Black Bird Crazy

Inebriation


Old Crow                  
can show         
how Poe
's
Black knack
snatched      
back              
his rap,
Tap, tap, tapping
evermore
on
your floor

The Wey of the Dog Star

13.0.0.0.0

When the Milky Way bisects the sunrise

And it's the first day of winter,

The Holocene ends with a shudder,
A great precessional age begins afresh.

Geologists named it an era for catastrophe---
A scientific upstage of Olmec lore
That looked up instead of down.


The Mesoamerican saints proclaimed
What only modern science can figure
Based on the stars and earthly wobbles;
Human beginnings of Gaean demise,
From secrets written in the galactic spiral.

Modern seers say, “it's the heat.” Nay,
Another Anthropocene layer, Brother,
Can you dig this stratigraphic rap
Conjured up by some forensic don
Tassel askew and mind so cool
Even global warming can't stop that!
Who knew? It could be a sign,
Of a time we won't remember.

I would advise reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann for a start.

About seven thousand years elapsed between the dawn of th Middle Eastern Neolithic and the establishment of Sumer. The Indians navigated the same path in somewhat less time. ... Pride of place must go to the Olmec, the first technologically complex culture in the hemisphere.

They invented dozens of systems of writing, established widespread trade networks, tracked the obits of the planets, created a 365 calendar (more accurate than its contemporaries in Europe), and recorded their histories in accordion-folded books of fig tree bark paper.

Couple notes on the numbers. Stanza is Fibonacci Series and total number of lines =20 which is reflective of the vigesimal number system , i.e. base 20, used by the Mayans.

Stop, Look & Listen

Changlish

Linguistic inertia bends
Knewton’s law with e-motion,
Puts the em-PHA-sis on the wong

syl-LAH-bull when
Mandarin music makes more money.

Write the China syndrome
Whole planet language orbituaray.

Fate dictates sound discoveries,
New East mates dictionate

Online. Translation speak,
Where the rubber meets the toad
Pwincing the kisser.

Banking on By Golly

Click on the poem and see the big picture.

When bad maps point the direction

Common Roots

As cool as the morning calm
Cold vowels drifted onto the steppe
Seeking soft romantic companions

Met with a Cyrillic harshness
Old political divisions multiplied
Turning mere symbols to enmity

Touched by a silent sentience
Sweet pheromones of amour
Changed the semiotic of warming

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.


[^j^]

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

Under statement

Road Sign Redux

Help! I'm stuck in the box. Click me out, please!


I started the one below--but I could not finish it

KEEP RIGHT
EXCEPT TO PASS


Did you ever wonder,
"Except to Pass" where there are no cars?

Somewhere on that forgotten road
The smell of death lingers

She was this baby's breath flower

The future could not fathom
her gilded gaze nor her septic curse

So fate decided the shock value
Would awaken the almost dead
Long enough to read the signs

Placed there like broken fragments
of Broken dreams and broken hearts
Left to swelter at noon day
While the desert heat does its work

... Carries the eagle ever higher
Brings the scavengers from nowhere

Launched by a hormone quest
Her innocent flippancy
was
Spent too hastily on a pickup seat


To damn many things happening this week--the OLPC G1G1 order arrived Tuesday.

Circumpolar Satellite Telephony Mine

Birds, Bonds & CA

In a mythical word jumbled world
St. Louis becomes heaven
The middle kingdom of MLB
Where the ruler of Blanco hell dare not go
So far from California
Pelicans cannot see the coast
Finnish is a difficult language to master
Encoded on the sports page
Where San Diego Gulls confuse pucks with goals

Givers and takers, Quakers and Shakers
Induced ecstasy drug trips from reality
Scan the sky with disembodied eyes
Fan belts of believers
Break, lose their timing, dim the lights
Safety is a high school dream of
Overhead Camden yards
Overflowing with American League birds

Newfoundland oysters drive
Fords on moonlit neap tide rides
Dreaming of Pontiac Firebirds
A leap of faith
Resurrects Evel ... and all is well
You can read it on the Internet
Verizon: you make the call

Back a couple of weeks I got tagged by this girl with the task of explaining to others how to become a better poet or something to that effect. Well I am certainly no expert on poetry, but I do know that creating is about contemplating the world around you. So I guess it would make sense to be an interesting person and don’t forget to look for all kinds of different perspectives on the ordinary. Ask questions, especially the dumb and naive ones, even if only to yourself. It is good practice for when you go public. & Explore ambiguity.

I can also can give some hints about how I work. For example this poem grew out of my fascination with the dada desire to recapture humanity from technology. When I read the prompt for this week I thought of being up in the sky looking down. I mean way up at the level of the low orbit satellites that play such a large role in human communication networks. These satellites are in circumpolar orbits and the earth turns below, for example the Landsat satellites only fly over the same path every 17 days even though they make an orbit every 90 minutes or so. Sometimes the view is obstructed by clouds.

In addition, signals “bounced” off the communication “birds” are sent in packets that may or may not have a continuous stream of intelligible content. What if at any one instant you could look down on the world, in this case North America, talk? At least where the view was unobstructed from your point of view. How would it sound? Would it make any sense? Could you make any sense out of it? How?

For additional reading I would suggest Crossings, v5 "Reappraising the Disappearing Body and the Disembodied Eye through Multisensory Art to get an idea of how a multisensory artist thinks.

ab

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 words for work

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.

straightforward view of the ordinary

after Ted Kooser's "Horse"


<;;>
There is something not right about a time when an insurance man becomes the nation’s poet. And I don’t mean any disrespect for Ted Kooser, he writes great poetry and was most deserving. I just can’t get the sense of irony out of my head.

translations and typos

transxshun


in a musical notes scramble

to find meaning

tones and stone turned up

the anagrammatic rock

no 1 on

key

can see

hear

or

hum

Salt girl commotion

Click on the pic to see full size