View Down a Steep Hill
I write poems about the silence of the goddess.
Unrequited love of what may not be there is our cry in the wilderness,
Unanswered throughout our existence.
Every instant and inch apart is regret made flesh,
Every sight and touch is flesh made whole with mind and spirit.
Why do we persist?
Religion is politics without compromise.
What is it about emptiness we so urgently need to fill?
And with what?
Our own sad little notions of what such a being might be like.
Is an infant’s bleat: More.
///
Ashes Licked In Desperate Hunger
Imagine your life experience as the contents of a bottle.
Does it change when you switch labels?
Of course not.
Yet that’s what SUCCESS and FAILURE are, labels.
We think we are one thing.
We are not.
We are each a multitude, symbiotic,
A cooperation among diverse life forms.
When we “die”, cooperation ceases.
That is all.
This delusion we call Self is energy
Focused in a matrix of matter,
The received signal of the antenna
That is our body.
When the antenna rusts and falls apart
The signal is unaffected.
All is energy.
We swim, dolphins in pixels, Splashing our stochastic joy and pain.
/ W B Kek
///
Poor Choice
We wander the back alleys and abandoned factory lanes
Because the high clear brightly-lighted main street is reserved
For those who benefit from our labor
Who keep us penned behind the barricades of law and privilege.
Clean clothes, edible food, and potable water are their rights
Our futile wishes.
Safety and Security, twin illusions born of pecking order,
Stroll happily with Friends and Family,
Those connections that, in our darker world,
Are good mainly for sifting out prime suspects in murder cases.
We the people are nothing without unions and democracy
Yet we have let them take both from us with hardly a protest, let alone a fight.
Turns out our servitude could be had simply by demanding it;
We are volunteer slaves to those few we,
Through our labor, which they steal,
Have made rich.
/ Samael Gyre
///
Neither Blink Nor Figit
I was in Kindergarten when the teachers started crying.
We all got sent home early, children and adults both, Without being told why.
When I walked down the gravel road to our orchard house
My mother was surprised to see me.
She was crying too.
I asked what was going on and she sat me in front of the TV.
”This is important. Watch.”
So I did.
I’ve watched the rest of my life.
Each tentative answer, marking the spot where someone stopped thinking,
Does nothing but pose a myriad further questions.
I saw Cronkite cry.
I saw Oswald catch his bullet.
Roosevelt Grier bellowed, “He was my friend.”
Sad black people in good clothes walking, heads down,
Their beautifully-stated dream shattered.
Because I watched as much coverage as possible
I grew up from age 5 on knowing full well
Things are not what we’re told they are, nor what they may seem.
Coverage uncovered truths unfathomable.
Serious consequences lurk and can pounce
If you are not vigilant,
And sometimes even then.
Jacqueline scrambling after a chunk of her husband’s head As Clint Hill clambered onto the trunk with her, to push her back; People crying in long lines of dreary black-and-white, The caisson, the funeral march, little John Jr. saluting;
All of it stays with me.
I’ve read uncountable books and articles about it, too, same as we all have.
Still don’t have a fucking clue what was going on, though, do we?
We keep watching.
We wait as we watch for our own bullet.
///
About My Pal Charles Dickens
The reason I never liked Thanksgiving is simple:
We do not need a day set aside when we’re told to be thankful.
Nor is gratitude communal.
As a kid, it was always a deadly dull day.
We sat in stuffy rooms in good clothes while adult males secretly got drunk,
Watched college thugs beat each other up over a football,
Games no one cared about, having never been educated;
They did not know how to give a shit.
The women prattled like hens for about 79 hours making food we all horked down
As fast as possible once it was served,
Which meant go grab it for yourself.
It was just like all of life got put on hold so you could be forced to survive
An onslaught of strangers called relative, (to WHAT?),
So you could be forced to get through a boring, awful day
When horns of plenty blew out everyone’s brains
In an orgy of gluttony, edgy tolerance, and hushed fireworks.
Never liked it? I hated it. Loathed it.
Yet thankful I was:
For books.
They got me through.
Gave me a place to put my head.
Oh, and turkey? One word: L-tryptophan.
Just the thought makes me drowse.
I’m a vegetarian these days.
I live alone. Well, parallel.
I remain thankful for books.
///
“The library was a gloomy room, whose antique oaken shelves bent beneath the weight of the ponderous folios so dear to the seventeenth century, from which we have distilled matters for our quartos and octavos, and which, once more subjected to the alembic, may, should our sons be yet more frivolous than ourselves, be still farther reduced into duodecimos and pamphlets.”
–Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy, Ch. X, ¶ 1.
Telescopic alchemical pilfering and reduction of once-great, now-forgotten classics into modern diversions is what fuels so much of commercial publishing.
