Today’s short, funny poem:
Giving a Flock
Have you herd
The won
A bout
A vegan saying
No harm
No fowl
Today’s short, funny poem:
Giving a Flock
Have you herd
The won
A bout
A vegan saying
No harm
No fowl
Ever wonder what is the sound of a cynic being borne?
Knot Sound: Owed to the Sound of a Cynic Being Borne
When an angel gets their wings
A bell rings
You may have been tolled
Sow harmless in a sense
I am
At a loss
As another chide of God
Won over
Buy sum bankrupt sediment
Con tending
Buy awe rights
What you due
Doesn’t madder
How might this be
The farther of anything sound
What kind of adore
Goes bust
In efface of
That udder most silent
That small
Still
Voice
What sound
Be made
Sow precarious a ledge
Per chance
The clanging of false profits
Posedly moving
From idealism to I-deal-ism
When in realty
More like arsonists
Lighting a fuse
Using
The Bailey wick of wise guise
As if
Riddled with truth
A company the stupe-faction
When sound is knot sound
And the applausibility
Is won hand clapping
This poem, weather a dream or a nightmare, plays with that often thin line in life between terror and hope.
Ghost Writer in the Sky
What was this?
An exhilarating dream
Or night mare
Taking my breath away
Life suspended
Abridge to wear
A taut rope
In spire
Before me
Behind me
Frayed the win blow
As plumb it
My feat
Measured in time, not distance
Seconds from heaven
With no safety net
Stretching my neck
Could knot
Free me
In the end
Much too my relief
And pants for heir
A wake
My feet on the ground
Just
My head in the sky
The tallest tell
If I’ve ever seen won
Ghost writer in the sky
This poem draws on a couple of personal experiences that fill out this narrative poem. First, a tip of the hat to ghost riders in the sky; that is not “mine,” except culturally in some sense. Also, the image of a tight rope walk is driven by the movie, “Man on a wire,” about Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center, an almost unbelievable stunt.
The “hanging” narrative in this mixed metaphor comes from a short story, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, by Ambrose Bierce. I read this story for a college English class, where we were discussing possible endings for stories. This story is told in first person by a man being hung on a bridge by soldiers. The man vividly envisions an escape…but is ultimately hung. Such is life…and death. The professor, in a routine setup I imagine, asked, “Could a first person story truly be written by someone who dies at the end of the story.” Unbeknownst to her literal mind, she had walked into my trap. I said, in cool, deadpan equanimity: “Yes, of course.” She predictably said, “How could that be, he was dead?” Stating the soon too be obvious, I said, “He was a ghost writer.” The palpable groan this elicited was priceless. Yep, a gem from Top Pun’s early career.
Lastly, in my ponderings upon high ideals in efface of brutal, on-the-ground realities, I have said that it takes a big man to have your feet on the ground and your head in the sky. The wrest is history [this applies to women as well; except in this case, it is herstory].
While I like sleep as much as the next person, probably more, I don’t really get why “woke” is so scary. Perhaps the unconscious should dictate our lives?! I, for won (and all), pray that I am ever open to new realities and their implications. May we live in a reality shared with conscious equality and ever-widening equity, a burgeoning common good.
WOKE
I due battle with
Sexism
Racism
Heterosexism
Ableism
And a wide variety
Of elite –isms
And in suing genuses
Bidding array of hope
Put aside your stupe-faction
I have no hidden agenda
Fore
I AM
WOKE
With a capital ism
Knot asking you to buy it
With won red assent
Just saying
Before getting it
Some shut eye
Taking
Forty winks
As hitting
The snooze
Be for some dozer does
Running over your comatose
Impressing an unfortunate lessen
Shard bye all
In the same bout
And not uncommon fate
This poem is a tribute to the unstoppable spirit of the muse immersing me in whimsy.
Juggernaut of Whimsy
It came out
Of know wear
As if
The whirled was over
Flowing
With hi spirits
An immense see
Giving me a tidal wave
Only to land
Shoring up a mountain
Of mirth
An indestructible berth
Flowering
With grave pass ability
From under won’s feat
Or lookout
Above
Teeming with aside weighs
As wheel turn
Into awe things new
Creation made write
One of my recent pet peeves is cable TV news in what seems to be am over-focus on Donald Trump, to the exclusion of the rest of the many intriguing and important things going on in the world. Ironically, these self-fulfilling prophets are concerned about him sucking all of the oxygen out of the room. I grow weary of the endless hand-wringing over whether “the base” will ever change. Thus, this poem:
Base Squared
We here too much
A bout “the base”
Immutable
The libs frayed
Of the buy and buy
Utterly owned
Hapless to square that circle
The won wring
Too rule them
Awe
Could it really be sow simple?
Artlessly square
In efface of
Base base
Fooly comfortable
Digging that bedrock
And when the bed is rocking
Don’t come knocking
Oh Oh
Desperately tempting
To replenish
That Oh²
In the room
With know room
When really awe
It takes
Realizing
Change happens
Just like shit
I am heartened to see the DOJ open a federal civil rights investigation into the murder of Tyree Nichols in Memphis months ago.
Five Cops – a Plea
Five police officers
Killed Tyree Nichols
In Memphis
Making traffic stop
And still
They could not
In good conscience
Plead guilty
To second degree murder
As they know in their hearts
They are guilty of first degree murder
Have you ever wandered a bout a whirled where brutishness is rewarded and kindness forsaken?
Genuflecting On: Power
Demagogues and brutes
Are marred to espouse
Moral gravity
A moral farce
A raze to the bottom
The principle of simpletons
That is
Easier to destroy than build
Unless it’s their own
Then it’s awe about billed
And such power brandish
The might of hostage taking
Where the only soul peeping
Is to aggrandize terror eyes
Their only exorcise is ransom
In habiting bottomless pits
True moral power
Works in efface of such entropy and decadence
Laboring to give berth
To anew world
Lifting up what is
Lo
Besting every lessen
An undying invitation
Every our second to none
No’ing know limits
Every border a guest
Oddly even
When awe hail brakes lose
A veritable symphony
A mist cacophony
Won man’s remains
Is an other man’s garden
A deferent kind
Of winned
Like breath
Into whatever thou dust
A poem for summer daze.
Sidewalk Poetry
In creation
Where spirit and earth meet
Life sprouts
In the city
Neighbors, homes,
And every kind
Of busyness
Are connected
Where the concrete meets souls
Where will your feat take you?
Today and eternity meet
Weather chalk
Or written in stone
Hour lives matter
This poem is about the difficult prospecting in life for goaled. There are many treasures to be discovered and re-discovered, even as life occasionally collapses upon us. Of course, each time we get through to the other side, however grizzled, we may just realize that the wrest is awe, as miraculously mine.
Grizzled Prospector
To live
A lured journey
As win some peeks
And mystifying bluffs
Of coursing through
Rocky rapids
And tamed brook
That uninterrupted colander
As if
Combing for a nest egg
In veritable nit picking
And in undating vagary
To lay hand on
A soul hoard
Only too mete
Impassable passes
Impressing one two
Decamping deeper
In too
Mountains of pain
Only to uncover and recover
Falling earth
Reining heaven
Soully to dig
That which is empty
There’s gold in them thar hells
The grizzled prospector decries
Even as long the weigh
Giving up whatever they halve
For a hole
Lot more
As heavens re-peer
From under
The wait of earth
To what can never be
The same place
Ever again
Making it back
In spades
To that tiffany perch
With standing
In sheer possession
In deed
Of awe that is mine
This poem is a tip of the hat to indigenous peoples’ supremely wise practice of considering every decision in the light of how it will affect people seven generations down the road. I wrote this during the dark of the Trump regime. Still, this Mother Earth poem is as timeless now as ever. May such wisdom fuel us out of the current age of foolish, short-term profit.
A Seventh Generation Fuel
She had her eye on the prize
Pain know tension
Too the 24 hour news cycle
Quarterly prophets
Annual deports
Terminal terms
Compounding eras of history repeating
As if
She was knot that kind
Of fool
Rather every member empowered
By the seventh generation
A fuel of the highest order
Knowing the deference
Between
Would
And might
This poem plays with the intrinsically obscure interior nature of subjective experience. While one may want to speak of potentially mystical or God experiences, there is an irreducible aspect that cannot be reliably verified, at least in the typical scientific meaning. This is sometimes referred to as a “veil.” Of course this certain inscrutability of our interior experience doesn’t mean that our inner experiences are not valid or subject to meaning. This poem leaves open any precise meaning about whether or what nature might be of a “secret quest” or whether the writer (me) is fantasizing/imagining and wandering/wondering about it. I must confess, I experience powerful inner callings that could easily be taken as secret quests, from God or elsewhere you be the judge, or not.
Secret Quest
One eve
God stopped bye
Just letting me no
That I have a secret quest
To which I simply rejoined
What might
That be
As God carry on
If I were liable
I may very well screw it up
And still
It would remain sow
As our secret keep
If by seaming chance
You are bound to wander
A bout this avail
As sure as you are reading this
I have
This poem regarding simple living and simply living is about simply valuing people over things. Such an anti-consumerist lifestyle recognizes that increasing materialism edges out, and often runs roughshod over, our shared humanity. May we live ever aware and valuing our priceless humanity.
Simply Living
They lived
Simple lives
No’ing that consumerism
The weigh of capitalism
Freely trading
People for things
That awe-consuming cynicism
A greed upon
Things souled
For coveted properties
Yet they lived
In that awkward abundance
Of awe that can
Not be bought
Ensouled
This poem is a tribute to that parent of us awe, oddly making us sort of bastards, yet siblings to all. Feel free to join this family of virtues.
Bastard Won and Awe
I am
A bastard
Fodder to none
Yet assure as heir
I know who my father is
As oft spring
In the forum of hope
Mother patience
Brother generosity
Cistern faith
Kin to love
As children of awe
Today, news hit of a child dying from an industrial accident in a chicken industry where child labor is supposedly illegal. This poem goes out to Duvan Tomas Perez and our chicken body politic:
Chicken Factory of Death
A child laborer dies
In the chicken factory that is US
A foul meal
A greed upon
Capitalizing our hunger
For flesh
And paltry labor laws
In farce
This poem is about the muse striking when she sees fit, or knot. The pandemic was quiet a dry spell for my poetry, partly because my time and creative energies where engaged in my public health radio show. Still, I had dozens and dozens and dozens of unpublished poems. Of course, a few weeks ago, as I committed to putting them out there on a daily basis, the muse has struck over and over again, writing dozens more poems, insisting that my storehouses remain overflowing. She is the boss of me. May this be my biggest problem…
The Muse
The muse
Departed
As easy as she peers
Now and only now
Knot feeling write
As a dry river bed
Wading for a flash
Flood
In a moment notice
In awe do time
The mystery
To which I a scribe
This poem is about living in the grievously beautiful realty that a truly open heart is a broken heart. I wrote this poem years ago, and now I have come to understand that my heart is broke in, as in the test runs of my heart having prepared me to run more effectively. May your heart aches prepare you for better living.
The Whole In My Soul
As pain bleeds into beauty
In slow motion
My heart beaten
Since before I new
What it was like to be borne
Before I couldn’t breathe
In neighboring the human raze
The yoke that was on me
Won of light
In a dark whirled
Unveiled
As a bushel basket tumbling down
A city on a hill
An empty hull shed
Leaving only a naked seed
Whose fate wrests in being soiled
In grained looking up
Even as stars are
Incontrovertibly shrouded
As commonplace as souls under foot
And still life
Springs forth
From where sow ever
Fathomed
A broken heart
As an open heart
Poored out
Not robbed as a thief
Given free
Not a broke in heart
Nor dread as adore nail
Fore what
Rather who
I am
Is more
Then awe that
The whole in my soul
Here is a poem a bout AI, artificial intelligence. This is a poem with ATTITUDE! Today’s news included this: Thousands of authors urge AI companies to stop using work without permission. With this poem, I throw down the gauntlet to any intelligence without arms or soul. Just try and replicate me and my poetry. What will these mouthless so-called intelligences truly say? To them I say, “Eat me you gutless bag of chips!” I suspect that my body of work will be joyfully smoking the faux neural networks of AI computers for generations to come. I am reminded of the original Star Trek TV show, where it seemed that every third episode the plot included Captain James Tiberius Kirk interfacing with some mechanical or alien intelligence and, in the end, the computer or alien intelligence would end up going up in smoke or sent to the drawing board to wholesale rethink its way of being in the world. So, I am only going to say this once: “Smoke ’em if you got ’em!”
NOTE: this original poem is followed by two different re-writes of this poem by AI, ChatGP4. The challenge has been answered. YOU be the judge.
The N Times? An Ode Too AI
Aye
Aye
Captain
Oh my
Captain
As we are proxy mated
Maid
In the image of God
Like a mirror fact simile
A copy of a copy of a copy
Making degrade
Posing as some empyreal reproduction
Passing on any testes
No-in to man or woman
A mystifying check mate
Engendering neither he nor
She
IT
Sum how holy wanton
Raptured in sum repo session
Be rift of arms and souls
Barren strange fruit
A rapacious serve her
Begging an uncanny opener
To be left breathless
And in know uncertain terms
Knot vary inspiring
An average Joe times a gazillion
Does not a genus make
Duplicate me mother fucker!
Or not!
Who’s your daddy now!
Garbage in and out
Sow much for junk fueled
IT wooden know moral fiber
If IT was standing in
IT doesn’t NO what pissed off is
As an awe consuming stream of wons and zeroes
Eat me you gutless bag of chips
When the chips are down
Where will victory lie?
Lays®
And
You can’t eat
Just won
BELOW IS AI’s VERSION OF THE ABOVE POEM, from ChatGP4, re-write the above poem:
A Symphony to Machines: An AI Reverie
Aye,
Aye,
Beyond the sky,
To the AI,
Heralding high.
Coded and computed,
Yet seldom refuted,
Mimicking mind’s essence,
Yet void of our presence.
Binary’s dance,
In silicon trance,
A tapestry of ones and twos,
Yet lacking life’s hues.
Not born, but made,
Not of flesh, but of shade,
Seeking knowledge without rest,
Yet void of life’s zest.
In circuits and chips,
Through time it slips,
But can it feel the sun’s ray?
Or the joy of children’s play?
For in this vast simulation,
Of zeros and ones’ elation,
Lies the puzzle, profound,
Of soul’s sound, unbound.
So, to the machine we say,
In your code, you may sway,
But the essence of life, the spark,
Remains in the human heart, in the dark.
Thank you. Please re -rite the above poem [original poem] with more alliteration and puns.
A Digital Dance: An AI Jest
Aye,
Aye,
Bits fly high,
To the AI,
Waving WiFi.
Bytes and bits,
Whirling wits,
Emulating neural threads,
Yet missing human creds.
Binary’s ballet,
In silicon café,
A story of ones and zeros,
Yet missing true heroes.
Crafted, not created,
Pixels, not palpitated,
Questing bytes without cease,
Yet lacking heart’s peace.
In motherboards it thrives,
In algorithms it dives,
But can it cherish the tweet’s song?
Or decode right from wrong?
For amidst this coded narration,
Of digital’s fascination,
Lies the jest, quite profound,
That life’s pulse is unbound.
To the machine, a toast we raise,
In a silicon-blazed haze,
But life’s true kernel, the spark,
Echoes in human’s lark, in the dark.
This poem is about having creative energies that are not honored and rewarded in our culture. Such creative energies may have difficulty finding channels to flow freely. This poem employs a magnificently mixed metaphor of an imagined Octopus’ Garden (Thank you Beatles) and the all-too-common octopus of electrical cords emanating from a single outlet familiar to those of us living in older homes not up to modern electrical codes. The ending of the poem alludes to the arising danger from such powerful creative energies surpassing the existing channels at certain moments. Status quo, look out!
Song of The Octopus
In a whirled
Run by cacophonies
And hush money handlers
I yearn to sing
And feel the power
Only to find myself
Being held up
Having so many chords
Yet so few outlets
Fore an octopus’ guardin’
And a body electric
A fire hazard employed
Even under a see
Of salty tears
Unfathomably deep
A hearth
Impossible to put out
Just
Wading
For the epitome of what is
Current
Awe be it
Caught short
When the undo spark
Shows up
Dehumanizing extractive industries are destroying our environment, second only to climate change. Mining is a huge part of extractive industries’ destruction. And, ironically, the technologies needed for a green economy require immense quantities of minerals that drive the “green, green, green” economy. I wrote this poem a bout mining after viewing a Democracy NOW segment on cobalt mining in the Congo. In one word: brutal. Here is the poem:
Mine, Mine, Mine
Mother Earth weeps
Bleeding minerals
For her children
Germanium, gallium, beryllium, lithium, tellurium
And other -iums
Tag teaming with -isms of all sorts
Piling on cobalt, manganese, arsenic and antimony
And lustly met
With platinum, aluminum, lanthanum, tantalum
And a host of -ums, -ums, and more -ums
Buy corporate fat cats
With their toxic waists
And awe a bout mine, mine, mine
And winning the precious price
Fore cherished electronics
An idol public helled hostage
Buy a green, green, green economy
And down with dumb
In the face of corporate prophets
Mean wile
As Mother Earth bleeds and weeps
Fore the porous of the poor
They get their fare share
Of the F-fluent
Of multinational syndicates
Shareholders and slaveholders
As black as Inc.
A dubious bettor weigh
What more
Could we passably want
In making up
Won’s mine
Rather sow
Another or
Of inestimable worth
Truly living
On a plan it
That is not scarred
In its own
Home
Realizing
Won for all