POEMS: MAY MAYBE POEMS

NEWS OF THE WORLD # 14

A year in space; “It’s the same old place.”

The song’s the same; it’s the human race:

Bombing cradles, towers and steeples.

Our hearts in darkness, we’re The People.

Yemen? schmemen! Man, I’m in heaven!

It’s not my bread that needs to leaven.

Why should it be the golden-egg goose

is strung up high by your angel’s noose?

NEW CONFLICT ZONES! So send in the drones

(It’s cheaper, by far, using your phones.)

"Hey! That’s not Santa! Is it a nuke?"

"Stop with the eggnog! I need to puke."

Why for a buck do we try our luck?

How will we know a duck’s still a duck?

When will we learn that we’re lost at sea

and can’t see forests beneath a tree?

…..

What’s this notion of “plastic" oceans?

“Legacy" mines’ absent devotions?

And laundries spill those micro-tailings

while arsenic ponds bring graveyard wailings.

Our politicians and polymaths

will speak with methane but not their graphs.

We should be bothered by what they’d tell:

What’s born in plenty, grows up in hell.

“Those stinking bergs with their melting turds!

Man, this Ice Age thing is for the birds!”

(Who seem just now less inclined to fly

across our cracked and blood-red sky.)

ASTEROID NERD: “IT LOOKS LIKE A TURD!”

Speaking of which, here’s Trump’s latest word:

BILLIONAIRES POOR! THE POOR WILL BE RICH!

If it’s so easy, why don’t you switch?

Wall Street’s on steroids, pumped-up on blood.

Bank loans and dream homes, cleared up like mud.

ZOOM-ZOOM MEET DOOM-DOOM. Dummies for All.

Thank God the church is next to the mall.

Will we fight wrong or will we wrong right?

What does it matter who’ll shed the light?

War criminals are cute—when they’re old.

Like Opa at Christmas (so I’m told).

POPULATIONS RISE—GERM CELLS DEVISE!

Who would have thought a small thing so wise?

Who kept watch when this smallest of men

slipped past gates of avenging heaven?

Our wading pools hold many the fool.

They sip their tea while a doddard rules.

Their unbound country now pays its tolls—

Will they lay down, or lay down bed rolls?

Middle classes! You hopeless masses!

Stand so small for your lads and lasses.

All you can say: “We’ll rocket away!”

Martians, one day, will welcome your stay.

DRIVERLESS TRUCK GIVES BIRTH TO A DUCK!

Pride in the land of virtual fucks!

We've come to fear what others have bred?

Toast to the living! Well come to dread!

“ACCUSED GROPER!” Poor, little moper!

(Sorry, we seem like interlopers.)

But, please can you tell us why it’s that

only women are pulled from your hat?

CHARLES MANSON IS DEAD! That much we’ve read.

But must we now parse all that he said?

His body, it lacks most of its pomp.

(His eBay  dentures won’t even chomp!)

Block chains and Bank-Aid. Children in stockades. 

Who needs Jim Jones to lead our parade.

Will lemmings riot over those cliffs

like icebergs, time and tectonic shifts?

Phosphate and potash—how ‘bout a dash?

We’re nearly empty, so how's your stash?

Oil fields with low yields? It must be your gear.

Say, have you heard your neighbour’s gone queer?

Greenland may be—Atlantis! Someday.

(Save for the ice that’s still in the way.)

Icebergs, so shy, will slink to the sea,

that sends it's regards, and a stiff fee.

……….

When reading the news, the weather, views,

in 3-D, colour—all you’ll peruse,

recall what’s been, what’s been here before,

and what’s returning, asking for more.

Göbekli Tepe* sits on its hill,

lingering dryly, lingering still,

More real—so far—than Plato’s lost isle;

its cracked walls and charms rest there a while.

*(Go-beck-lee-tep-eee. “Potbelly Hill”.)

Downtown Bus Depot

May 2017 #2

Air swirls about your head;

warm rain mists your face.

There’s soft, wet rhythms

on the brick paving

beneath the tree—

A jazz song

between earth and sky.

In Due Course

Somewhere

there are cool sands

where bare feet

can walk

past the clever twists

of wire

out to where 
only rust

gifts the wind

with forms

never meant to be.

Interloper

Rain falling and freezing

in the season’s first fractal mosaic,

across the window glass.

Rain patters the eaves:

the tinny drumming

is harsh along the chilled metal.

Outside, the grass 
was knee-high yesterday; 
it’s now

swung low,

coated with a heavy glaze

of early winter.

The grass bows down,

tramped flat

like an old mat

of wet lawn.

Yet sprigs of wild parsnip

still stand.

Ice-water coats 
the brittle stems

and crowns

of the broken seed cups

until dark.

In Your Dream

In your dream,

the shards of your teeth

sit like clay tiles in your mouth,

cracked and worn by time.

Sands of Babylon drift by

filling your mouth.

No words rise

along your throat—

the Euphrates, the Tigris.

No sputtering of awe,

no gasps of joy.

Only a dry mouth

and broken teeth.

In your dream. 

Attraction

I find you dangerous.

Your cutting eyes,

the hook of your nose,

the edge of your breasts

are like daggers in the heart

of this dying Ottoman.

Deadly, perfumed,

etching with the filigreed

calligraphy of sin and sex,

your lost-harem limbs

move like dusky shadows

across moon-lit dunes.

The scent of lime and roses,

cinnamon and saffron

swirl among the folds

and creases of your robe.

Life with you is like

watching an old movie reel

skipping near the end,

as the film spools its way

through that terrible light—

catching distance between

one frame and the next,

growing hot  and problematic.

Life with you is a fast-forward,

blurring of the passage,

done simply enough

by your touch.

I cannot stop now,

even if I wanted.

You are dangerous.

And I love you.

A History of Botany

An accident occurred,

with not much disturbed

(or even perturbed)

for an age or two.

Then Red opened eye,

and Scent opened nose,

and without much help—

the Wild-Thorn Rose!

[It was International Nurses Day yesterday, May 12, so tip-of-the-hat to all the Florence Nightingales of the world who do so much for all of us. Thanks, Pat]

"I left my meaning around here, someplace..."

I WENT FOR A WALK YESTERDAY. Birds were chirping, trees beginning to blossom. The air was fresh and clean in the park and little woods near where I live. It felt good stretching my flabby muscles after sitting at the computer all morning. The day was the same: No mushroom clouds. No troops shooting protesters. No rapes. No murders. No Bombings. Just a few joggers out and some couples, an old guy or two, some families. I walked by a bunch of pink and blue balloons hooked on a tree limb and twisting mischievously in the breeze. It was a typical spring day in the pre-apocalypse city where I live.

And by that I don’t believe there’s any Armageddon being constructed in the hidden interstices of our world, ready to rise behemoth-like in time for the End Days. Nothing seemed amiss that day, yesterday.

As I trundled along paths strewn with dry leaves, big black squirrels were busy scrambling along tree limbs, flicking their tails, making chittering sounds, as they indignantly waited for me to pass by. There were just a few cars in the street at the park’s west end; with no place to be, there’s no place to go. I didn’t miss their noise or smells.

“No, Oumuamua is NOT Hawaiian 
for 'Great Frozen Turd!'”

Earlier, I‘d watched the news. The commentator said the American economy, in the months and perhaps years ahead, would most likely recover along an anaemic, scraggly vein of growth, slow and lethargic—more catfish than Asian carp. He suggested that, from a statistical, chart-wise point of view, we’d not be making any quick climb back to where we were any time soon. 

He said the economy looked ready to be more like an “L-shape,” going forward—like the profile of a stair step. But where he saw the stair going up eventually, I think it’s just as likely to be descending.* So my rambling point is--there will be a comeuppance after all this is over. Normal is gone, kicked out of the playground. Just what will replace is still to be determined. Stay tuned.
.....

THE OTHER NIGHT I FINISHED Kurt Vonnegut’s second novel, The Sirens of Titan. I’d been a little impatient to get to the end because I felt a bit like a fish on a hook. Good satire tends to keep you up in the air like a juggler does his balls, keeping you spinning and never quite dropping you. Vonnegut keeps you in the air, as well as smacking away those comfortable complacencies and typical reader expectations we all have. For example, at the beginning we’re told, there’ll be a love-story as well as answers to Very Important Questions. We get both at the end, just not the kind we’ve come to expect.

Asteroid Living: For Today's Space Traveller!

After the introductory section, the main character, the rich and debauched Malachi Constant is convinced by recruiters to journey to Mars where he trains for years as part of a mercenary army set to invade Earth. (By the way, they get creamed!) While on Mars, he is lobotomized and has his memory erased. On invasion day, his ship is forced a detour to Mercury where he lives for a several years, but eventually he is able to return to Earth. He has a vague memory of a wife and child on Mars who he must now find on Earth. In the ensuing years, after the failed invasion, Malachi comes to be known as the “The Space Wanderer” and is idolized by billions of adherents to a new religion: “Church of God the Utterly Indifferent”, whic was begun by the millionaire, Winston Niles Rumfoord, who we learn is trapped in a space-time wavelength, a kind of conveyor belt called the “Chrono-Synclastic Infundibula” (CSI) which automatically transports him back and forth across great distances of space. While he is trapped on this cosmic conveyor belt  he is able to see the future

Rural Rout

I know, but he saves a lot in hand sanitizer.

And Knowing the future, he devises a plan to unite all the peoples of Earth, and to eliminate the petty squabbles and wars between nations. As I have said, Rumfoord achieves this goal by creating the existential threat of alien invaders, thus uniting all of earth under a common purpose of repelling the Martians (who in reality, are earthlings recruited by Rumfoord’s agents). The invasion fails miserably, as Rumfoord knew it would, and results a new religion being born (also something Rumfoord knew woul happen). When the space wandering Malachi finally makes it to Earth, he is initially welcomed as the fulfilment of a prophesy (courtesy of Rumfoord) who will affirm the worshippers belief in the utter indifference of the universe, and of a God who cares not a whit about anything they might think, wish or do. 
Instead, Rumfoord reveals that the Space Wanderer is, in fact, a judas. Malachi's decadent past is exposed and he is  reviled by the worshippers as being an example of thevery  corruption the new church abhors;  he is someone who believes in a benevolent God and that "luck" is on their side (“Somebody up there likes me!” is a phrase he often used as a young man.) Such people like Malachi feel they somehow have a special place in universe; such thinking is blasphemy for the adherents to the new world-wide religion initiated  by Rumfoord. Malachi is now held up as an example of what not to do and is subsequently banished to Saturn’s moon, Titan,** (which, Rumfoord tells us, has a “warm and fecund” climate). There, Malachi, his wife and son live, and it's there they meet the re-materialized Rumfoord, as well as the alien robot, “Salo”, a stranded messenger from the planet Tralfamadore, who crash-landed on Titan several hundred thousand years ago.

"I will NOT have such daydreams in my class!"

Malachi and his family live out their lives on the distant moon, while Rumfoord is transported back and forth to a different parts of the universe. Near the novel's end, the Salo receives the spare he has been waiting for to fix his flying saucer and continue his mission. An elderly Malachi hitches a ride home from Salo as the alien departs Titan. Salo drops Malachi off late one wintery evening at a bus stop outside Indianapolis where he subsequently freezes to death while waiting for a bus that’s running late due to the weather. So it goes.

As Malachi sits on the bench, becoming drowsy, unaware he is dying, he falls asleep and dreams that his greatest wish in life--to be reunited with his friend "Stony"--comes true, and that they’re going to go away in a flying saucer and live in paradise together with Malachi's family because “somebody up there likes you.” as Stony, in his dream, tells him. (532) The dream is a post-hypnotic suggestion put there by Salo, to comfort Malachi as he dies. Thus, Malachi's wish comes true only in his dreams as do ours (except for some people who are just luckier than others). Malachi, whose name means “messenger”, has no message to give us. Neither does Salo, whose diplomatic “message” he is to deliver to beings on a planet in a distant galaxy, contains but a single word: “Greetings”. What more can you say, really? So it goes.           

For Vonnegut, life is a series of face-plants and prat-falls and accidents in The Theatre of Low Comedy, and to make anything more of it is absurd. But living--that is different.

1,000,000 B.C.

1,000,000 A.D.

Pratfalls aside, at the novel’s end we do have a love story: After living separate lives on Titan, Malachi’s decades-long care and courtship of Beatrice pays off, and they experience love for each other in the year before her death at the age of 67 (and his death a short time later). “Chrono” their son, who lived apart from his parents, residing in the society of the eagle-like “Titanic” bluebirds, has become more bird than human. But, he returns briefly to the island where his mother has just died. “Thank you, Mother and Father,” he shouts, “for the gift of life. Good-by!” And then he was gone forever. What more can a child say to his parents to express his or her love for their parents? At the novel's end, there was the love between a man and a woman, and love between parent and child, and while they came late in life, amid the vastness and emptiness of space, and were not what we expected them to be, still, they are a warm and very human accomplishment.

“Mom, why do I have two left feet?”

“Ask your father.”

And in the end there are answers to Very Important Questions: such as what is the purpose of human life? The answer, of course, is that humans were evolved into societies over the course of several hundred thousand years in order to be able to manufacture and ship a spare part to Titan to repair Salo’s flying saucer. When Salo became stranded on Titan, hundreds of thousands of years ago, he sent a distress call home. On Tralfamadore, in order to speed up delivery, they sent out special wavelengths of energy to Earth, altering the brain chemistry of our hominid ancestors and directing them toward a single purpose. After many failures, at last a civilization arose with the technical know-how to manufacture the necessary spare part, which turned out to be the size of “an Earthling beer-can opener” (407) and operated  like a gasket. Disappointed? Don’t be. If you’re reading this, it means you’re alive. And that's something, according to Vonnegut.

   

And before I go on too long: If life is absurdity and pointlessness; if it just simply is, then searching for meaning of any kind is equally pointless. A phrase Rumfoord uses early on in Sirens and again near the end (and one we can be assured the veracity of, since Rumfoord can see both the future and the past) is this: “Everything that ever was always will be, and everything that ever will be always was.” (325, 509) Meaning be damned! Just live your lives as best you can^ǂ.

…..

SO, FAR AS THE POETRY GOES--it goes as far as it went. NoW #14 has a lot of absurdities in it—war, famine, pollution, climate change, greed, cosmic events and a number of other items gleaned from newspapers. I wrote it a few years ago and offer it with apologies to anyone who reads it with some expectation of finding answers to Very Important Questions. 
Some poems I like more than others. IN YOUR DREAMS is not too bad. I like the imagery of teeth like rows of broken clay tiles, and the “sands of Babylon” image is cool. The meaning? Quick, it’s drifting by on the wind! ATTRACTION is rather steamy. I must have been rubbing the magic lantern too much and this genie popped out! Oopsie!
A HISTORY OF BOTANY is an oldie and I liked the simple sing-songy rhyme and playful images. It still smells sweet to me. Enjoy them or order in a bucket of sonnets.

Enough for now. Time to get out and smell the flowers.

Cheers, Jake.    

*As I went walking yesterday, I listened to a helpful podcast discussion between James Howard Kunstler and Charles Hugh Smith of the oftwominds.com blog, as they ticked-off all the boxes on the true state of our economy; where we are as a society (at least the American situation, though we’re not that far behind them) and in general where we’re heading post-Covid-19, and more importantly post-modernity. Their talk is a good reality check, if you’re after one! Check it out here: https://kunstler.com/podcast/kunstlercast-328-chatting-with-charles-hugh-smith-from-the-oftwominds-blog/

**The so-called “Sirens of Titan” come from a photograph Rumfoord shows Malachi when he first recruits him into his Martian militia. He tells Malachi that he will end up on Titan because he, Rumfoord, has  seen the future, and he hints that the three incomparably beautiful females depicted in the photo may be up for grabs when Malachi arrives. Of course, the three are actually three statues carved by the alien, Salo, as he waits for his spare part to arrive. They decorate the bottom of the pool at Rumfoord’s residence on Titan. So it goes.

^ǂ The novel opens with the framing of Malachi’s story as being written in the distant future. It's a story from what the narrator calls the “Nightmare Years” (our immediate future), when humanity assumed that the answers to the meaning of life lay ‘out there’ somewhere, and space travel and colonization of planets in the solar system has begun. The narrator says: “Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.” (313) Vonnegut may be pulling the reader’s leg about the search for meaning being found by an inward journey. His narrator comments that in the bad old days, no one knew any of the “fifty-three portals to the soul.” (ibid) I guess it depends on what Vonnegut means by “soul.”