Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
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.
At the mailbox, again:
“Who loves me, baby?”
Well, let’s see: there’s a flyer from Mercury Insurance,
Reminding me that most middle-income customers
Save an average of $4 million smackaroons when they switch too.
The Penny Saver USA.com is here,
Thank God, almighty!
So now I know that Thomas Roofing & Paving
Is having a special on 20-year leak-free flat roofs;
"All work guaranteed & insured.
No job too big or small.
Free estimates/Emergency services/License # I8U-69."
And thank you, Jesus,
For another $4.99 Farmer Boys 3-Egg Breakfast
Combo with Coffee coupon, and that
Little Caesars Hot-N-Ready, $5.00 cheese or pepperoni,
Mae-West-“why-don’t-you-come up and see me sometime?”—mailer. And, of course, another technology Siren’s song:
Verizon FiOS delivers entertainment this big,
Dish me up some dish NETWORK, $19.99 a month . . .
Are you ******* me?
For 12 ******* months?
AT&T;: whack me off on 120 channels.
DIRECTV.com - DIRECTV® Official Site‎
Worry-free 99.9%  . . . cue Joe E. Brown,
"Some Like It Hot“ Osgood:
"Well, nobody’s perfect!"
Time Warner/Sprint/T-Mobile;
And ******* Leather, Polk Street, San Francisco.
******* leather?
Must be for my neighbor: that ***** ****!
And here’s the weekly 8-page color fold-out from Stater Bros:
Lowering prices every day, large cantaloupes
(Jessica Lange, are you back?)
10 for $10.00, 32 oz. Gatorade
Or 24 oz Propel in 30 assorted varieties @ 79 cents
+ CRV: California Redemption Value?
Nice euphemistic cover-up for a TAX.
Nice, nice, very nice, CA elected state officials;
Nicely done, Sacramento.
Everywhere else in the country you get real money—
A fixed number of pennies, nickels, or dimes—
For your plastic bottles and aluminum cans.
But in California, the licensed recyclers
Get to pull the market price out of their *** each morning.
California Redemption Value?
What ******* genius government kleptocrat thought that one up? Conspiracy Alert: who gets all that CRV money?
And what are they doing with it?
Feeling plain, Jane?
Marinello Schools of Beauty, want you,
Offer you hands-on training in cosmetology,
Skin care esthetics, manicuring and vaginal deodorizing—
Just kidding, Babaloo.
Food tip for the Third World:
Never try to write poetry on an empty stomach.
Sizzler 6 oz juicy & succulent.
RENEGADE DEAL:
El Pollo Loco guacamole chicken sandwich,
Coupon free, small drink and small chips,
When you purchase a guacamole or jalapeno sandwich,
includes pepper jack cheese and a southwest sauce.
Gardenas sandia con semilla, 7 lbs 99 cents.
GARDENAS: “en precios, servicio y calidad, nadie nos iguaia.”
Bud Gordon’s Quality NISSAN:
One at this price after a $1500 factory rebate.
TERMINIX: get them before they get you!
The Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Arthropoda, Class Insecta
Bug up my *** again.
And a form letter from the VA
Asking me to please update my whereabouts.
And a form letter from the VA asking me
To please update my whereabouts.
And miles to go before I sleep.
Bite me, Mr. Frost!

An outing, at last.
I am going for a walk around the inside of my gates.
I live in one of those gated over-55 lunatic asylums.
There are gates. It is gated. Get it?
GATED! We feel safe here.
Probably a good thing at our age:
Self-imposed institutionalization,
Putting oneself in an asylum to ferment and die.
The fact that so many of us
Need it so bad at only 55
Says something itself about the current state of
Baby Boomer metal-fatigue.
I am now standing at the far end of the golf course.
I wait at the far end of the 18th Hole.
A ball bounces past my head and
Rolls off past the green into the far rough.
The 18th Hole is perched atop a small plateau,
Out of sight, far above the horizon for anyone teeing off.
I am Puck, invisible and impish.
I pluck the ball up.
I scamper to the green.
I pop the ball into the hole.
Which is better than popping a hole in the ball,
Surely, kind of a drag,
As we were once fond of saying.
Deflated Ball.
Deflator Maus.
OPERA can be ****.
Bodice-ripping corsets, whorehouses and naked ******!
Hardly what you might expect from
A night with the Welsh National Opera,
But they found their way into this production of "Die Fledermaus."
Ripe language, contemporary jokes and
Toilet humor thrown in, adding immensely
To the pleasures of Strauss’s operetta.
"Die Fledermaus," or The Bat’s Revenge,
Is all about drunkenness and adultery.
Despite being written in the 1870s,
It remains equally pertinent to today’s pub culture of excess.
Daring; Colorful; ****: PGA golf.
I steal a golf ball on the far end of the 18th Hole.
I pick up the Titleist and stick it in the hole
(Steady Jessica, not yours.
I hide behind your bush.
(Cue up PSA, First Lady Bird Johnson’s 1960s
Nationwide Beautification Campaign:
“I want everyone in America to plant a tree,
A sherrrr-rub, or a booosh.”)
The golfer now searching frantically:
Why is the cup always the last place they look?
Then, wham, bam, he looks:
A legend is born.
A hole in one,
His name forever immortalized
On a plaque over the bar, the proverbial 19th Hole.

As you know, I speak for all mediocrities,
Safe in my 55+ gated-community.
I go next to the Club House,
"The Lodge" as it’s called.
Each afternoon, the usual suspects
Claiming first come/first serve tiered mini-theater seats
Where Netflix matinee gems are screened.
It is two minutes to DVD show time.
I walk to the front of the room.
I stare at my audience.
I count the house slowly,
Making meaningful eye contact with each wrinkled face.
I cup my hands behind my back and speak:
“I assume you are all here for my lecture on Kierkegaard.”
No one reacts.
I turn to leave but do a double-take and smile.
One old woman in the top right corner of the amphitheater laughs, Perhaps the one other human being within the gates
Who has also smoked a joint today.
For an instant, I am overwhelmed with paranoia,
Perhaps I’ve gone too far over the line:
No longer “oh-he’s-a-character;”
I am now “that creep is ******* nuts.”
Is it time for someone to approach my family,
My next of kin, my “who-to-contact-in-event-of-emergency” number? Who will make the call on behalf of the HOA—
The Homeowner’s Association—
The Tsars, the Duma, the Supreme Soviet in these parts?
They are the power inside the gates;
Those who determine the state’s enemies,
Who govern its community norms.
Power within the gates.
Law within the asylum.
Little Hitlers one and all.
Hopefully they reach my sister first.
She’s been briefed.
KEY POINT IN THE NARRATIVE:
The new narrative is non-linear.
We can no longer sustain a narrative understanding of ourselves;
We are each an individual stream of consciousness,
All of us random, non-linear and disconnected.
We grow more and more disconnected from others.
We may be neighbors in space and time,
But we remain deprived of any significant human contact;
Any spiritually significant human contact.
Our social circle narrows to what can fit in The Telescreen;
We become more intimate with a legion . . .
Did someone say a legion? SPQR:
Am I having some sort of genetic-linguistic seizure here?
Am I channeling Benito Mussolini again?
Il Duce speaks to me from the grave,
Still blowing smoke up my Hopi-Jew-*** ***,
Filling in my insecurities,
Plugging the holes in my character
With delusions of classical Roman grandeur, glory and empire. Hmmmm? Quite an appetizing pitch for the average *****,
A message so completely, so ethnocentrically slick,
Olive oily, and so seductive.
A non-Italian would have thought
American Legion or Legionnaire’s disease,
Or The Foreign Legion, The French Foreign Legion.
The French: a virulent, promiscuous people.
Do you want fries with that, Simone?
No, I don’t get out much.
Only an occasional brisk walk around the asylum,
In and around the golf course, around but inside the gates. (LINKS) Bill Gates. Daryl Gates. Billy Bathgate’s Gates? Ghiberti’s Gates? The Hot Gates? Thermopylae? 300 Spartans/700 Thespians:
“The noun causing idiots to think of
Two girls sloppily eating each other’s mighty vaginas,
When they hear mention of someone being an actor.” http://www.urbandictionary.com
Not even close.
No, I rarely venture out.
This is Hemetucky.
There are methamphetamine-stoked
Teenage zombies at the gate.
Note to costume control:
Perhaps camouflage clothing is the safe choice?
No loud red Hawaiian.
No garish Indonesian batik.
Fleet of feet are these Hemet tweakers,
These cranked up Riverside County teenage barbarians,
These Huns & Visigoths,
These amped up, ravenous jackals.
And why stop there?
These Vandals & Vandellas.
A Motown flashback:
“Nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide.”
With or without Martha—
They remain dangerously lethal.
Yes, let it be camo clothes for me.
Those **** heads may be young.
They may be fast.
They may be able to run me down
On a dry grass dog-legged fairway savannah,
Tearing the meat from my carcass.
But the sons-a-******* have to see me first.
Besides, we know who are real friends are.
Hooray for our media peeps!
We become more intimate with a legion
Of television personalities on 125 different channels.
Most of these we know by name and context.
We know their families, their friends,
Their histories, their tragedies,
Their favored hyperbole and manner of speech.
Sometimes we establish intimacy with celebrities
Strictly on the basis of universal body language.
At times–in the absence of any other
Empathetic facility of identification–
We connect on instinct alone.
Instinct: perhaps animal at its core,
An animal kingdom affinity group,
Connecting on a bio-linguistic level,
Particularly when the Korean, or Spanish,
Mandarin, or Arabic,
Japanese, or even Hebrew language version is broadcast.
All languages cryptically alien,
A dense boundary, a barrio border wall,
Undecipherable, impenetrable concrete.
But we’ve never spoken to our neighbors,
Nor do we know their names.
Celebrities are the neighbors we know best;
Although the intimacy is an illusion,
Permission to invade their privacy presumed,
Tacit in the relationship between celebrities and their fans.
I am an independent contractor now,
An outside consultant to the NSA.
Try as I might I cannot crack the enigma,
Kim Kardashian remains far beyond my code-breaking prowess.
I repeat myself:
We can no longer sustain a narrative understanding of ourselves;
We are each an individual stream of consciousness,
All of us random, non-linear and disconnected.
We are more and more disconnected from others.
We may be neighbors in space and time,
But we remain deprived of any significant human contact;
Any spiritually significant human contact.
Our social circle narrows to what can fit in The Telescreen; we become more intimate with a legion . . .
Back to you, David Ulin:
“Sometime late last year—I don’t remember when, exactly—I noticed I was having trouble sitting down to read. That’s a problem if you do what I do, but it’s an even bigger problem if you’re the kind of person I am. Since I discovered reading, I have always been surrounded by stacks of books. I read my way through camp, school, nights, and weekends; when my girlfriend and I backpacked through Europe after college graduation, I had to buy a suitcase to accommodate the books I picked up along the way.”
Thank you, David L. Ulin.
I cannot help myself.
I grow more eccentric each day.
My eyeballs glued to that flat screen!

Cosmo Kramer: "The bus is outta control.
So I grab him by the collar, I take him out of the seat,
I get behind the wheel, and now I’m driving the bus."
Jerry: "Wow!"
George Costanza: "You’re Batman."
Cosmo Kramer: "Yeah, yeah, I am Batman.
Then the mugger, he comes to and he starts choking me.
So I’m fighting him off with one hand,
And I kept driving the bus with the other, ya know.
Then I managed to open up the door,
And I kicked him out the door, ya know,
With my foot, ya know, at the next stop."
Jerry: "You kept making all the stops?"
Cosmo Kramer: "Well, people kept ringing the bell!"
(Share this moment with a stranger.)

I speak for all mediocrities.
I am their champion, their patron saint.
Boom Chaka Laka. Boom Chaka Laka.
Boom Chaka Laka. BOOM!
Isn’t it time Salieri tempted Constanze–
Frau Mozart–with a plateful of Capezzoli di Venere:
“******* of Venus.”
You had me at hello, Kidman.
I know you too well, Nicole.
I knew you from before,
Way before Tom’s Oprah couch freak show.
Listen to me, Nicole:
We are face to face
With the most profound question in American literature:
"What is the grass?
The flag of my surrender?
The flag of my disposition?"
I resort to Socratic maxims: Know yourself;
The un-****** life is not worth living.
Is it stress? Is it lack of conviction?
Everything Jeff Lebowski neither wants nor needs in his life?
I watched you *** in "Eyes Wide Shut," Nicole.
Now I know you with my eyes and your legs wide open.
Thank you, Sidney Pollack.
Sidney knew.
Sidney dealt us cards
From his Hollywood Tarot deck.
We are intimate, Nicole.
I watched you squat.
Delaney Jun 2015
Secrets are my amplifier.
They burn in my heart like a forest fire.
I am made of those closeted items
they live in me like I'm their phylum.
For only I can keep such dark whispers
hid inside with painful shivers.
Speaking as the queen of hiding
I can assure that it is only time you are biding.
If you believe you can keep silent
think again, because the thoughts get violent.
Secret keeping is not for the faint of heart
it is, in fact, a sacred art.


(d.d.b)
JL Mar 2013
Apple taste
Placed atop
Your head--
Shotgun
Klu
Klux
Klank

Bang
00 Buck
Shattering
Thine
Crystalline
*****-
Optera
Forever
Encased
Behind Glass
Locked and keyed
Plead
Plead
Please
Let me out
To
Use my wings
I'll allow myself
This
Dream
Only for a
While of
Rubbing
Antennae
(With"you")
Caked
In Pollen
(All the other children used
To laugh at my unobtrusive
Thorax)
I forgot
The taste
Of Breeze
Please
Free me from
This prison
Cell
Inside
Your
Nucleus
Warm and inviting
I think
I could learn
To lov-
To lo-
No, I understand
You don't use the L-word
In this
Kingdom
Phylum
Class
Order
Family Genus
Species
You
Use much more subtle
Habitual
Mating Rituals
Practiced by
Boys
And Girls
Alone
Once
Their government
Handbooks are issued
Ashamed and
Full of doubt
They seek out
The silence
Offered on
Forgotten
Moons
Where they can
Meditate to
The infinite hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm­mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm of the universe
You can hear it
Now
If you listen close
Enough
*Almost
A

Whispering
Deep inside (me?)


I
Think




I  could...


love you
worker bees can leave
even drones can fly away
the queen is their slave

-Little Haiku Poems I E-mail people at work
david michael Jul 2012
Lately I have been over taken by a strange urge to high five a sloth. In truth I cannot explain this              
     at least with any sense of legitimacy.

I just feel like it needs to happen.

     When it does it will be like me building a bridge.

Across species?
     Maybe a class or phylum?
           I have not taken biology so i don't know jack about this hierarchy of life business.

          
          
I also feel like sloths can teach us more than we can teach them
     Like our lives are so fast paced
           like a race and we are struggling to get to a finish line
                   That doesn't exist...

Sloths are like slow the **** down...
     It'll be okay...
          You'll get there...
                 I promise.

I kinda think i need that in my life.
     A person...
          or a sloth...
               to just tell me it'll be alright.

I try and be that for so many other people
      But I'm constantly losing my ****
          on the inside.

Like most of the time
     I'm fine
          I can manage life

But that fear of dying
      alone
          unloved
               It's always there
                    In the back of my mind

That can get the upper hand if my guard is down...
     That **** scares me...

It's an irrational fear
     I know that  I am loved by many
            I got buckets of love in this *****
                  makin the Cosby's blush with all this love.

But still this emptiness persist...
     like i am incomplete on some level
          Like i have to fix myself

But I know on a conscious level that..
     I am enough.

But on some other level
     I don't fully believe this...
          And I need someone to tell me this...
               I need to highfive a sloth...
had a dream... highfived a sloth... it was the most awesome feeling ever and i woke up pumped and ready for the day and that was a thing...
Adya Jha Jun 2017
I don't get **** sometimes
It makes me feel dumb and incapable
I wish we could transform science
So it wouldn't feel like a burden

Where is the spark of learning?
The prime aspect of education
Formulas, calculation, books
At the end of the day, I feel like nothing is useful

Fluids, kinematics, gravitation
Atoms, molecules and electromagnetism
Phylum and classes of plants and animals
Calculus and relation and function

Sometimes, I feel like maybe I'm just better off at poems
Saint Audrey Sep 2017
Nobody likes me now
I don't care
Everybody hates me now
They've got some nerve..
Everybody's looking down
I'm feeling cyclical
What should I do about

These *******

Pariah
Sin in over abundance
Liar
Reality could never change
Despondent
Sacrifice util it's incumbent
Pariah
You love the fair exchange

Gauge the metric
By which you judge
The proper usage

Harsher than the light on my keyboard

Often peckish
Killing skeptics
The proper usage
It all falls in the same vein

Forgiveness to a fault line
My god
All I've ever wanted was a new design
Hiding away in the suffering
Fudge the figure for the slumbering

Drab as they may come
Welcome to the whole **** phylum
Encroaching on the underlying theming
And everyone seems confused

I took the world
In my hands
Looked down
Then up again
They all were screaming
About the meaning
Under god
Claiming that they were free men

No resolve left, I stopped listening
par
Esther Jun 2017
They inject it into your brain
Directly through the skin and through the skull
Don’t even ask about the pain
Anyway, it seeps into the cortex
Lighting up the neurons with memories
What memories?
First piggy back, first pulled tooth, first death wish
Soft stuff springing into sparks
And then oh, the flames
Don’t even ask about the pain
The straining emotion remains, of course
And new connections are made
Stemming phylum connections between
One ethereal feeling to the overwhelming onslaught of
You know, things
Then the frontal lobe takes a break
It sips that stuff and stops
And thinks- we all know where that leads
Detachment and dissociation start dancing
They tango to the dull beat of your heart
It thump thumps and there’s nothing else really
Your brain wakes up every few minutes
The background music playing
And it makes you **** in this weird cold air
Stuff happens, things stay alive
And the injection well
It’s faded the minute it was dispensed
You were never more or less awake
But it’s all still moving slow-quick
Slow down, you say quickly
It speeds up
You’re feeling everything that’s ever been felt
What a rush what an end

Now it ends.
You slouch
You see there isn’t a needle or a pen
Nor a blade of any kind
And the thumps are replaced by heavy thuds
The sound rattling in your ear canal
You inject it into your brain again
Nothing
You get up to brush your teeth and wash your face.
Ken Pepiton Jul 2022
89 sets of eyes had seen the first eighth
made public, Tobagoan dimes,
then it was 96
I made'em up, bought the whole mint,
and went into serious business,

re-evaluating dime bags, when John D,

Mr. Dee, he
hands me this silver dime, about 1917.
Says he, gimme the Time's

and I'm about to
when into 2022 i-sense, calculualualchange
in time,

on a dime among many, my own dime.
I invested that liberty given me, for using
old news in good ways once used to force
a reading of the rules.

Would there were a Daysman, betwixt us.
would we had this tech back when,
term papers - ended curiosity
or drove home the point to madness,

all
you know, ex
plodes… pop. And if you breathe
another line
per haps it is one of mine, we think

at old printer's devil, filling space, pace.
Skimming troposh-pherical Miramarical,

thought speed past the other way
one
of these days, you said, these days, we
say today. You are safe
where now is today, and not when this whole
lesson in shared pain per gain, proud son,
prior to changes in the rules
- is allowed to lead to gun play

game on. That fast.
The future has me in it from the start/
I have a mind to tell you all I know,
Pro-ver-bee, do be, do, you know

It was an organized mind, rhearranger
of my fingers on these
keys, i-i-I ai ai ai think these keys, were magic

in the beginning, some men trusted in horses,
some men trusted in leasing and releasing
land… who won?

Eh, not o'er yet. EH, they have wakened
a sleeping giant,

yeah, I paid a price to discover that fact.
Dillon, Montana, storefront all johnnyrebbed up.

I lost the best phone I ever owned, with all the
evidence of hoped for things attained
and apprehended with full ready
set for alz-heimlichkeit kriegspeigel- mir-ror

mar-velous. World of 2022. Within Covideo
5G- wiz mom the fridge is 5G

G is for Guidance, child. Traditions do not change
truths. Oaths welded to the guardian's heart,

pow wer wordsssun-ng
choking in dust, as the eagles gather round the
whole idea
-comfort, ease
in security, we exist in air, as words people think
after reading something old,
fifty years, ago, change wa'swift,
an entire jubilee for most all sworn
legit-liga-mental mind made up to be a way for a reason,
oaths, Breach of contract, old school rules, you lie,
you die, before you unveil the secret place, we be, in, I mean,
so help me, God, on the Bible-level
like on TV,
depending on your experience in the realm of words.

You are now a Kierkeyardian Troen Ridder Wannabe.

Some things you may imagine, leave percussion…
- humms al'lowed to fifteen since then,
- that summer with Pattie Maffeo
- whoa, this idea- drum roll
Rudd, Hersey made me up, and I grew up, in here.

-- Phidelity is only secret to those who must hide.
Inside us, outside us, inside me is not inside you.

These are words, these are sense in your head,
more swiftly than the author choses to believe.

Ping, chorus, another one bites the dust.

Isolation in realization that an ifery, an actual
one
real-live ifery situation, with the body environment
alive
and breathing and
comfortable, thanks for allowing that, I bring some
every time I come,
pop
you can't say that. right or wrong, how long is ruled
valid in code any kid in any country can translate.

Who says we saw every thing
change.
When we was young,
faster paster now as then, I swore

as real as any ride I ever imagined alone.
All things are better when you know, though.

A churchyard child bade me listen, you may know
as we grow in knowledge, as a species,
from a phylum
at the core… we can, and have

we can imagine, yes, and have
haps, in pers and mays, hap-pen
happenstance,
Manifest on TV, that
is power to convey a story, requiring
minds with binge-in-Covid-season, after season,
immunity to cliché ¿ make every idle guess reasonate

Hate ain't 'hate when I do that' kinda thing
hate is evil, you know, no idle word, evil
living words can hold any thought a team of two
agree to allow
- spacetime to think-?
G-qualified Art Intuition, this is not ****,
we know it when we see it, what is this thing

we agreed with, this corporate structure,
many many many tiered this tinker toy thing

A Robin Williams seed, I think, Jim Hunt.
What dreams have come.
And we aren't done.
Icahn's history, I was not even in the game.

Here's one, eight lines from go
go
go man
go

gotcha, johnny be good slood
on a legendary curse
into sec-secondcoming.com

justice, sir, I must say, I just ring the bell.

--------------- hello poetry hello world

5G and starlink, if I stay in the green zone//

From Montana, that 5G fridge, messaged me,

my almond milk is out of use by,
did you die?
we know you are old. We will check again.

At random, I assume, my captain's chair,
and survey my realm
- 26 thousand unread emails… how much
- is my pending attention to any one worth?
I rub my stubble and scratch my half year hair.
I oughta get up
and go/ chorus there, and go

I ought get up and go, but I got no place

I'd rather be,
right now, with you… who
stole that from some show, no body you don'
know.

Some things happen,
when you know,
they do… the color does not set the mood

the time
just hasta be right.
mama
mama always wished to know,
when does it end,
when does it end,

electric shock begins, the folding in daze,
folding pages in donated Sears & Roebuck's
catalogues,
to make door stops, to hold ever locked doors
open, for our grand children, wait
and see, in deep dementia, did she mention…
Tech that functions is so easy to entreat...
Christa H Apr 2014
My physics teacher told me that the acceleration due to gravity is 9.81 m/s/s

yet this law does not apply to things

that are either too large or too small.



I feel like my presence 
defies all laws of physics,

as i feel larger than necessary,

out of place,

struggling to fit into the confined hallways of my school,

doomed to be forever compared to the pixies that float

down crowded hallways,

slipping past each other 
with agility I can only dream of having.



However, at the same time

i feel tiny and insignificant,

as my voice does not project

in a sea of too much static,

and my physical presence does not equate

to my lack of a voice

and lack of a self-dignity.



The biggest flaw in science is that it is a data based art form—
scratch that, it is not an art form,

it is a carefully executed set of rules,

in which statistics are king
and the stripping down of all things human,

is only what becomes of this “objective observation”.


It is ironic that in which when we began the processes of science,

and delved into the depths of our curiosity

we forgot the real meaning of humanity
and every

kingdom phylum class order family genus species

is only a testament 
as to how far we’ve gone

into taking so many parts of a whole
and breaking them into infinitesimally smaller pieces. 



Ironically, with advancements in chemistry

we realize how large we are in comparison

with the atoms and quarks that merely make up

imaginary fractions of our beings.

And since atoms are mostly just empty space, 

one can argue that the things that make up who we are,
arguably do not 
take up any space 
at all.



But in retrospect, the advancements of astronomy 
help us realize
that 
we are a lot smaller than we think we are,

as in a cosmic scale that even God has trouble wrapping his hands around,
the Earth becomes a quark

that makes up the state of our being.



On a cosmic and molecular scale of things we belong

in such an age in which
we are torn between extreme larges and extreme smalls,
and finding the middle is too unsatisfactory,

as humans tend to have a tendency
to claw for too many sides. 

I am both a girl and a student of science

and a student of whatever the cosmos

has granted among us unfortunate humans

to latch our desires upon,
yet I do not understand,

why 4 dimensional concepts 
have to be watered down

into 2 dimensional figures.
Ottar Feb 2013
Butterflies and dragonflies,
Weaving trails on unseen paths,
Bees that bumble, buzzing beautifully,
In the light and heat of the humid day.

Flowers' centres are a delightful repast,
To the insect kingdom that wants summers' bounty
to last, spiders hold it all together with the webs they spin,
The acrobats and airborne members leave mere morsels
for those below.

Those whose many legs, walk and only,
leave a microscopic footprint,
Devour, carry to store these remnants of
the phylum's failures and death,
They eat to live for the moment, they store
not for themselves but for the next generation,
For in their lives of living for the moment,
they too want to know if the next bite ............
will be enjoyed by them or will be them......
For the love of nature. Or, for nature lovers.
now, unlike my usually trenchant literary librettos, I regale the unknown (tum me) reader for savoir-faire articulation, elocution, and indomitable tour de force proffered by a spectrum of bounteous expropriated hegemony rightful to Mother Nature.
--------------------------------------------------------
A Place Revisited Within The Mind
(an illusory escape during dead of winter).
The shafts of a golden veil, spring sun at noon
break through the heavily coated
overgrowth of leafy foliage
and cause shadows spar upon the forest floor.

In a field of wild
a mosaic of crystalline color
from the prismatic play of sunshine
upon the silently talking heads
of the swaying stalks.

the scintillating and sparkling rays
in unison with the weft
(and warp across an invisible loom)
weaves a delicious tasting warm breeze,

(which sways the boughs of treetops to and fro,
akin to an unseen baby being cradled)
brings a ladled spate of cool freshness
from the map-cap world (webbed wide)
of a manmade existence.

The grandeur of the fallow spring meadow
a pageant of exquisite dignity
by the graceful movements
from the un-choreographed fall and rise
of the unplowed acres

eyes orbit, ear re Canal,
and twitching nostrils of sensate beings
to the mellifluous sounds
and sweet smelling aromas
that gently teasingly assault the senses
beguiling the sight,

and lulling ears into a transcendent state.
A buoyant airy tonal plume
rises into the surrounding heights
touches the breadth of cerulean sky
and scythe lent lee gently tumbles back down
like a merry widow waltzing flowery waterfall.

In quiet circumspection
the antics sans plethora of BuzzFeed ding
busily buzzing foraging insects,
which contentedly hum and alight nearby

flitting to and fro
oblivious to plaudits encore
harmoniously thriving
within the living laboratory

of Mother Nature,
sans, Insects or Insecta are by far
count as the largest group of
hexapod invertebrates
within the arthropod phylum,

where simultaneously
underneath the earthen surface
the ground this abustle with
glorious heartthrob
of one micro universe
comprising architects, builders, and weavers
engage in all manner
of natural devices for a livelihood.

This brilliant splendor tantamount
with top-notch operatic performance,
a sensational visual and audiological feast
hypnotizing one humble human (me)
into an inebriated state of bliss.
The more I learn, the more
     I realize how little I know…
which insightful, gutsy,
     entrancing, catchy apothegm

     attributed to Socrates by way of Plato
subsequently self ranking myself
     amidst Phylum Chordata with the Dodo bird
     Class Aves (namely

     said extinct flightless winged creature
with a mass of 29 – 51 pounds Oh!)
once endemic to the island of Mauritius,
east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean,

     none would be espied,
     no matter how thorough
going across aquatic spreadsheet,
     one might row
eventually coordinating
     dropping vertical column in toto
arriving back to original
     mentally ponderous premise

     gamboling feint enroute to see
     Old Man Wizard Of Oz
     meets Crow Medicine Show
pitching thy quasi recursive query - bro

ching concurrence with another maxim to boot
“ignorance iz bliss”, which lack o'learn'n
     doss appeal to this old coot,
yet such pithy accordance came
     to this smart *** to late,
     a mister wordsmith
     with a palm pilot maximum glute
clamors (at risk of life and limb) to hoot

and holler when new kernel
     of knowledge gleaned finds me mute
as if raw bit of savored information akin
     to unearthing a rare gem,
     or rare species of newt
temporarily allaying fervent quest to root
thru hefty tomes of great literature,
     and tracts that suit
many other subjects,
     less to be arrogant and toot

my own horn, but more so...
to satisfy an increasingly
     insatiable hunger grow
wing nsync with unquenchable
     thirsty ambition less for dough
(cuz bing po'
with treasure trove of voluminous
     expansive bookish notions doth shaw

surpass becoming suddenly wealthy tin *** hustlers
     with un hewn fifty nine shades of gray straw
this haint no cowardly lion seeking Androcles
     to extract thorn from hum my faux paws.
courtney May 2018
what is it that makes you so close-minded
so blind-sighted
by the world around you
you get offended by the smallest things
as if the world and the people in it owe something - as if you are the king
but you aren't are you
you are despicable, mad, and irritable
who has put that mask over your eyees
who has told you all of these lies
you are no different that us
no bigger, no better
we are the same
but you can't see it that way
you think we're different because we aren't your color
that we who are taller
are none less than a monster

so i am here to tell you that we are the same
we are the same species, phylum, and domain
our hair is different, yes, eyes and skin
but cut us open and you'll see that we're kin
open your eyes and realize
that we are made of the same ash and dust
that we all have the very same lust
the lust for freedom
for the death of jealousy
so don't come around just to claim
that you're bigger and better and that we're all insane
because i'll be quick to say that we are the same
like it or not
the fact cannot be fought

you are no different
no better, no more sane
so don't judge us because we won't be slain
by your filthy thoughts and hateful eyes
me and my guys - you cannot buy
so if you can't open your eyes, your mind, your thoughts
leave here and be gone
written: 11/22/17
Al Drood Sep 2019
Shut away from public view
behind high walls and landscaped gardens,
Antiseptic wards where beds
have strong restraints, and none are pardoned.
Seldom are the inmates given
visits by their family members,
those that have forgotten kinfolk
cling to life like dying embers.
Who would wish to see some brother,
giggling, imbecilic, drooling?
Who would wish to see some sister,
***** round her ankles pooling?
Then there are the psychopaths,
the freaks deformed, and those possessed;
sedatives and exorcism
pacify the most distressed.
When the sun goes down no shadows
lengthen in stark corridors.
Never-winking neon tubes
ensure that light’s forever yours.
Even so when night has fallen
always come the sounds of Hell.
Slamming doors and running footsteps,
screams and shouts - a tolling bell.
Lost souls roaming empty stairways,
disembodied spirits howling.
Bodies stiff with medication
twitch whilst cotton sheets be-fouling.
And when dawn returns to shine
upon this Godforsaken phylum,
Nature wipes a tearful eye
and grieves for mankind’s bleak asylum.
Wakeful zero, peerless March,
longbow that bears the seasons’ arch,
when mist and windstorms pelt the blank slates
of cold-stupored trees.
Do I wake up yet? Dare I to unfreeze?
they ponder, short of language,
brains abuzz in taproots, dormant xylem
filling phylum with a flash
of namefulness past gray despair—
who grows? What draws them there,
gathered before they sprouted
in the epoch mire of waste that feeds them,
nurture dense distraction from
the trod-upon.
Stay put! They rest
a lot upon your back,
from holding nests to lightning’s crack—

yet time forgets you.
Hashtagged, color-marked you’re not,
a name once only March forgot
now baffles subjects of
a sheltered, sweaty throne.
Good thing you hold your own
whate’er they call you.

               Naming stirs
you from the sleep you keep,
six thousand nicknames ere
you rest again. And man,
forget you as he may, looks to
your silent cue to stay, or migrate to
some panicked place you never knew.
What came before was rough—
you’ll grow through people, too.
Made to again run with me.
Slashing past branch and vine,
leaf and twig;
The sharp corners come upon
us as we turn with grace;
the precision of scalpels,
and mirrors, like a raging river
made peaceful.
The horizon dips beneath mountain
tops, while the wind sweeps across
our bodies, cooling our brow,
drying our flesh.
We dart like birds of prey
through the canopy. Our shadows
cut beautiful forms against
the untrampled scenic landscapes
unfurling below.

The sun at our backs, the moon
before us; we've become catalysts
for the movement, the new days
ahead; the memories of what
has passed in our stead.
Motionless no more,
our voices expel upwards, given
wings by foresight, our power,
and might.

Swept away, avoiding precarious
terrain; landing at the doorsteps
of ears that once dared not listen.
Now they too are becoming filled
by the cacophonous wails, bellows,
and tears of adventure.
Their once stagnant souls ignite,
for greater insight, grandiose
perspective.

They're beginning to hear the roar
of undiscovered rivers of thought,
the hiss of yet untamed mountains
of complacence. Imaginations
scream to life, action bubbles in
their blood.
Onrush of emotion, the unspoken
words of panic, betrayal, and ignorance
manifest into tears for still
lifeless forms.
Grasp onto hands that are running
to again bring to life what
has yet to be seen, from mouths not
yet encouraged to speak.

Peer into the eyes of existence;
shackled no more, our many ways
of endless transformation.

Throw down your predetermined
notions, sheath your convoluted
accusations. Hear instead the
crashing oceans of discontent,
shaping rock into footholds.
Hear the whisper of tall grass
swaying in rhythm with the enemy
they conceal, formulating, and
engineering an end to their eternal
heart beat.
Made to again run with me, our
boundless vivacity, our forever
expedition.

Rising from between phylum,
from vein to flesh;
subcutaneous to cutaneous.
A reminder long since forgot,
"I have a voice, I have thought."
Arising to glisten its sharpened
teeth against the ambiance of moon
and star, sun and cloud.

From the base of hairlines,
to the nape of neck,
sculpted shoulders take shape.
To fatigued arms browning in
accusation to a committed work
the cowards will not overcome.
Shoulder blades to channel of
back, down to the rim of stained
in stench trousers; down to painted
in blood and mud boots!
The Revival!

Animalistic urges to again
strike unprovoked, to perch oneself
on high viewing all as consumable
yield.
Soul and trust,
effort and angst.

A strengthening pulse beats
sound to life, from behind improperly
protected cochlea.
Shaking rustic chords free of
their complacent sediment to again
speak, speak the words of those
whose breath has been taken.

Lest the warrior, the leader,
the cook, the house keeper,
the accountant, the clerk, the postman,
the janitor, the mechanic, rest forever;
yet they steal themselves away some time;
by candlelight, flashlight, moonlight,
or campfire, nursing their childlike
exuberance for expression back to
true virility.

Passivity bites against bit and bridle.
Now screaming passed smashed, and
cracked teeth, "They're coming!"
All captured by heads against cold
ground, soft grass, burning concrete,
and propped pillow.
A dream coming to life once again
rising against flesh to cool our
forever ascent.

"Don't make sympathy your resistance."
CdeM
Shell yours truly share hook line
and sinker, regarding how I nearly
fell prey to off fish shill
doom for umpteenth time?

Ya haint got no choice... to late,
cuz eyes already clicked bait,
though don't worry be happy fate
will find thee enjoying poetic tête-à-tête
rhyming Hors d'oeuvres
ain't no Shakespearean literary great

expert, nonetheless might interest
with special Labor Day rate
absolute zero charge courtesy
to mollycoddle principally
as figurative paypal pit tate
ting gently massaging your pate

anyway don't get doggies in a dimple
yawping personal ambition
of this doggone puppy not to create
literary accomplishment appraised great
merely to fritter away time possibly
unexpectedly, unknowingly,
unwittingly... titillate.

Herewith follows "FAKE" off fish hill
anecdote without wallowing
in self pity and deemed gill
tee of slimy overkill,
whereby fisherman seeks likes of me,
who favors lollygagging
within Brooklyn rill

frequented by Jack and Jill
ice cream in vain
when riled, poked, nabbed...
courtesy angler England Bill
unaware his carping cavil
never fooling this ever will
fill squiggly... d'ya phylum me?

As proud Annelida where trawler
(accompanied with boating mate)
blithely tosses yours truly into catcher's
reel tin can - grim fate
ah, but survival skills include
ability to regenerate

in thee event mine body electric rotate
headed, chopped, perforated, segmented...
evening, increasing, licking... odds
laughing to myself, which doth not abate,
cuz I outsmarted, thus aye state
with modesty if perchance just a sliver

lopped off, destiny cannot eliminate
opportunity not to agitate,
but rather duplicate, replicate
unisexual worman hood
without need to feign
being irate, thus
pretend to equivocate.
Onoma Jan 2020
red hot wax, seal of revulsion.

a morning peck on the critical

mass of your night.

neither girl, nor woman--but some

other phylum.

some pathetically behorned Nordic

malformation running fantasy.

breaking out in despicable rashes of

behavior--begging the sum of holiday.

a thrown wind come to inhibition...

rags to the tainted shroud of wouldbe suicide.

encampments to chameleonize, lie-configure

***** itch rock n roll.

by the powers that be--cessate, sink a one man

stone into earth, as pledge your loyalty.
acacia Oct 2020
I step up those stairs and I TAKE photos of each corner: tears fumble each step in a diamond red-bottom heel, paid a few hundred for a crystal to shine inside her eyes . . .
a real cylinder lady sways her hips up the ladder, eyes zoom in on the One, above all of these men
and all of this humor, outside of racial classes, There it is . . . the Truth lays nestled within a golden egg and a silver lining highlights its belly, its bottom . . . and on it rests a bed of shiny hay
Another swig of sweat: holding up traffic, and the busyness of all other ants beside her chaos guarantees the messed up timing:
this is no longer a problem, She continues to go. Nothing stopping her: she stabs each ant, cuts each tail off of the tailless *** .
something that is so clear to me now, haziness persuades me to take off my bracelets and lay my earrings down on the silk twined near the side of the road: nothing lets me rest. my feet ache and beg to be in a bed. in the gold, a soft shimmering blanket pierces through the cold and engulfs my body in a warmth: shiny warmth, and the gold, and the Wealth, of the Real True Man sinks into my skin as a Realization occurs:

still nothing says into these words I inject for the fifth time, a way to contact Her: Her, she's there drinking me. . . you left it. the Ego swirls its tongues around each dripping *******, fetishistic men pray and the seeking woman peaks into the mirror in hopes to find somebody else, and it is alright for the Men to go for They all will find somebody else. yet we gave all we could give, in our Imagination, we've switched on our crystalline reveries: the awakened consciousness of neon lights, slow movements, properly edited bodies . . . the stench of your fantasies causes a car crash. do you smell your own blood yet? have you tasted your own ***? excuse my vulgarity, but the pearl she refuses to speak on behalf of your perversions and sickness: take your hands somewhere else, Creations, Adamic Being, PreAdamic One: level up your plane . . . to the highest elevation . . .  We hope you know I stride with brown wrapped around the neck, transluscency swiped across the lips, cupid's bow drawn over to hide the secret of the Phylum Nephylum. Tired of miscommunications of my body in this density, the way I bespeakforth Hare Hare Om only makes the World more confused of my No-Bonics, despite my Ebony . . . Bony skin drinks, it hurts more than being within a matrix, perhaps: but that is the matrix itself working through my flesh, this body is the illusion: No other way to put the Truth, move along, and there is still it somewhere embellished within the movements of your iris and perhaps somewhere near where your pores open and close . . . I've faced the end of you and what you've spoken about since I've met you, still I will end up in your dreams wreaking havoc and killing the girl who hurt you; I will step on your broken chest with my bare feet, black in the sunlight and colored in the moonlight, purple under your back, my soft flower grazes against your navel, and I know you will cry: I pray it hurts, I pray you regret it; The God of Me I am Unrelenting and Helling : Heaven-invoking for the Paradise-induces the Vidyamaya: I push and **** you.Ripping the Inenr You towards the Higher You towards the You towards The.

— The End —