the people in
     fur coats.
And ladies who hold silken scarves
over their oddly high placed noses
as they pass my friend's cigarette smoke
     just before they enter the "hip" Latin restaurant
          to prove they're cultured.

And even though I laugh,
     and give my friend a knowing smile,
I hear them over the crowd
     incorrectly pronounce
           the phrase "dos cervezas",
and can't stop the cringe that appears on my face.

My friend walks away as if nothing is wrong,
      truth be told, there shouldn't be.
We both know how this works.
Who gets upset about a heritage they don't advertise?

We have all
        but bleached our skin
(because anything that isn't white is in)
We want out.

Because exotic
       animals
              are often admired
(as they are worn around the shoulders).

For a brief moment
with a pen in hand
I become god
If I choose it to be so
you’d all bend to my wim,
with every pen stroke I’ll
make brush stokes that
forge fields of dreams
that are overseen by
boundless galaxies riddled
full of stars that never
got their wishes of being wished upon,
the moon in all it’s heavenly bound glory
would set depthless ocean tops ablaze
with its luminescence and all of the beings
I create would live on the earth as if they realized
this is the only one they’ll get.

The touch, it makes me weak it makes me strong
makes me feel that I belong
when I reach
and become enthroned under your arm
I belong

to the skin and not the deceitful lies
to the nature that is mine
those evil ugly spies
that despise
my internal
eternal
purity

there's a body pressing inside of me
holding me
from wriggling free
and when my guilelessness breaks from it's digging piano wires
and I lay
my desire to be touched
on your skin

theres a small opportunity
though
I'm mute
each tear length finger tenderly on the edge of your consciousness
touching like pen to paper
of my inner fears, hopes, disposure
and even so gingerly
I know
I know you feel me
and its depth
it's radiating heat
before I come

I'm a child with my cheeks pressed to a screen door
I move as though my body should ******* like dried mud
as though my yoke is exposed

but surprisingly
I've the hunch to know
that you feel my heaviness
to know the weightlessness I feel
in my soul
you reach with your minds eye around its negative space
and feel its sorrow
though it needn't be real any longer
because the lies are fake
you move like a ghost in my soul
through the layers of my existence
until you reach my blinding light
that smiles with blinding stars
and cries with pools of joy in every corner of my face
in spite of the darkness that tries to influence us
influence as it may, to block me
I know you see me
because it permits me to breathe
loosen the strings of this
of the injuries
of this mask
of what it has taught me
digging raw behind my ears
through the experiences
that cant do more than to try to contain me
the person, the essence, I adore above all else

When this cast is cracked
my lithe body
my bones tumble out
like a newborn animal
exhausted
into a tender pool, locked lovingly around your body
with your will
and its silent attentions
I'm safe to empty
to heave the waters of my deepest
perpetuating well
with agonizing throbs of pain in my arms
to feel the weight
live the weight
to finally know it's release
If I desired, or I so choose
I could flood the very color from my eyes
I can do this very thing
You must know the feeling
behind my face
when I lunge the gallons from my linen canvass
Thank you
for this safe place from the world and its composing times, overseen by your perceptive silence and compassionate lovely gaze

There are scores of characters seen
from the third story window.
They litter the walks:
step after invisible step, past imperfections in the damp cement.
I wish I had their consent,
to interrupt their set,
to interject:
curiously, coolly, calmly,
to tear every costume to shreds,
to mend the script that's been
written on every bathroom wall,
every dorm room hall,
and in monopolized letters to all.

It wages on and on
like some cranking machine overseen by fashionable businessmen
and their thirsty paper money hearts.
But, there are times
when the walks are vacant and lonely
and the set is silent,
no acting for an hour or two.
They're getting their makeup done,
practicing their lines,
and warming their jaw muscles
for the next play of the day.

There are scores of characters seen
from the third story window.
Littering the walks,
and putting on plays.

All for my afternoon rest.

You said you know the tales of cities,
traveled through each, big and small,
You've roamed the streets, felt the rush
and acquired a taste for it all
But the one you've overseen the most,
the one with history in its veins,
riddled with ancient relics and goods,
has a tale you have not obtained
Your efforts to expose this minute metropolis
to the doors inside of your mind
have failed thus far in your journey
because you've locked the key inside

What happened to the cannon fire
And to the guns with bayonets?
What happened to the cavalry
And to the soldiers with straight backs?

What happened to the officer
Who had overseen their training?
What happened to the drummer boy
Who kept the troops marching steady?

The cannons changed into grenades
And guns became automatic.
Horses were traded in for tanks
And our soldiers came home a wreck.

The officer is dead and gone
Replaced by a carbon copy.
And what use is music to them?
All they can hear are hearts pounding.

War has changed in so many ways
But there are some things I still know:
Glory was never an aspect
Of it and neither was honor.

Instead war is comprised of blood,
Tears, fallen comrades and lost years.

Another day ending by waking up to another empty pillow
A coffee break for two and a carriage ride for one
Bad lyrics to sum up a life, or not a life at all
It's not me
Who's he? Who's she?
Mysteries the Hardy Boys won’t touch
When Mary Jane is the best lawyer out there
I'm in court for the ****** of a young woman
Found guilty; life without parole
It's better that way anyway
I can't go after myself anymore
There's tape over my ears to silence the words around me
Clown smiles painted across the town now
I'm panicking Indian style of the side of the road
Waiting for someone to throw candy my way
Fortunately, I'm overseen
A walk home, alone, empty handed
But happy

The templars took the cross
and made it a religion rose
a psychological overseen dome
of acquiesce and admiration

What if there weren't any slaves?
only mercenaries who craved
for power and a subservience rave
across the vast seas and distances

We trace the Omlec race in Americans
way before Colombus leaped his strides
as they left scented archeological remnants
of basalt and granite sculptured rights

The templars took the cross
and created glorified corded bonds
aesthetically covered with an overseer
of utter deceit and embellished conmanship

Clumsy creator
scribbling whimsical impulses
silently crying with desire for bliss;
the one-sided dream of popularity.  

Such history
angst protrudes
endless words repetitive
for all shades to a single
melancholic emotion.
Comfort comes from discomfort
past and present.  

His tales err
each day a page
littered with blemishes,
the next forever blank
until written so.

Don't dwell too long
correction's left to
what the future promises;
more room to fill
than a page growing
ever so occupied,
worry growing rapid
like a child to a parent.

Despair
long the struggle
you must overcome.

The weather for any path we take
realized by our mind's forecast
our eyes the screen we sense.

Solace may come
when rain falls heavy
yet the sun shines
promising growth with
the earth long overseen;
beauty cannot forever cling to
nights and overcast days
while light permanently contrasts

So please
embrace balance.

Honour

They have used me and I have served.
How could I not?
They made me what I am.
A servant to their cause.

I’ve seen Queens crowned.
Threats of invasion from afar.
Overseen their communications.
Remained steadfast
As a good subject does.

I serve Queen and country.
I provide shelter for the ******
And light for her successors.
I trembled as planes flew above
And celebrated as they flew no more.

I’ve watched from afar, as the great playwright worked,
As theories and principles that would shape the world
Were committed to paper for forever more.
I’ve seen evil and good, hatred and love
Entangled in their eternal battle
From high above.

And as I waned, as I began to fall
Like all the Queen’s servants must do
Even those that had once stood so tall
Above it all, yet never apart
I can fade happy knowing this oak has honoured thy ******.
Goodbye London, my one true love.