Maybe the hokey pokey is what it's all about

"It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms."
or maybe it was something else Friedrich Nietzsche said.

Click to enlarge the images of the real thing

btw, here a link to the poem I wrote for last Sunday.

and this one still applies to the Super Bowl Game this coming Sunday.


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Thinking Inside the Box

“Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present." Friedrich Nietzsche or maybe it was something else he said.



Chance encounter

btw, here a link to the other poem I wrote today.


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When Poets take on Precedents

In memory of the protest sonnets of Claude McKay
on Martin Luther King's Day

... by observing the ideological paradoxes manifest in America's treatment of minorities and by adopting Western literary traditions, and thus he gains a voice among those whose project of subjugation has been to efface the native cultural heritage of African-Americans and to silence the discourse of dissent. McKay challenges the American power structure.

from African American Review, Fall, 1994 by James R. Keller

Waltzing over a Cyberian Sunset


Are you sure there is no good reason
Why a people would live in a fog?
If it’s not about fear or cov’rin
Your behind, then buying a watch dog

That is way out of touch and knows it,
Is like living with clowns that wear shit
Eating grins on their face, a disgrace
That American’s had to embrace—

Eight long years with a stupid oil fake
Because Clinton’s hard penis goon child
Was the symbol of freedom gone wild,

Made hypocrisy the country's namesake,
A torment that will outlast the grief
For a war that bestowed no relief?

In the a world of supervillians and cyber comics,

Doctor Cyber was the commanding presence behind a global criminal network around the same time when Wonder Woman had relinquished her powers and her fellow Amazons retreated into another dimension.

I continued the experimental aesthetic by composing the Pushkin sonnet in bluesy 3-beat trimeter instead of conforming to the iambic dogmatism of the traditional sonnet,

for more on this sad debacle in American governance that won't go away...click here.

Playing the bottom card too soon

The Untold Story


It was an average morning
Sometime in February
Unremarkable sunrise
Certainly not the kind of thing that would call out amateur photographers
The poets were still hung over
So only the factory workers were missing it
A body floating above the horizon
Purple and slowly desiccating

Was it only a mirage
A reflection of a life just ending
A curiously well formed cloud
Whose alligator skin flaked into the contrail of a fast moving exhaust from the future
He couldn’t quite tell
Every time he raised the glasses
Thoughts got in the way
His oatmeal was burning

The phone rang
It was his mother
Nothing interesting
Then the sun broke through pierced his retina with a concentrated photon blast
Knocked him to the floor
So this was what it was like
He was between breaths
The next never came

He was the only eye witness
No one to tell it to
Unreported news
It took only 27 lines in a the C section of a newspaper he never read
God’s beta son gone
His underwear still in the washer
Ready to be put on
A modest world

Unspeakable Word

As it happens, today was the day I had my annual checkup at the VA. For me, it is the hardest thing about being a DAV.

24/7, 24/7, 24/7, 24...

An out of balance hammer
pounds in the middle kingdom of auditorium yammer
Tinnitus tingling without a single sound anywhere
No winning combination here or there

It rings like a diabolical plot against humanity
a Conspiracy Theory of insanity
Punishment in the here and now of my ear
For sins committed long before this new year

For being among the limerick readers who cheered
when the boy from Nantucket appeared
gave us a grin
Raised his “toast” to the great somethin’

(In a modern sense of an old fashioned word
Frozen on lips that cannot be heard)
A stern librarian from out of the guilt of our youth
Screams quiet! But it is only an unobtainable truth

“It’s all in your head
or under your bed,” she said,
calling back that first turn of the phrase
The euphemism that said no in so many ways,

figuratively portrayed as a sonic
wave that vibrates until it became a near chronic
hum that will ever remain unseen
to serve as a surrogate for the in-between

New Years 2008

One of my favorite places to publish: Relevant and many excellent poets contribute-- My poem was the New Years 2008 Day choice

The New Verse News: Not Too Late for Commutation

...
regenerates the beat of life
Children who have not watched the news
breathe deeply to propel the perpetual wind of change

The editior, James Penha,

Under statement