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
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
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
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..." |
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!'” |
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! |
Rural Rout |
I know, but he saves a lot in hand sanitizer. |
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!" |
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. |
“Mom, why do I have two left feet?”
“Ask your father.”
|
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 canǂ.
…..
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.
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.
Ç‚
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.”
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