POEM: Succumb Lame Less

October 4th, 2015 Filed under: Poems, Political and Philosophical Musings, Uncategorized Add Comment

He suffered
Multiple strokes
Of genius
Rendering him
Unable Not To speak
Out
With what
Was in
Left and right
Both lame
All to gather disarmed
In infancy motions
Red and blue
Leaving won
Marooned
Feeling peaked
In a fervorish affection for awe
Only not taking — seriously!
As if
Cracking
Sum remorse code
And infirm resolve
Following every empath
Willing to lead
Awe the ardor
Challenging
Everything
Wee wince knew
As invalid

This poem is a takeoff on having a stroke, or in this case, multiple strokes…of genius. This poem is an ode to playfulness as a form of salvation from the lameness of politics. By playfully challenging virtually every ideology one can escape the death grip of political calculations. Also, such playfulness is both a means and an end to revitalize overly serious politics. Politics is important enough that being rendered unable not to speak is a useful affliction, as participation is key to vital community. Nonetheless, sparing oneself, and others, from the cynics of politics is reason enough to embrace awe and playfulness. The braininess of political operatives may be able to triangulate winning electoral strategies and even pretty enlightened politically correct platforms, but truth is more akin of joy than rightness. Politics tends to create as many problems as it solves. As Albert Einstein so aptly noted, “Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.” May you be subject to multiple strokes of genius as an antidote for lame politics.

Tags: Awe, Community, Death, Einstein, Genius, Ideology, Intellect, Joy, Ode, Play, Playfulness, Poems, Poetry, Political, Politics, Truth

POEM: A Royal Buzzkill

October 22nd, 2014 Filed under: Poems, Political and Philosophical Musings Add Comment

Bee
The change
That you wish
In the whirled
Too see
O Mother Earth
Undertaking
Men o’ pause
In-fertility rite
As nature fecund wanes
A roil buzzkill
Soon with death teeming
Wear is thy sting
Extincting that human race
Soully certifiable reproductions
Unfit as a specious
Forerunners to know end
Yet today, this solitary caged bird sings
Like a canary
In a cold mine
With its deadly presents
Colorless and odious executioner
The lynch pin of anonymous hoods
Haunting all
That which is called “natural”
Sow fumes miasma
Till hour last breath

This poem is another mournful environmental poem, with the steady decline of bees as the proverbial canary in the coal mine for the deathly threat to the ecology of the earth. Of course, the stoic denial and fatalism of human-induced climate change through fossil fuel consumption reaps a Mother Earth whose only defense may be to open a Pandora’s box capable of “naturally” selecting the human race from an internal combustion race to a mere foot race, where humans are no longer large enough scale to crash the entire planet’s ecological system. If we don’t change course and evolve into an ecologically-sustainable species, we will be devolved into a much less dominant species. Whether this would represent an evolution or devolution would have to be reflected upon by many fewer homo sapiens.

While we as a species are still living high on the fumes of burning fossil fuels, the buzzkill of bee genocide may lead the way to the end of agriculture as we know it, and the end of human culture as we know it. Our unchecked industrialism, fueled by the burning of carbon-based energy forms, may very well lead to our checking out as the predominant species on earth. Could this bee the end of the world? as so aptly asked in an article of the same title (with a now extinct link!):

Albert Einstein once said: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”

Einstein wasn’t an insect expert but he had a point. The humble honeybee is an integral part of the global ecosystem. Honey is just one aspect of what this entomological wonder does. As a pollinator it ensures crops reproduce, so although a world without honey would be a poorer place, man would survive. But without plants, we’d become extinct.

…On a global scale, it is estimated a third of the food we eat is pollinated by bees…

…The introduction to the 2010 UNEP [United Nations Environment Programme] report into global bee colony disorders puts the insects’ plight in context. It states, “Current evidence demonstrates that a sixth major extinction of biological diversity event is under way. The Earth is losing between 1 and 10 per cent of biodiversity per decade, mostly due to habitat loss, pest invasion, pollution, over-harvesting and disease.” It asked, “Has a ‘pollinator crisis’ really been occurring during recent decades, or are these concerns just another sign of global biodiversity decline?”

Unchecked domination is not the nature of nature. Either homo sapiens will learn to live in harmony with nature as a whole, or our ability to dominate will be cut down to scale. As throughout countless generations, we are faced with choosing harmony or destruction. Nature has patiently endured our penchant for destruction. Nature cannot be violated forever. Nature’s feedback is gentle and generous. Only fools destroy the hand that feeds them. Will we be fools in the largesse weigh?

Tags: Change, Climate Change, Consumption, Culture, Death, Defense, Denial, Disease, Diversity, Domination, Einstein, Environment, Environmental, Evolution, Extinction, Food, Harmony, Human Race, Life, Loss, Mother Earth, Nature, Poems, Poetry, Pollution, Sustainable

POEM: God Gets a Bad Wrap

May 11th, 2014 Filed under: Poems, Political and Philosophical Musings Add Comment

God gets a bad wrap
As do men
Gloom
Over
Rite and wrong
Babies borne of bathwater
Throne buy themselves
Like clay
Giving rise
To the pitter potter of little feats
And inconceivable images
Speaking out laud
In a class by themselves
Bastards won and all
In celestial relationships
With awe thumbs up
Too given the slip
Sow fatefully fired
Knot from above
Hardened arts of ode
And stone code making cooler heads
Commandments all deca-ed out
Can you digit
For what remains
Won in the mettle
No’ing only gods enflesh
And bones picking
Wons fecund knows
As dead pan humors
And how to think themselves
Outside the box
And portending wake
Only breaking
That awkward silence
And bound curiosity
Ex-splaying stuff
A coffin in drag
Employed in the coroner office
As doody-full janitors
So disposed
In a sweeping universe
Taken out
Behind the would should
Wile hearts still
Beating
Out standing in there feeled
Straw men ghostly flailing
Which came first
The bunny or the egg?
An ironic inquisition
Unable to eat crow
So far a field
Full of crop
Making hay
Of men
Which can’t be bailed
As so determined
Only Abel to must-er
Barren stock aid
A vestigial humanity
Remains incalculable
Even as calculating
Blinded by the blight
Reckoning slight unseen
Nothing sound to be hold
No peeps to be herd
In this objective a praise
Un-re-lie-able reports
Of being touched
During wholly observances
Untraceable soles
Save those who follow
A fare hearing too steep
Know inviting savor to a t
Angles abandoning
No read scent to be found
Not to be
Incensed by fragrant violations of logic
Having bin burned before
And thinking it novel
Sticking to non-friction
Yet a tribute to nothing a tract
Easily excepting gravity
And perhaps animal magnetism
In a random house
A glorious reproduction
Fit to survive
In terminable halls of tomes
Covering smiles from end to end
Atlas, holding the whirled
And shrugging
As passé
Ages of old
Quipped with a thesaurus
In countering the unspeakable
Super seeding doubt
Calling out
Awe hail
Too the faithful
As libel to slander
Of rites unridden
And xenophobic farces
Poorly versed
Caricatures
With drawing
From think wells
Drying too hard
Distasteful to unknown palettes
A vapid likeness
Running lapse
Around good taste
For bitter or worse
Never winning
The grace
Unfounded
Even though profits speaking
Assure us
From the freely given
We make the most sense
Only from blessed assumption
Are we
Infer the right of our life
Or in ability
To take our hunch back
And so stoop id
Egos on and on
Un-till
We are
Super
With unassuming cape-ability
There is all ways won more
Last sup pose
Surrounded by friends
Or enemies
So tight
God sheds tears
In a wrap so taut
A hide sew made
Pelted by the dead
The cruelest of stoles
Witnessed ever
Only
Escaping such a cloak
From beyond assent
As leapers never heeled
By any crowning bluff
Transcending any convictions
Illiciting something knew
Surpassing the bounds of a head
A risqué gambol
When all that you are
Goes for bust
Never able to hold its own
In the public square
Spilling the truth
On all who will here
Should their eyes beam
And motes be crossed
To take a hike to knew places
Where nothing will be left
Wanting more
Even when full
Groan

This poem is a long elaboration of a familiar theme of mine: the transcendent bigness of God and the cramped quarters built by man’s hubris. The poles of this theme are occupied by scientifically unverifiable but glorious experience of life and the denial of God, often on the grounds that any mental packaging of God is necessarily inadequate, a too messy foundation for some. The mystical reality that no description of God can do God justice is fodder for both believers and skeptics. Those anywhere on the spectrum from belief/openness to skepticism/denial are doomed to at least some measure of failure trying to give God any wrap in human terms. Believing in an open-ended God that cannot be put in a box strikes me as a rather predictable characteristic of the creator of life — life being a dynamic and messy endeavor. To continue maturation beyond a certain point as a human, belief is necessary — necessarily messy. Those who are agnostic strike me as trying to avoid confronting this juncture between the transcendent and the mundane. I think this can leave one developmentally disabled or delayed. Deniers strike me as having more hubris than tenuous believers because they must assert certainty to disqualify the question as a legitimate question. Of course, the is a seductive simplicity to addressing the nature of transcendence by simply saying it doesn’t exist. But, like Einstein said, “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

Disagreements about God probably have little meaning as an abstract intellectual argument. God is definitely too big to fit in your head! Our conceptions related to the God question are ultimately questions of power. There seems to be a universal tendency in humans to not be lorded over by others. This part of our nature can serve both skepticism and belief. Questioning authority is a natural process when ultimate authority is open-ended and messy. Belief in such a higher power, one that doesn’t want submission but rather co-creative participation, frees us rather than enslaves us. Reality is bigger than our self. In at least one inescapable sense, we’ve gotta serve somebody or something (for those more comfortable with the impersonal). Bob Dylan captured this sense well in his song, Gotta Serve Somebody:

You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls