Rule 161:
If trying to avoid death
Results in avoiding life
You are not avoiding death
You are avoiding life
Yep, if something results in the opposite of what you intend, then wisdom it ain’t.
POEM: Rule 161
POEM: Chrysalis of Security
I shed my chrysalis of security
Arising as a butterfly
Only then realizing
I was not the worm
That I appeared
I am struck by how the quest for security can easily become a prison. Whether the quest for security is played out through money, material comforts, emotional familiarity, moral compromise, or big, juicy mental rationalizations, letting go of the known, familiar, and predictable seems necessary to take flight amidst the “unbearable lightness of being“. Apparently, a common regret of the dying is about not having taken enough risks. Well, we are all dying. The question is really: Am I living?
POEM: Divine Lover
One day
I asked God
What is it all about?
There was only silence
But with the look he gave me
We’ve been lovers
Ever since
POEM: Worship Here and There
I heard that many people will travel miles
To go to church
I find so much worship between here and there
I rarely make it anymore
POEM: Where Lost Socks Go
The other day I stumbled upon
That place where lost socks go
And I thought to myself
Of course, that makes sense
I would love to tell you where it is
But then I would have to kill you
I’m not a big fan of violence, but I couldn’t resist the twist of the mobster cliche at the end; it seems very campy, over the top. I’m just grateful that I found the place where clean socks go — the other place is hell!
POEM: Illiteracy
I am illiterate in hundreds of languages
And more so of the ones I know not of
At least that’s what a little birdie told me
Or so I think
I’m not really sure of
These languages for the birds
Justice For Danny Brown $149.02
Today, I have to go down to the Toledo Municipal Court and pay my fine and court costs of $149 for “illegal posting” of Justice for Danny Brown stickers and Julia Bates WANTED posters all over downtown, surrounding the Lucas County Courthouse, where Julia Bates, Lucas County Persecutor, holds the fate of Danny Brown within her poor judgment, blocking his exoneration and access to civil compensation for over 19 years of wrongful imprisonment. Ms. Bates has stated that at this point it’s really about the money. Maybe she should run for treasurer rather than prosecutor. As an act of poetic justice in the face of her intransigence, I will pay my fine and court costs with bills marked with “Justice For Danny Brown .com”, as pictured below:
I couldn’t resist adding my two cents, as a tip, in case my main plea for justice is declined. Typically, I write “Money is NOT Free Speech!” on my paper bills, but in this case, since it is “all about the money”, I will pay for my not-so-free speech this way.
For better or worse, my stickering may not be a gateway crime (simply an escalating misdemeanor) — I see a lot of stick-ups in my future…
POSTSCRIPT: With three armed guards protecting my lone self entering the Toledo Municipal Court, a fortress of law, I knew that evildoers would scatter from their inevitable cross-fire should freedom get out of hand. When I handed to the clerk my stack of marked bills topped off with my shiny two cents, she proferred a blank look, as if a 5 gram copper monkey wrench had been thrown into the works. Apparently, in the give and take of life, the court is adept at take, but unfamiliar with give. With all the tender that is legal, she rendered another blank look when I added, “I prefer to offer my two cents, literally and figuratively, in these types of transactions.” I saved her from further trauma by re-claiming the two cents. A wiser guy might open an IRA or something, but I’m going to continue searching for venues where my two cents is welcome.
I have now paid my debt to society, though my rent of activism for living on this plant is still overdue.
POEM: Squandered Life
I have squandered my life
On poetry
And making love
If only I had kept a cleaner house
Said no one ever!
POEM: Empty Plates With Dancing Tales
Empty Plates With Dancing Tales
A crowd gathers
A performer spins
A dozen plates on poles
Like angels dancing on pinheads
How many are possible?!
Worthy of a few coins
Fore a collection of small bills
[Unmarked except by bankers]
Gathered wear
One’s head might normally be
South versus North
An animal magnetism
Whose gravity is unequaled
And might be considered
Un-slavery to sum
A spectacle to most
Providing little food for belly
Or thought
Still
Within arms reach
Yet outside rapt attention
Against the wall
Even rarer
A woman’s plate
Holding earthly delights
From seasons passed
A cache returned
From soil and toil
Yielding
A patience
Unseen by any human hospitality
As sun and seed conspire
As clearly as mud
Untrampled from above
Clan destined
To over-look
From whither
Rations aplenty
And from the gaunt let
Turn their eyes
And just
Beyond the pale
I specked
Return dimly
To one’s own moat
For a fort night
Never leaving port or ail
A thousands channels to sea
What can’t be seen everyday
Every day
Never the less
The woman sews
Yet another see’d
Acquainted with empty plates
And those by which continents are divided
She undertakes the tectonic shift
In udder silence
As the upper crust
Takes
Up
The mantle
Picturing itself free
Ingeniously framed
Buy empty plates
With dancing tales
I have long been fascinated by the often sharp and surreal contrasts between the inane and the meaningful. In post-modern times, it seems that inane distractions are reaching all-time highs on a daily basis. Still, the generous forces of nature and creativity counter such head-bobbing and rubber-necking with constant access to simple and awesome pleasures to participate in as co-creators. In this poem, growing and eating one’s own food is that tectonic shift that will change the world, though perhaps at an imperceptibly slow pace to all but those with the largest perspectives. I am grateful that it is more than possible to surf such tectonic shifts and still be well grounded!
Also, in case you missed it, I choose a woman to represent those connected with the forces of creation. Women do most of the work in the world, including most of the underpaid and unpaid work in the world. We all owe a debt to them. THANK YOU!
POEM: Past, Future, Now
Past, Future, Now
Past
Future
Looking back
Looking forward
It makes my head spin
Except for now
And now
And now…
POEM: Unfed Just Desserts
Poets are born, die, crushed by writer’s block or a cruel world, and are reborn again and again. The world can be a desert at times, sometimes worse. Yet, as a child, an infant in the arms of a mysterious universe that somehow cares for us, we are fed. We launch ships and create beauty that remains largely unseen. But, like the macaroni art that only a mother could love, we return to our source, a home, even if a home to no other; and we take a place of honor, as a sentinel on a doorway to that place where Mom’s food is stored.
Unfed Just Desserts
When I find myself
Unfed
I play
The child
Imaginary
Tea
Set
Against
Me
Still
Un-made
Fore
Solid food
Not with standing
In a world of
Make believe
Partial to
Anew born
Who finds their nourishment
Spewed about
Much to the dismay
Of those with
More mature tongues
And ingenious mines
No amount of trains or planes
Could carry the sustenance
I re-choir
Though utterly captivated
My self
I let out a powerful wail
Enough blubber
To endow
A thousand poor SOBs
Any mother knows what I’m talking about!
And I am herd
As I
Go on
Strike
An umbilical chord
Sending me to my womb
Wear a dinner awaits
Unserved in any dining room
Just desserts
POEM: Can God Make A Billboard SO BIG That…
God is bigger than any box or labels we can imagine. I think of those epic movie beginnings where the letters scroll across the whole screen, at most one at a time, so you really have to pay attention to read the words. Can you imagine having to read an essay, poem or textbook about God that way? Here is the poem un-capturing that:
I suspect that God is well practiced
At making bill boards so big
That we can’t read them from our ad vantage
POEM: Nature’s Guardin’
This poem goes out to all those who showed up on May Day for the groundbreaking of Toledo Occupy the Garden.
Nature’s Guardin’
Nature spills
From pots unpurchased
It knows no law but its own
Openly heiring its dirty secrets
Breaching our wreck tangles
Finding its way
Under our nails
Mortar
Boards
Weeds reclaiming that which can never be lost
Even in death
Oddly giving
Life
It’s all a plot
And weave awe
Be planted
To be
A rested
Where there is no crime
Sow
Drop buy
The guardin’
Or leave no witnesses
So goes the weigh of nature
POEM: I Suspect
Here is a May Day poem, where metaphysical optimism crashes into empirical skepticism. Will we simply crash and burn? Or, will we rise like a Phoenix from the ashes? Stay tuned…
I suspect
I suspect
God is
The greatest
Un-detective
Just
Waiting
Wise
Cracking
Another Case
Wide
Open
As the whirled unrivals
As wee
Per severe
As we in cyst
In decisiveness
Receive only
A silent answer
Deifying the laws of gravity
What trail of clues
Could we possibly fallow
In too the forced?
A Candide house
In witch to live
Or worse yet, in ovens
Mere bread crumbs
Long the way
Consumed by others
In an inquisition
What could passibly be incite?
Like pop corn
Under cover
With more heat than light
Blowing our tops
Not taking know for an answer
Yielding
Nothing but
A mess haul
Leading know where
What more all fiber
We knead
Sow un-pallet-able die it
Doody-bound to ask, “Where’s the better?”
The haystack needles us
As a single blade of grass
Mysteriously cuts through our encyclopedic egos
Wet the hay!
Rudely ruminating
For an unherd of fourth tine
How can we stomach it?
We have a cow
To match our bull
Sterile and next to godliness
Making love
With a test tube and a bleaker
Open minds and vacant hearts
A terminal generation
Overcome by they’re first
Fore knowledge
Over looking
Clothesing one’s I’s
So unsightly
As life’s wizzed ‘em
Over taken
Bypassed
Buy history
Doomed to replete it
Prospect us
With pre-science
And art
Beating
Like a conundrum
None the less
Dissecting all of life
Left
With a pile of tripe
As we complain of the stench
Of our own making
(Or un-making as the case may be)
If God were to show his face in this town
The lessen would certainly be learned
Love hurts
The hair of the dog
Banned
On the run
Never quiet feeling like homme
He would, in all probability, be epically misunderstood
From the powers that be down to a best friend
Likely murdered by both
A merciless alien power
And the icons of the culture he was born into
Un-Abel to walk unscathed through a crowd of birthers
For they couldn’t pick him out of a lineup
In the company of drunks, tax collectors, and fools
In a holding cell
Wading for some final trial
With a thousand co-Pilates and no one at the helm
Staging a mock revolution
Where the only truth is that
What goes around comes around
Accept some con-science
And the inevitable quest in
Beyond the reach of a court of laws
Some lurking undiscovered
Lost in a holey see of overlooked graces
Born free
So far from home
In one’s living room
A naiveté of a starless night
On the out in an inn-less locale
Only there for another’s senses
Borne stuffed
To the rafters
Full of hay
Only longing
To be assistant manger
Nothing more
Than what thou dust
Surrounded by animals
Where the “nays” have it
Guilty by dissociation
Given birth
By an absentee father
The biggest mother of all
I suspect
Not countering upon
The distracted
The brutalized
And hard working skeptics
Unresigned to forest labor
Sisyphean mountaintops
Out to sea
Beyond the vale
Beyond damn nations
Willing
To pay the fined
The greatest miracles unearth
POEM: Not Unlike Hope
Here is a poem about hope, sometimes on the run, sometimes on the lam. Hope is never lost, and hope often lurks in sometimes unrespectable places. This poem has plenty of puns, hidden jewels, drama, chase scenes, and victorious poetry. Enjoy!
Not Unlike Hope
Take heart
Breaking news
Hope is believed to be
Residing in an undisclosed location
The authorities have undertaken
To apprehend hope
Dead if need be
Vowing to devote all needed resources
To the hunt
For citizens
Good
Neighbors
Turning in
Suspicious
Character
Turning out
En masse
Lady Justice
Courting
Blindly
Dated
Expects her clues so
Much like a pink panther
Only rarer
Insulated by specious arguments
A trade mark
To protect and serve
Up
The last
Ne’er do well
Un-till
Hope rears
Her ugly head
Once
More
Only aft her
Out laud
In the vicinity of
Lincoln and MLK Way
Where the scufflawless meet
The police force
O Captain! My Captain!
Flailing too
Resolve
Issue
Press
Release
Dashing
Up the poetry
As we cooly add verse
Shelling out what is ode
And the sonnet rises
Not unlike hope
POEM: My Heart Breaks Daily
Life is messy. Compassion is messy. Acting in the world in a way that is congruent with one’s broken and breaking heart is a challenge. A challenge to the actor, and a challenge to those in the world witnessing and trying to make sense of one’s acts. Here is a short poem about such heartbreaking action:
My heart breaks daily
Spilling out into the streets
And other public places.
The authorities instruct me
To clean it up.
POEM: A Mother’s Nature
This poem did not exist a few hours ago. I was interrupted by a thought (captured in the first few lines) and I took the time to jot them down. Seconds turned to hours as the muse is a taskmaster second to none! The harm we are doing to our planet haunts me. Meditating upon the good nature of a higher power helps center me while on a planet where cynicism flows freely. I am powerless over the creative powers. This is a good thing! I stand in awe. I will stand to protect our planet. Enjoy!
A Mother’s Nature
Mother Nature is relentless
Like our best dreams
Unlike the monster one step behind us
And gaining
She will do us no harm
Patiently waiting
For her children to return
To the home she has fashioned
Never out of style
Yet oft forgotten
Too few admitting to such a hospitality
Taking the mantle of patients
Picturing her children’s development
Framed by her own love
Razed buy edifice complexes
No matter how
She made them field
And forced unmatched
Given freely verses
Accrued credo
Never to retreat
With receding heir lines
Lured into orphanages
Buy counterfeit presents
That no’s no currency
Now
Giving no quarter to a homme-less mom
A mirror sham to couch their shame
Forging the future
A bode
Swayed by unnatural winds
A backwards whirled
A lost race
Imitating won another
They could get no flatter
In the crush of by-gone dates
Rapt over and over
For what they ware
Gripped by un-void-able cells
Phony sustenance
Quiet a pare
The elusive wons and zeroes
Forming a mock 10
Sow quickly barren
Fake breasts
Seduced into beating
A psycho-path to
Unending litter
Mine-ing anything and everything
That would
Make steal
Throbbing from a mother’s chest
Hearts trumped
Up on false charges
Beating the rap
A single ruse
On Mother’s Day know less!
As she goes
About her business
Miss taken
Scores of prodigal children
A fatherless brood
Ever digging that irony
Any bogus meddle will doo
Pinned to their empty chests
Never wandering up ponder
All is dwell that ends dwell
Wee awe
End up
In hour
Birth place
Returning too
One’s native
Land
Taken
In
Buy
Mother Nature
By awe accounts
Receivable
How can it be
That she is
Unscarred
By us?
There is no sphere
Like hers
POEM: O Children of Mother Earth, Arise!
This poem has emanated from my musings about the oil tar sands in Canada. The extraction of these oil tar sands, in some of the most pristine parts of North America, is the largest single scarring of Mother Earth ever undertaken by human-unkind. It seems that our oil addiction has us scraping the last drops of oil from the planet, squandering nature’s wealth — our children’s children’s inheritance — and polluting Mother Earth which sustains our very life. Greed is the most dangerous enemy of sharing a planet together. I hope that people from locales all over the earth rise up and protect Mother Earth from the many assaults on her. As for my Toledo friends, you can check out and join Occupy Toledo’s resistance to oil tar sands being processed here at the BP refinery. Think globally, act locally — that’s local, not loco!
O Children of Mother Earth, Arise!
Listen, O children of Mother Earth!
Hear, those who have ears
Hear the streams of clean water, our tributaries of life
Hear the streams of cars and trucks dirtying the air we breathe
See, O children of Mother Earth!
See, those who have eyes
See the beauty of fields and forests, mountains and meadows
See the scars of strip mines and cesspools of toxins
Smell, O children of Mother Earth!
Smell, those who have noses
Smell the fragrance of wildflowers and gardens
Smell the stench of oil and coal combustion, and chemical cocktails concocted
Reach out and touch, O children of Mother Earth!
Reach out and touch, those who have hands
Reach out and touch the soil and sun which fuels nature’s bounty
Reach out and touch the concrete and landfills, the Alpha and Omega of so-called “progress”
Taste, O children of Mother Earth!
Taste, those who have mouths
Taste the fruits of her plenty, enough for all
Taste the bitterness of her children’s petty scarcity, robbing brother and sister
Feel, O children of Mother Earth!
Feel, those who have hearts
Feel the call of nature
Feel the greed of those who would of nature relieve themselves
Speak, O children of Mother Earth!
Speak, those who have tongues
Speak of the splendor of a Mother’s care
Speak of the horror of an orphaned race
Arise, every living creature, O children of Mother Earth!
Return to her lap, and breast, and arms
Turn away from her desecration
Take your rightful place, to neither rule from above nor rule from below
Work side by side
Play together
Live neighborly
For we share the same fate
Whether we share or not
O children of Mother Earth
POEM: Chicago Transit Authority and Me – 147 to 4
I recently spent the week in Chicago while my Dad was in the hospital for major surgery. Travelling back and forth from the hospital involved going about 110 blocks on two busses, from the north end of downtown to the south end of downtown. Depending on the time of day and how long I had to wait for the busses, this trip took between one hour and 15 minutes and 2 hours and 15 minutes. Riding the bus is a great way to observe the life of commuters and just plain folks in Chicago. I wrote most of this poem while riding the bus. Enjoy!
Chicago Transit Authority and Me – 147 to 4
Workers
Shoppers
Students
Students of life
Ride the bus
Make it a double!
The daily double
An express
Oh, to the heart of civilization
Such congested arteries art
A tact rendering society’s very core
Any falling short
In efficiency
Made up
Even odds
Run over by effectiveness
Pilings of people
Towering foundations
Things looking up
People looking down
In a windy city
Going bussed
Reaching a critical mass
Together experiencing the unspeakable
Connected somewhere else
Razing dreams
Of brighter palms
Too due lists
Play lists
Songs sung by someone else
Left only wanting
More Gigs
Beating the hum drum
“I pod people”
“I pod people”
Over and over
Over and out
Still
Now
Faster tablets
The magna carta of a new millennium
An ever-expanding tabula rasa
Living on
Cloud nein
Mean wile
The poor stare into their cells
The porous of all
A remnant grasps
To trees gone by
Scrawled by the prints of modernity
Pulp
Fiction
Yesterday’s news
Tomorrow’s prognostications
Today’s storyteller
Only lessor is
Standing still to arrive
The man clutching only to his bar
Drinking in
His river
As life passes by
Close enough to touch
Surrounded by a stream of cars
Never the same twice
Day after day
Some for hire
Some already bought and sold
Thankful to have a job
Washing windows in the rain
Making umbrellas while it suns
Trafficking in
The city
Flashy lights tell us what to do
And what not to do
Saying when
Hoping to get off
Before it is too late
Surveying
A single bird
Twittering
Nothing to see here
Don’t flip out
Dreading a park
Backs to the shoreline
Fending off the source
From still waters
Of a nameless state
Well
Beyond the horizon
Sales trimmed
Passed what you can’t afford
Not too due
Drive on, fare people!
Fear not what you miss
For there comes an other
Echoing in eternity
Dozens of stories
To be tolled
Countless more
To be ridden
Far too many
On a shelf
A mobile library
Where audience and author
Miss unparalleled appointments
I’s that seldom meet
Idle business
Wasted time for sum
A riders’ workshop for others
So many blocks
So few children to play with
Un-no-ing
Silently groan up
Wonting to be scene
Not herd
With plenty of space to ponder
Who is passing who?
Encyclical roll reversals
At times
Like
A living museum
Enriching the observer
In the presents
Of the seeming mortified
Weather paying a tension or not
Life will take you places
Each doing the bus they can
Out look
Fare to excellent
Many more waiting
On the streets
To be
Or not to be
Full, filled
Contracting countless riders
From ashes to ashes
From dust to dust
Only to return to where we came from
It’s enough to make won
A little loopy
Accept to know
That one
Awe ready
Has arrived
Just Eating For Life: New Web Site
I have been interested in nutrition pretty much my whole adult life. This started out from a concern for world hunger and stewardship of our natural resources, as well has an interest in nutrition and health. I became a vegetarian and took a nutrition class as a freshman in college in 1980.
I eventually went on to get a bachelors of science degree in biology from Hope College in 1983. I also earned a Master’s degree in public health nutrition from the University of Michigan School of Public Health in 1985. I first worked as a nutritionist in a health and nutrition center operated by a progressive physician as a business and an adjunct to his private practice. Then, I work as a health educator in a community health center, utilizing my skills in public health and nutrition quite actively. Then, I spent a decade working on HIV/AIDS through a local health department, not utilizing my nutrition knowledge very actively. After this, I spent several years working as a health planner, covering a whole host of public health issues, nutrition only been part of this. Then, for something completely different, I started my own business, Top Pun.com, which I have done for the last decade, which has virtually nothing to do with public health nutrition.
It’s time to get back into the nutrition game. I’ve always maintained my interest in nutrition, and I have done a fair job of keeping up with nutritional science advances over the years. The idea of teaching a community nutrition class has been brewing in my mind for several years now. However, recently, with a series of awarenesses related to nutrition, as well as a number of significant changes in my own nutritional practices, I have decided to create a website, Just Eating for Life, and actively pursue creating a series of community nutrition courses, ranging from simple one-time lectures to longer more involved courses which entail active behavior change strategies as well as the steroidal increase in nutrition knowledge.
Hopefully, the gift of me being seriously under-employed will benefit the world. Of course, I will enjoy it immensely, either way. So, let the games begin!