Screaming streams of information pelt all corners of the mind. Neurons are constantly flickering with flinches. Meanwhile, the body whispers its secrets in the hushed tones of a prayer uttered during a shootout.
POEM: Information Age Ailment
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Category Archives: Free Verse
POEM: A World of Loathing
a cat abhors a vacuum vacuums abhor tangled hair tangled hair abhors a hairbrush hairbrushes abhor Victorian Spanking Fetishists Victorian Spanking Fetishists abhor Victorian prudism prudism abhors immodesty immodesty abhors modesty modesty abhors whores whores abhor cheapskates cheapskates abhor expenses expenses abhor ledgers ledgers abhor ink pens ink pens abhor writers writers abhor synonyms synonyms abhor antonyms antonyms abhor continuums and so on... it's true that Eddie Rabbitt loves a rainy night, but who loves Eddie Rabbitt? [the Coalition for Names with Double-Letters, that's who!]
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POEM: Hypnagogic Voices
I hear voices -- a cold burble of voices -- too dim and distant to extract meaning, too inexplicable not to inject a rationale, or a slate of reasons: -madness -conspiracy -expectation -the impulse toward void filling minds despise quiet, filling it with puzzling prattle, and making any hash of sound into cryptic natter, until sleep descends
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POEM: The Mind of Urban Cattle
What's a city through the eyes of a mid-city cow? Growing up on a farm, I can't say I ever questioned how a cow perceived the pasture -- vast tracts of green, green grass seemed like a natural habitat, though I recognize that a philosophical cow might see nothing natural in its circumstance, either way. What of the fast moving vehicles? the horns? the best grass fenced off? the rush of humanity? the bright, white lights? the stink of human life? Can they tune it all out as well as they seem to? Zen mind / cow mind? I wonder?
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POEM: A Leak in the Sunny Side
Rounding through the pass, I crossed from the cold to the sunny side. But while I transited from the damp & mossy to the dry grass side of the mountain, I carried the cold with me. The ubiquitous sun would not warm me, but rather I seemed to suck the warmth out of the world -- as if I were a portal, and the light landing upon my skin was shunted to some parallel universe. I was the world's window left open with the heater on, and the temperature differential pulled a steady breeze in my direction, to who knows where?
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POEM: Knee-Jerk Speciesism
https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/121 [via Wikipedia]
I glimpsed the red hourglass, vibrating in a stone wall -- a Black Widow spider, bouncing on a thin web spun within the void of an absent rock -- that gap forming the spider's recessed hide. And instead of being happy that the spider had found a fine shelter, I worried that a child would stick a careless mitt deep into that wall hole, and be bitten on the hand. In retrospect, this seems so unfair to the spider.
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POEM: The Power of That Which Bumps in the Night
The last lamp out dips the room into darkness [sudden darkness] and in the nothingness, before vague shapes form, a clunking sound triggers the stab of an adrenaline spike into ones chest -- mainlined frisson, or fright: the heart thumps, the chest cinches, the stomach lurches, breath is sipped spastically, and an involuntary noise escapes from some unnamed place within. The power of strange and startling thuds and whumps has fueled many a storybook, but though the mystery is rarely solved, we get over it soon enough.
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POEM: Lighthouse Keeper
The lonely lighthouse keeper, peering through a deep-set but narrow window at waves smashing onto the rocky shore, spouting upwards in a fanned geyser. So much depends upon his maintenance of momentum, but the better things go, the more dreadfully boring is life, and when things go poorly, there are russian roulette odds of tragedy. Like life on a mountain, but when someone crashes into the mountainside, the mountain-man is an unlikely participant in the tragedy.
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POEM: Starlight
I shambled out to watch the fine-fired light of some bright but distant star. The message in that moment was old news -- more than ancient & less than relevant, yet it was the only news on offer. If one traced that line of light back towards its source, one might find the source no longer existed, its last instant recorded in the caboose passage of light as it whizzed past.
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POEM: Cloud Life
i watch the drifting clouds and my mind synchs to their speed and i wonder whether i'm the cloud or the cloud is me and i know that i'm not moving and yet i feel i am and i know that i'm not weightless and yet i feel i am and i know i can't live aimlessly and yet i feel i can
