Summer beach day; swollen clouds slog nearer: mass exodus.
Summer Storms [Haiku]
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Category Archives: Poetry
Berry Game Theory [Haiku]
summer berries: to pick or let ripen? what will birds do?
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The Abyss [Free Verse]
Nietzsche said:
“And if thou gaze long
into an abyss,
the abyss will also
gaze into thee.”
I must admit
the first several times
that I read this quote,
I couldn’t tell if it was wise,
or just had the patina of
wisdom that comes from
parallel sentence structure.
Crisscrossing subject and object
lends a ring of sagacity.
“If you can’t take
Mohammad to the mountain,
the mountain must come to
Mohammad.”
“Ask not what your country
can do for you,
but what you can do
for your country.”
“If you can’t get the carrots
out of the refrigerator,
get the refrigerator
out of the carrots.”
Yes, that last one is nonsense,
but it’s not nonsense like:
“The banana pirouetted fuchsia
all over the underside of
an A-sharp chord.”
The carrot quote probably took
your mind some time —
if only milliseconds —
to relegate to the
trash heap.
That’s why this sentence structure
is beloved by godmen &
politicians: because you can
sound wise even if you’re
kind of an idiot.
So, I was ready to classify Nietzsche’s
quote pseudo-wisdom when I realized
that my smartphone was the Abyss,
and it was certainly staring back at me.
It stared through all the data collection &
neuroscientific and psychological
research designed to keep
a person scrolling.
Maybe Nietzsche was on to something
that even he didn't fully understand.
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PROMPT: Romantic [Or, romantic]
Depends on the context. If I’m thinking about poetry or philosophy (which I often am,) then it pertains to the early nineteenth century movement that counterpoised the Enlightenment. Those “Romantics” disliked what they saw as the cold rationality of Enlightenment thinking; they valued spiritual and mystical experiences, and they believed it was important to not throw out the spiritual “baby” with the bathwater. That is, like many Enlightenment thinkers, they realized that it was necessary to jettison many of religion’s noxious ideas (e.g. the concept of “chosen people”) and also realized that mindlessly following moral dictates that may or may not have made sense in the pre-Christian Levant could be detrimental to their present-day life experience. However, unlike most Enlightenment thinkers, they did find value in spiritual views of the world as well as in the pursuit of mystical experiences. William Blake (even though he is often labeled pre-Romantic) provides an excellent example. His poems are spiritual to the core, and yet explicitly reject a lot of the moralizing and toxic aspects of conventional religion.
Of course, that variety of “Romantic” is usually given a big-R, and so I suspect the question is after a more colloquial definition. With that in mind, I believe “romantic” means “that which facilitates the unity of two (or more, I don’t judge) people in an immersive intimate experience of each other during a common period of time.” I’m not big on trappings. I think people obsess over trappings because it allows them to slack on the physical / cognitive demands of being fully engaged. This is why sex (done well) is such a great tool both for relationship building and for personal development. It makes it relatively easy (i.e. rewarding) to stay fully engaged in a common experience and in the moment, and to not fall into the attentional abyss.
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Farmland, Unchecked [Free Verse]
From a hilltop,
farmland stretches
to the horizon:
parceled into rectangles
of brown, beige, and oh
so many shades of green.
It must be the tropics,
for ripe grain to
coexist with verdant
& fallow patches.
So different from the farmland
of my youth
where all the rectangles
were one of two colors -
because everyone had to
pack into the same tight
growing season.
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Personal Jesus [Senryū]
a plump heron
walks on lily pads: my own
Personal Jesus.
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Passiflora [Free Verse]
Passiflora looks like space-age technology. it seems like it should pick up signals from the far reaches of space... but I doubt it does.
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Ruins [Haiku]
a jungle walk yields an unexpected scene: decrepit ruins
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Honey Bee [Haiku]
honey bee at work on flowers still dripping from Spring showers.
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Beach Sleep [Sonnet]
The evening winds are blowing out to sea,
and carry away all the woes of day.
You see the sway up in the waving trees
that give a sendoff to what's blown away.
The sea grows dark, and darkness envelops.
And sandy scents and fishy scents blossom.
And sounds of crashing waves seem to swell up,
as vision decides it will play possum.
Then stars - in veins - do shimmer between clouds,
the clouds one cannot see but can induce.
Now free from both the light and noise of crowds,
and all the human chaos and abuse.
Midst drifting shapes my mind is lulled to peace,
then all that is - both sea and wind - does cease...
Tiger Riding for Beginners 