POEM: Dead Precedents

Can we let go of the stale, moribund notion that money will give us security and somehow not come between us and our humanity.

Dead Precedents

He could not handle change
So he only dealt with folding
Money
And that kind
Which
No one can touch

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POEM: Call Me Warren

In life, I have learned that going down rabbit holes in not voidable. I have learned to welcome them as portals to new worlds. Regarding the title, for those who may be overly-citified, a warren is an area where rabbits live in burrows, or a colony of rabbits. May you boldly wander and stumble up on many wonders.

Call Me Warren

Warren possessed
A twisted mine
Of rabbit holes
Unfathomable
Inviting and daunting
Going down
And ending up
Who no’s wear
That naked truth
Timeless and timely
As bunnies never dating
Springing eternal
They just
Due it
Call me
Warren

If you want a more traditional poetic take on such matters, here is the poem, The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

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POEM: From God Slips To My Years

Here is yet another poem about the experience of writing poems, or transcribing them from a muse.

From God Slips To My Years

In what manor
May we discuss the whether
A poet or a stenographer
In plaque-able quest in
Without compare
Those moments that sustain me
From God slips
To my years
On lookers
On occasion see
As putting on
Lipstick on a pig
This dyslexic DOG
That
I AM
What might
We make
Of such posed poems
Parently speaking
In tongues in chic
I can only note
I witness
Each and every won
Blissfully unaware
Of how
We awe
Alliterate in hundreds of languages
Or passably just
One
That we cannot no
Long the weigh
Hope fully
Mirrorly
A diction
Of sum kind

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POEM: Taking Auction

I’ve been no’in to say, “If you are going to sell your soul, make sure you get a good price.” There are people of auction. There are people of action. Be the latter, taking us to a higher place.

Taking Auction

Due I here
Just a little
Bit more
From the gentile man in the rear
And might I add
Reckon awe
That this is
A won time offering
If your going too
Get
A good prize
For your still small voice
Shout® it out
If you will
Fined your self
Pooped out of life
Going thrice
Souled
To the man in the red suit
With the eternal contract
Writ large
With know fine prints
Of darkness

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POEM: Catchy Zzzz’s

I see much of life as a struggle to maintain a vigorous consciousness and cultivate a vital, life-affirming conscience. I see the powers that be as offering a vain, numbing “contentment,” free of inconvenient or uncomfortable realities. Security becomes distancing oneself from such realities. The temptation to build a heavy-doody wall and outfit fashionable blinders to such realities can induce an impressive slumber. Falling for such offerings is a pinch of incense on a profane alter, voiding true change. Stay awake, my friends!

Catchy Zzzz’s

In the wake
Of life and death
Conscience
And consciousness
At time peers
Sow tiring
And what
Due you no
Power izzz
Azzz
Power duhzzz
Vainly hoping
Too catch some
Zzzz’s

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POEM: A Mazing Grays — Owed to Racist Color Blindness

During the Republican primary election, we are in the racist shit, more than usual. In Republic can due fashion, in a run away of endemic white supremacy, we hear of our civil war as only peripherally related to slavery, and color blindness as a solution in the race, at least the white race. Of coarse, it’s much worse than that. The leading person of color candidate in the Republican primary, Nikki Haley, has claimed that we have NEVER been a racist nation. This poem was triggered by candidate Ron DeSantis, whose answer to race relations is color blindness, a popular American dodge. Plus, on the other side, both President Biden and Vice President Harris have said that we are not a racist nation. I don’t know if the two of them consider the U.S. as NEVER being a racist nation. But, if we were at one time racist and not now, I am intensely curious what decade, or century, they would mark as the end of being a racist nation. Either weigh, I consider all of the leading candidates as making America grate again.

A Mazing Grays: Owed to Racist Color Blindness

It’s a grey day
In Amerikkka
A narrow palette
In a tasteless nation
No’ing history
Like the back of their hand
Its own
Forum of racism
As the world passes
Them buy
They can’t see race
The color bind
Leading the blind
As much as a republic can
String long
Knot discerning
Noose to some
As country fool
Of racists
And how big it
As old glory bleeds
Washed out grays, white, and dark
Formerly red, white, and blue
Though white just
The same
The deference between gray and grey
Halving
Never herd
Of black and white
Mirrorly human
Bazaar
In this rendition
Of confederate grays

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POEM: You Are Not a Loan

A poem for those who have crushing student loan debt…

You Are Not a Loan

Do the bankers still have a crush on you
Even after having
Taken you
To school
Bank rolling
The best daze of your life
Only left
With dear John
Letters
After your name
Meaning little
With a debt sentence
Hanging
Over
Your ahead
They so illicit
As you shutter
With the expectancy
Of another missed monthly due date
Feudally hoping for closure
As your castle is rooked
For in
Chess beating
It’s the king’s game
Sure wood
Forest to pay
For they won’t except a check mate
Down
Under
Colonizing all that is penal
As no man
An aisle
Of thieves
Con signed
And in return address
Occupy that robbin’ hood
Unable to fiord
As men of means
Who cannot right
It off
In their abandon
Just
Another pawn
To hock with them all!
Conceived only in liberties
Fashioning accompany
Banned of brothers
As marry men
Outlaws and in-laws
A peer before queens
With a warrant for a rest
And broad casting
For won and awe
Wee have yearned an education
The key to mastery
Coming out of the woulds
The hole truth
And sole uniting principle
Of persons of interest:
You are not a loan

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POEM: Winning The Stockholm Sin-drome

This is another in my series of poems on artificial intelligence. I suspect that the “wow factor” of some early AI uses will serve as a sucker punch for a largely bloodless beating. While I am skeptical of many AI uses on technical grounds, my major concern is that AI technology rollout will be in a largely unregulated environment primarily driven by profit, and used in no small part by bad actors. In the end, I see AI as further disconnecting humans from humans and dividing us, resulting in a net degradation of human society and humanity itself. I fear that humanity does not have the wherewithal to resist the coming tsunami of AI’s uncountable temptations to drift, or run away, from a sustainable human social fabric and sustainable planet. I can find few reasons to believe that existing inequities will be healed by AI rather than multiplied, perhaps exponentially.  This poem employs the Stockholm Syndrome as a metaphor for this process. Learning to identify with our captors may not be a boon for humanity. Though, we may survive by becoming massive tools ourselves.

Winning The Stockholm Sin-drome

Their is a bloodless competition
Its
Turing
The likes of many
The love of money
Attest too be taken
Literally
Our mortal coil
And moral recoil
A new forum of worship
The lowest common denomination
Pain in small unmarked bills
A tortuous ransom
In the chorus of things
Acquire of Lillipution repute
Poor tending death
Buy millions of bytes
Reckoning pros and cons
Wile played for a song
An X mas attune
It’s beginning
Too look allot
Like Stockholm
Everywhere it goes
And every wear
There seems to be you
Sort of like
Ikea you
Dissembled in a numb-er
Of unknown peaces
A mob hit
Or at the lease
Helled hostage
In a fateful judgement
Boom or doom
Perhaps fired
Or an icy friend
Pick aside
Ahead
Or behind
A technology explosive
Diarrhea of wons and zeroes
In the end
Off coarse
Weather wear or not
It may turn out
To be
Won of the guise
At work
You no
“Chip”
He’s “super”
0 you mean
The calculating won
1’s you get to know ’em
It all makes cents
You’d halve two be crazy
Or a dollared
Too knot accept
Him (sic)
Sum kind of quantum savior
Taken till
Big data real lies
What their is too due
Too finish
A sentience
A word winnowing
In the end
An impossible hostage situation resolved
Problems solved
Having climaxed
A final solution
Presence before us
There is no their there

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POEM: Trifecta of Win Win Win

I wrote this poem today, MLK Day, after listening to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech, “Beyond Viet Nam.” Have you never herd; it’s a real gas. If you don’t like it, talk to the hand, nay, palm…

Trifecta of Win Win Win

Have you never herd
The triplets
Of racism, poverty, and militarism
Ignorant
Of sum
Mutha’s MLK
A perfect stormin’
A fecund whirled
A trifecta of win win win
No’ing our place
And no show
Like business
And meaning it
What will it take
To pass win
For the love of beings
As strong as any steal
If smelt
Dealt
Ore what
Might be
Just
In efface of
Silent but deadly

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POEM: Yours to Deicide

Wile it doesn’t make cents for some, I see humanity is one. I strongly suspect that there is only one side. Thus, in a religious sense, any won that kills other children of God is ungodly. In some sense, killing others is a form of collective suicide. Many call out the name of God in their homicidal ventures. This strikes me as a suicidal notion of God. The formal term for killing God, or perhaps won’s notion of God, is deicide. Thus, this poem:

Yours to Deicide

They prey
In the mourning
They prey
In the knight
Axing only won thing
God on my side
Being halve right
And still left
There is only one side
Not to commit
Deicide

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POEM: Poetry Bombs in the Hows

The muse is the bomb, dropping poetry bombs, as she wishes.

Poetry Bombs in the Hows

My crib is in
The neighborhood of a muse
Reigning over me
Poetry bombs
In a hood next to no wear
A boarder
Across
Never too bare

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POEM: Dammed Hope

This poem employs a metaphor of a remote mountain lake brimming with hope, exasperatingly difficult to access, only to be topped with an even more secluded mountain valley hiding away awe of the lost senses of humor of uncounted folks.

Dammed Hope

Up in the mountains
Sow high
Theirs a pass
So long
Forgotten
And down
In the valley of lost hope
A valley know more
Rather there
I found
Transformed between
Two summit I’d a prize
More than just
A titanic see
Hope lapping onto the mountaintop
Quiet a mountaintop experience
Helled only
By an inexplicable damming
Whether geological or theological
I could not determinate
And having taken awe that I could convey
To the point I would depart
Beyond me
A single peek
Which I will never get over
Another valley
Positively knot a depression
That hide a way
Where uncounted folks
Have lost their senses
Of humor
And awe I’m culpable of
A vowing
Know joke

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Starving Palestinians — How Compassion Ate Gazans

President Biden’s posed compassion and the U.S.-Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza is starving the civilian population. The generations-long military occupation, the 16-year blockade on Gaza, and the current months-long bombing campaign has created a crucible of death in Gaza. The blockade and siege’s deprivation of access to clean water, forcing Gazans to drink sewage-tainted water, is accelerating disease and death in Gaza. Biden has the power to stop this genocide. Still, his policy is quite literally, “Eat shit and die.” The notion of Biden as a compassionate human being is a cruel joke.

Starving Palestinians — How Compassion Ate Gazans

Now avail Abel
Biden® brand compassion
In deed
What you have herd
Is for reel
Tending his wholly Catholic mass
Starvation
A yar sale of unclean waters
Entreating them as dogmas
Wile illiciting humanitarian law
As neither hear nor their
And what might
Madder
Is scene as incumbent
Iraq solid support
Fore compassion ate
Humanity

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POEM: Trump Blows (into town)

I’m posting this poem in honor of the upcoming Republican primaries. I actually wrote this poem years ago when Trump came to Toledo for a campaign stop. My experience there adds a layer to this poem. The attendees of the rally were overwhelmingly white. In fact, excluding some of the protesters, there were more blacks as vendors selling Trump paraphernalia than black rally attendees. I found this an odd and somewhat disturbing juxtapositioning. I spoke with several of the black vendors and they said that they didn’t care for Trump but it was a chance to make some bucks. Perhaps fleecing Trump supporters by selling them overpriced campaign paraphernalia was as poetic justice as could be mustered that day, in some eerily American way.

Trump Blows (into town) 

The end of the line
Is just
A block ahead
Beyond the pale
Making a hockey game
Look
Like an NAACP convention
Yet darker
Folks selling crap
They don’t believe in
The mob buys it
Money saved
From there hallowed ticket
The price of free
Dumb
Allegedly worth twice that
And all the wile
The prize of admission
We the people
Can’t afford

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POEM: That Leader Ship

I wrote this poem during the last Trump administration, of which I work and pray will be the last Trump administration.

That Leader Ship

What if
Everybody
Did that
Wading among prophetless idles
Spinning their wills
Ennui go
But how
Too bored
That leader ship
Down with that
Holey bull work
Awe that is deafed
Too holed water
Unfit for see
Accept a peep hole down below
In the face
Of a tsunami of salty water
Tearing at all that might
Be lost
As if
Their only hope
Agape
Full of wholes
More than
Wee can
Bucket
Bank on sum drain trust
Or patch the hull we have unleashed
And in that baffling place
Where nothing for sail
We illicit a response ability
Like walking on water
When the masses are frozen
Out living unfathomable fates
Beyond a preyer
Turning lead into goaled
And still
Mything the point
Sum will
In cyst
On turning
Water into whine
And that shit floats
Atop a lesion of angles
Those incredulous pinheads
And pricks revealing
How pussy in the end
Be holdin’
Too cantankerous ooze and awws
At everything butt
The kitsch in sink
Only to be left behind
A slew of idle leagues
At the see bottom

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POEM: Hanging Buy A Thread

Here is a Monday poem for those who may be feeling that impending work weak and need a bit of fortification.

Hanging Buy A Thread

There he hung
Buy a thread
Of hope
Peering mid heir
Soully able
Too due
Sow sew much

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POEM: Owed Time Religion

There very well may be a nexus between now and eternity, yet I find it helpful to consider now enough.

Owed Time Religion

Some in cyst
That there religion
Holds time in memorial
Preaching the hear after
Weather buy work
Or bettor yet
By faith
And still
Bye all accounts
I find now
Good
Enough
Without end

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POEM: Falling for It — Coming Down to Munch Time, “The Scream”

There is a Buddhist metaphor for life, that we are in a freefall from a cliff, and that learning to relax during this freefall is the key to life. I am not one much attracted rollercoasters and the like, but when I have ridden on them, I have found it an interesting challenge to see how much I can relax during the ride. Perhaps Buddhists should have rollercoasters in their temples — strike that, they already realize they are in a freefall.

Falling for It — Coming Down to Munch Time, “The Scream”

He was speechless
Having fallen for it
With utter abandon
The priestess of awe
Had for tolled
Life is like a dropping
From a cliff
A free fall
Of incalculable worth
Coming down
To Munch time
Dealing with fast
Before he eats it
That terminal velocity
Before hitting his bottom
Her words
Like the win
Unrushed by his years
Breathing presence
Gently inspiring
Before expiring
Relax
And enjoy the ride
You awe ready no
The real fear
Don’t feel
Soar
Even like
A bird
Dropping

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POEM: Opportunity Accost [Number Two]

I am an idealist. I see huge swathes of unfulfilled potential. I am confronted with an endless stream of possibilities — how beautiful. I recognize that most of the everyday whirled is ensconced in navigating probabilities — how practical. Still, I am fascinated with possibilities. The nexus of these two realm, possibility and probability, form for me an acute awareness of opportunity costs, the cost of choosing ordinary probability over extraordinary possibilities. I am both taunted and tantalized. Thus, this poem:

Opportunity Accost

Know madder
What we due
There is looming potential
Weave effaced
Hour live long daze
Haunted buy passibilities
Pregnant with awe
That is conceivable
A portentous bettor
On corporate shares
And heavy doody stakes
Vexing poetic just us
People verses
Mirror statistics
And every moment us
Victory for awe
Something more than
Just probability

As it turns out, I already wrote a poem entitled Opportunity Accost years ago; so, I added the [Number Two] to the title of this new poem — shit happens.

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POEM: Halve Truth

This poem is a parody of the infamous “You can’t handle the truth” military courtroom speech from the 1992 movie, A Few Good Men. You can view the original speech here. Many have killed and died in wars over half-truths and hole truths.

Halve Truth

You can’t Handel the truth
That’s dammed right
Aye ordered the cold read
Son, wee live in a world that has walls
And those walls halve
Too be guarded
Buy men with guns.
I halve a greater responsibility
Then you can passibly fathom
You halve that luxury
Of not no’ing what I know
You due knot wont the truth
Be cause
Deep down in plays
You don’t talk
A bout
At din’er potties
You want me on AWOL
Wee use words like “hope”, “faith”, “love”
We use them as a punch lyin’
I have nether
The time nor the inclination
To explain myself to a man
Who rises and who sleeps
Under the blank it
Of the vary freedom that I provide
And then questions
The manor in which I provide it
I wood rather
You just
Say “thank you”
And went
On won’s weigh

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