My memories of autumn are clearest —
the harvest time, when fields had turned amber,
with desiccated stalks – devoid of spirits.
And in the grain, we children would clamber,
’cause cleaning out wagons was time cherished.
Those short days are now brighter and grander.
It was an age of colossal machines,
and kernels of corn and tiny soybeans.
little nubs in a rounded spine,
subtle hollows between muscles;
we lazily build with sharp corners —
corners that don’t exist
in the backbones of beauty
as we know it
graceful curves and subtle transitions
are beyond our capacity to build
but are the only shapeless shapes
that we can truly appreciate
Taken in 2014 at Namdroling Nyingmapa Monastery in Bylakuppe.
blocks of knowledge
sit in rubble piles,
having been coveted, hunted, and horded,
they sit in rubble piles
the Epistemic Hungry Ghost
is too busy gathering blocks
to shove and nudge
them into load-bearing
structural integrity
that takes patience & a plan
&
there are too many blocks,
so many blocks —
ripe for the picking —
so many blocks
Who’d have thought learning could be a drug —
a crack-rock addition
with a prettier face
and prettier fidgets?
blossoms fall,
tumbling in a stiff breeze;
on the ground
they form a purple shadow,
ignoring the sunlight
Taken in Helsinki in the summer of 2011.
I opened up a book to a strange land.
A storied portal let me travel through,
and I looked down an unknown city’s strand.
I’d opened up a book to a strange land.
Here, ironically, all great books were banned
to keep the locals home and quite subdued.
I opened up a book to a strange land;
a storied portal let me travel through.
Nothing redraws itself like a desert.
From day to day, the dunes are ever changed.
Those shifting sands won’t ever revert;
they wander without aim, as if deranged,
needing novel airs as much as the flirt.
It shifts -n- cascades, but is never arranged.
It’s ballistic Art, ever self-sustained.
Taken somewhere in Asia (Thailand or Japan — I think,) sometime in the last decade.
Some people dream of shoving a boss in front of an inbound train. My own fantasies run to the smashing of computers and phones into a fine — if toxic — dust.
I don’t know what it says about me that:
-I equate these machines with the boss from that first scenario,
and, also,
-(like the aforementioned people) I’m too scared to go through with it.
I realize that these devices make life much easier…
except when they don’t, and it’s only then that I want to murder destroy them. Of course, the person who wants to murder her boss doesn’t want to do it when there is cake in the breakroom or when an unexpectedly generous bonus comes through — just, you know, the other times.
Unlike the original Luddites, I don’t hate machines out of a fear that they will replace me.
They already make a better economist than I ever did.
And even if the machines pick up their poetry-writing game,
that’s why I have the yoga instructor gig to fall back on…
[Because I’m convinced it will be decades before humans feel comfortable learning backbends from an entity that can twist rebar like a bendy-straw.]
No, I detest our silicon brethren because I have been sold a line that they can (and do) only do what I ask of them. [Hence the reason I don’t get so enraged by humans; anytime a person does something I ask is an unadulterated victory.] Instead, sometimes the computer does what I ask, but the next time something else entirely may happen. If the machines were consistently unable to complete the task, I would chalk that up to my failure to understand them. As it is, I’m left with a landscape of disturbing possibilities:
One, the machines are pranking me. (If this turns out to be the case, I think we can, eventually, be friends.)
Two, my computer’s desolate existence is causing it to try to commit “suicide by user.”
Three, we live in a glitching universe, and at any given moment the machine may produce a random unexpected result.
I don’t want to go back to the Stone Age, but I do have a newfound understanding of the allure of Steampunk. Contrary to the name, no one ever got punked by a steam engine. (Scalded and blown up, yes, but never punked.) The same cannot be said of a smartphone.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 