Totally Optional Post

Perhaps you may have gathered from the November 17 post. Things are changing.

I like the TOP concept---however I often produce something that I don't mind sharing but I may not want to publish, i.e. many poetry publications consider something posted on websites to be published as it is openly accessible, so I am investigating alternatives.

A couple links for this week:

Something old about Animals, etc.

&

Something under construction In the beginning ...

The second is on a Yahoo Group than can be restricted to members only. A suggestion: a TOP group for the purpose of sharing work that authors do not want published and to make it possible for sharing of comments and suggestions.

How about a Frappr Map

Departing on the Good Ship Integer

Count me<-_^>0ut

So ewe been to the party,
Met some voices and styles
Mixed in texture and crunch.
Some cream cheese
Red tomatoes
Bits of bacon and spice
All very nice.
Like a church recipe book
Everyone contributes,

& dissolves into the broth.
Tastes bud satiated?
Is it time to go
(Look around
Grab a cookie or two)
For the big X ?
Break the link, it’s
Not as hard as you think.

■ The hillocks have eroded
■ Paths a bit dusty
■ Surprises have dwindled
Like dew at mid morning,
Gone.
Hardly noticed.
Lost without any words.

It is past midnight,
Overtime,
One moon cycle complete.
The yin yang mirror faces
Bid farewell.
{No prompt needed !}

My thanks to the numbers in this poem ... 29, 24, 9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1,0
Come along on the good ship Integer and see what lies below.


Other voyages of discovery on Today's date

1869
The Suez Canal is opened to navigation in Egypt after more than 10 years of construction. The canal links the Mediterranean and the Red seas.

1913
The first vessels pass through the Panama Canal.

1970
The Russian Luna 17 spacecraft lands an eight-wheeled lunar vehicle on the moon.


A beginning on the back story: Are we missing a dimension of time?

According to Bars, the familiar four dimensional world we see around us is merely a "shadow" of the six-dimensional reality, just as a hand makes many different shadows on a wall when lit from different angles.

Although we cannot experience the extra time dimension directly, we can effectively notice it through the different perspectives of the different "shadows".

Only the names and "Sense of Place" changes

(click the title to see the poster)

Rereading God Signs One More Time
3 x 4 x 5

Suppose you were the king
A confessor king with no sons,
only imitation nephews
An illiterate group with grave responsibilities:
Protecting island domains from Vikings.

Charged with creating a language for Shakespeare
Whom you cannot imagine
and no one has ever talked about.
(English teachers being only a sci-fi improbability
in a genre that does not exist as yet.)

The town crier is not interested in history
Greek is the language of antiquity
Your imitation nephew is Harold the Earl
You have no Odysseus myth to emulate
Only priests that fear the almighty God.

The damn fool Harold goes off to Normandy
Gets captured by some left over Scythian thugs
So he pulled an Esau maneuver and lost his birthright
to this Norman (read French) Duke
Before you can make a decision, that might kill you,

William being of fertile mind and idyll dreams
Decides it is time to save Macbeth for the French
Remember Harold can’t read
The Vikings are still on this Odin kick
Your island is on their list in place of Denmark

William bought a priest of his own
Created a new myth about how you are his uncle
I mean, who could be serious about a guy named Harold
anyway, unless you’re Norwegian? William is
the Jacob type with a David sense of conquest to satisfy.

Which is to say, he had knights but no real enemies
And the now king dies just when this story gets going
The trouble with Normandy is, it’s okay for dairy cows
But you can only cut so much cheese,
the wool market is in the dumps, and a whole Bayeaux

full of needle workers are looking for part-time.
What was needed was something to promote tourism
Your advisors suggest war as a good theme
A comet, later known as Halley’s Comet appears,
In a flush of genius, Williams decides:

“I am going to England to claim my uncles’s crown.”
The same crown that Harold had been given by his priests
(Priests came cheap in those days.
Every bloody warrior could afford his own
since the Pope hadn’t invented indulgences yet.)

I mean what was a poor clerical sap to do, pray?
Well yeah, and how do you live on that?
“Sell out to the government, it’s a religious tradition!
That’s what we need, more kings with money to spend!”
So William decides to build a fleet of boats,

That gets everyone excited,
Gave the restless knights something to dream about,
And it made it easier to get to England.
Crossing the channel to do battle at Hastings
In a year when Halley’s comet appears in the sky.

Sounds like a best seller to me.
Didn’t Mark Twain have an encounter with Halley’s comet?
No I think it was Ronald Reagan and a UFO.
I am not very good at details but the story is familiar,
Every time God gets involved, something bad happens.

A Noun like Alice

Totally Optional Discourse

Squinting into an open window,
cup of Sumatran at about half
(somewhere between empty and full
wrt dependency ratios
sexual orientation dynamics
& anticipation index theatrics),

the IM alert flashes yellow
(an i2c)i.e., “invitation to chat”
one finger at a time—

absurd words translate thoughts
images metaphorm
phonemes
animate the stage

Let synthetic speech make your day

press stop to discontinue

The absurd word that won’t be heard

Hey dingle diddle this cat needs to fiddle
No! Says my date with the swollen prostate
I’m finger liken’ good and chokin the chicken
comes easy for a cheesy whatchama McGreasy.

Perverse? Poet is almost a 4 letter word now-a-days
Sort of like bike that used to be quiet-tude
Now rude dude crude is all we ever hear
from those Roar and smoke joke folks anyways

Some luckless suck-sess dream machine
Poetry scream slam jam Cando band
cutting 180 ticks up into staccato battle prattle
gets a hand for The lucidity stupidity grandstand

Some pathetic academic miscreant ascetic
In a dissertation dispensation sensation
blows it out his ass and Turns trash into cash
Proving art is never Art until your world falls apart.

So I pant and rant like a wasted miscreant
Send my letter to a jet Setter who’ll get no better
Pray for love from the dude up above, & say
OK, okay have it your way. Make my day.

You may scroll down now to read more, now.


The Empty House by Marjorie Agosín evokes an out-of-control feeling, one in which the mind cannot quite cope with the madness of memories. There are some elements of projects from the past remixed with things done this past week in this presentation. All the technologies used are available free on the internet thus part and parcel of every e-poet's tool kit.

Finding the code for work

with a little help from my friends.

When I think about work I am reminded of Phillip Levine’s poem, “What Work Is,” about how it gives a typical I B Singer answer to a topic that eludes classification. Besides, the quote from Clarence Darrow reminded me of the play, Inherit the Wind.

Double checked

Levine standing on the hands of Singer
tried to explain the Nobel prize
to his brother. Not Singer’s brother
someone else’s he mistook for him
standing in the rain
misunderstanding the holocaust
that would not leave his mind,

waiting for work to divert his mind
thinking all along that the truth
revealed in Tennessee
saved the fools who knew better
from another day of chess in the park.

But this bit of doggerel probably comes closer to the gist of the prompt:

Leadership at Work

Don’t worry about the climate
Were running out of oil
That’s okay we’re short on water
Which is twice as bad

And the newly crowned queen mocked:
“Let them smoke dope!
We’ll put the well drillers in jail
for... Blowing smoke up our pipes!”

Political decisions are not so hot
You might say slippery solutions
Made by folks who are all wet.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Per usual, you may click on the image to see it bigger than life.