Back from the Dead

Suddenly, the whole world funnelled down to a field of  blue.
No more the bobbing flower buds, the droning of bees
Too busy to notice my attentions; all these and more flew
Into a past that opened up to engulf the present.

Such deaths are gruesome in their way, but one sweet
Blessing they bestow:  they yield the dead back quickly.
And so I am returned early, from an early grave.
Therefore, bid me welcome, for computers

Are capricious things and my resurrection may,
At any moment, be retracted, and I consigned
To the dungeons of cyber space,
Shouting again into the silence.

Democracy

What despots and warmongers cannot control and possess they are happy to destroy, revising history to portray their deeds as noble and themselves as heroes.  They have destroyed so much for so long they believe there are no limits to the destruction they can wreck, and we follow, because it is easier to redefine freedom than to defend it.

I pity my race and despise myself for seeing, yet remaining helpless to turn the tide.

Incentives

Coming back life to life
One hesitates to create strife
No point in laying waste the land
Or making unreasonable demands
If all the baggage one creates
Follows one from gate to gate.

It's the End of the World as We Know It...

All night, awake, alone in the dark
I awaited the promised end, the stark
Moment when we step from life
To oblivion, and all strifes end.

Instead, waves of shimmering light
Washed over me from the heart of night;
I felt cleansed of a murky doom
I hadn't known was mine.  There is room now

For life, mine, yours, humankind's.
Not an end, but a rebirth, I find.

Open Letter to President Obama

Dear Mr. President,

We are glad you got re-elected, because the alternatives were grim, but we are not yet convinced that your vision and our vision are the same or even compatible.  We figure you mean well, you have good intentions, but we're not sure you know who we are or can imagine the nature of the dreams we hope to make reality.  Here is part of our vision:

We want real opportunities to get real educations--the kind that teach us to appreciate life and diversity, and to think for ourselves, not the kind that teach us to do what the corporations tell us.  We want opportunities to work, not to grovel, and we want meaningful, sustainable work that makes the world a better place and allows us all to live in harmony with life on this planet.  We want to do quality work we can be proud of, not live as corporate serfs pumping out disposable products until our bodies wear out and the corporations dispose of us.  We want justice, not a double standard where the rich are above the law and we get stuck with whatever they want to impose upon us.  We want government of the people, by the people, and for the people, not government for whoever has the most money, the loudest mouth, and the biggest fist.  We want the lobbyists and the corporations barred from Washington for good.  We want affordable healthcare for everyone because that is how civilized people live in community, and anything else is morally wrong.  We are tired of the "haves" whining about having to share with the "have nots", when they already control 98% of our country's resources and do less than 1% of the work.  We want the environment protected from corporate greed and  hubris--not in theory, by the empty promises of scientists on corporate payrolls, but in fact--and we are willing to make big changes to achieve it, because the planet is running out of time and we can't afford to listen to self-serving corporate propaganda anymore.

Is this your vision for all of us, Mr. President?  Is this what you have in mind?

If so, then this is your chance to prove it.  You have four years to stop capitulating to people who have no intention of striking a fair compromise--people who consider 47% of Americans (people whose homes and livelihoods they have stolen) "freeloaders" while they live off entitlements called bailouts that we provided--and start carrying the banner we've been carrying for you.  Four years without campaigning, when you could really take a stand and represent us, the people--not as might be most comfortable for political parties dependant for their survival upon those who are designing our destruction, but as as you have sworn to serve us.  This is your chance to be a real hero, Mr. President.  This is your moment to shine--or to become just another dim bulb in democracy's darkening lamp.

Are you ready, Mr. President?  Because we are.

Scavengers

We can't leave our property
Lest someone abscond with our trees;
Binoculars near the door capture
Poachers as they flee.

Musn't leave the car unwatched
Lest it be broken into by thieves.
The country is slowly coming apart
Unravelling at the seams--

When the structure finally crumbles
And the fabric finally tears
From what will the scavengers recoil
From what will they forebear?

White

(On finding a favourite website down)

It's pure, it's clean
It's blank, it's mean
That's right
It's white.

No thoughts, no moods
No shades, no hues
It's new
It's nude

It never intrudes
It's cold, but not blue
It's too good to be true
It's, like, totally you

Is it right to be white
Day or night?--what a sight!
Put it right
No fights, it's a blight

What a wreck!
An imperfect site.

Mad World

This week a man went mad, joked his way into the movies and began gassing and shooting into the darkness.  He thought he'd finally become someone memorable--and he was right.  This week the public went mad, forcing critics around the country to close down public comments in the face of rabid death threats against them and their families.  Viewers thought they were exercising their power--but they were wrong.  They were only displaying their savagery, the urge to kill for a fictional masked man.  Meanwhile, real villains pillaged and plundered, stripping the bones of democracy while the public remained silent and the Joker clucked at his own cleverness,  blind to the real drama playing out around them and their own slow effacement.

This is what we have become, this 'great nation'.  Is it any wonder we cannot recognise our own doom as it approaches?  That we cannot move out of the way of a speeding train, remain deaf to the warning scream of its whistle?

The Moment Before

The moment before pain
Comes to stay haunts the memory
Claims every waking thought, marks
Every dreaming signpost, starts us
To waking in the vain hope of relief
From a loss, a hollow, an unnamed grief.
Did the television warn you?  Did you hear?
Did you see?  Or did that last, queer
Vivid instant of well being slip past
Unremarked, unsavoured, as it must
For all of us, and for me, your daughter
Even as I think these thoughts
Form these words?

Encore

Right now, we are at a tipping point environmentally and socially.  We can either accept that radical change is unavoidable, assume responsibility for shaping that change, come together, and use our wits to innovate real solutions to our problems, or we can all revert to being savages wresting the last resources away from each other by brute force until there are no resources left to fight over.  That is our only choice.  Remaining in denial about reality means, by default, choosing savagery.  Six months ago we started evolving; now we are devolving again.

For a few weeks last fall people remembered what it means to belong to one community and stand together, not only for personal gain, but for our mutual health, happiness, and well-being.  We need to reclaim that--not only for ourselves, but for us all.

"The Sight"

Sometimes it is easier to see afar
Then to see the view from the back door.

Dalai Lama Blues

When even the godly become angry
And see their lifetime's effort gone to waste
When the enlightened concede the game
To the coarse, the base
Who claim for themselves what was made
For all, then do we find ourselves at last
Not on the heights, but on the vast
Equalizing plain where great and small
Are reduced to the same dull grains.

Ingmar's Wart

Perfection
Is being able to hide your flaws when the whole world
Is looking.  It's as close as we get, the film noire shadow
The hair light on the exquisitely wind-blown curl.
I have walked with monsters like Ingmar, the gods of theatre who make
Or break you because they can, because they are bored with the fake
But have lost the authentic or because you naively mistook their wart
For a beauty mark.

Long and Long

So many things have happened since last I wrote here... I had thought to put everything here in verse, but  I find I've little time to perfect my rhymes and so feel constantly dissatisfied with my efforts.  Now, I must write whether or not I reach the heights.

The world is full of synchronicities, coincidences, and I believe in neither, which makes this an auspicious time.  Chances to redeem old mistakes, rare things to keep hold of without losing the truth of this moment...  some to redeem me, some to redeem others.  Are these travellers here to stay or is this but a stopping place to offload some baggage so that the journey ahead may seem the lighter?  Who can say?  We must take it moment by moment and let it unfold as seems most truthful.

Elsewhere, in the world, change is accelerating, keeping apace with denial.  It is warm now, cold now.  The neighbour chews his cud, burns brush despite the ordinance.  We get out paint, we put paint away, watching the geese fly north and south like confused people.  Honk!  Honk!  Clogging the jetliner's engines like cholesterol in an artery.  A hundred wrists push a hundred watches up to eyes pinned wide by the spectacle outside, iris to iris, fingertips to wing-tips.  Is there some meaning here?  Why was the plane not delayed, why were the geese off course, why watch in helpless horror the frame-by-frame unfolding of disaster?...  There are no accidents.  The meaning is there in the pattern, if we dare to look for it.

I am hopeful now, despairing now.  I know the cycle.  I know how far it is to the light.  The thought does not encourage me.  And yet, the beauty of the earth, the knowledge of how things were (and could be again) make anything but the insanity of hope impossible.  Yet to each thing its season; the powerful must fall and the deceivers be discovered, and that too is a kind of redemption, making the impossible possible.  Let us hope, then, for a time.

When Only One Remains

Abundance is what we have
When we assume there will always be enough.
Poverty is the belief
That tough times are just around the corner
Making us hoard the lot
Like squirrels after frost.  When only one remains
That's when we cherish the dream
When we realise what we had, and lost.

Cyclops

The ancients blinded their seers to ensure they practised their art
Leaving one lidless eye in the centre of their heads.  How far
We've come you might say, how much better to be a flock
Of Cassandras, prophesying into the wind, than to blot
Out our eyes and rely not on art or science, but smarts.
Yet what a blind world we live in, for all that vision.

Knew Year

Only if we know the old year, can the new year be a better year.

Rare Prose

I just can't muster the desire to write a poem today.  Christmas always makes me melancholy--especially as it's celebrated here in the States.

It was much kinder in France.  As a student there I was stranded, my friends had gone home to their families, and I hadn't a centime in my purse to buy a table-top tree or a nice feast for myself.  And yet, those ancient streets decorated in old fashioned garlands and twinkle-lights made Christmas gentle and beautiful, so that even when seen from without it shamed our blaring ads trumpeting guilt trips and our grasping, ravening crowds clawing for disposable bargains...  What's happened to us, I wonder?  When did we start giving our souls to bean counters?...

At this time of year, I find myself longing to see old friends I've lost contact with in the course of life's chaos, but I know there is little point.  People move on almost before you have time to know them, and they don't appreciate it when their pasts catch up to them.  Even if I did, I am not who I once was; what would I have to say to them?  How long before the words died on our lips and our eyes slid to the nearest exit wishing we'd left things as they were, scrapbook perfect, instead of dragging mute memories into the present?

No, it is better this way.  Here, in the silent white, I salute you, old friends.  I remember.

Aftertaste

A haze of smoke, lingering thick
And bewildering around the lips
Of black clad hipsters intent
Upon rending the world asunder
With gerunds, and the errant
Metaphor, their words heavy with
Unsavoured satire, whipped
Into frenzy by the waves of a latte,
While the untried rhyme hammers
Futilely yammering against its cage--
I look around, thinking myself
Profound, to find
I'm just another novice poet
Hoping clichés crown me laureate.

The Wild Hunt

In the dark of night the Hunt began
We called it forth, and forth it ran
From the black hills past the pilot mount
The Riders drove their charges round.

In the deeps of the sea the chargers sped
The souls before them scattered and fled
And everywhere they were pursued
By the Huntsman and his baying brood.

The horn from distant hillsides sang
Over the fens and through the bracken
And all who heard it shut their doors
Lest they be lured out on the moors.

The night drew back aghast and wept
To see so many oaths unkept
That all that's hidden should come to light
Sounding the watches of the night.

And as the hounds drew back the veil
A thousand hands in a thousand tills
Drew back before the dawning day
Over the hills and far away.

Media Blackout

The streets are filled with people
The air is filled with sounds
But the cameras are myopic
And the satellite's gone to ground.

A canvas city's gone up
Overnight they took the town
Now they're coming here to storm the walls
And Wall Street's going down.

The underground is buzzing
Though the surface still looks calm
But a billion angry hornets swarm
The studio doors, beyond.

George Clooney's raising money
And Bono's sounding off
Wikileaks is collecting evidence
But the media is off.

"So pour a glass of bubbly
And dance all night till dawn
No one's pissing on our party
Or pitching tents upon our lawn

Let the silly blighters picket
Let them shout till they are hoarse
Cuz we've stockpiled all the money
And we've reinforced the doors.

When everyone is homeless
We will still be living well
So let the people stuff it
Let the country go to hell."

Yes, they've called out the militia
To disperse the madding crowd
But the tides have turned against them
And the rich have gone to ground.

The streets are filled with people
The harbour's filled with boats
There's no place left for pirates
We've even rigged the moats!

There's a secret battle brewing
Behind the mask of normalcy
But the only ones it's fooling
Are the aristocracy.