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.
Down in the Fairy Tale Canyon
hides a dragonesque companion.
Its spine plates jut from rusty sands
in this ill-known Silk Route badlands.
If you see the ground start to move
you’d better have a countermove.
Taken in the summer of 2019 in Karakol, Kyrgyzstan.
I don’t think much of Kim Jong-Un as a ruler,
but between you, me, and the water-cooler —
there’s something that just must be said:
I’d buy a cookie jar the size of his head.
There once was a bear named Jerry,
and – like the nursery rhyme Mary –
Jerry Bear was quite contrary.
“Those salmon should not swim upstream.”
“The people I bite should not scream.”
“Why wreck good berries with whip cream?”
There wasn’t a thing anyone said
upon which Jerry would not tread.
Don’t be like Jerry. He’s a d!$%head.
Taken in December of 2016 at the Vienna Town Hall (Rathaus)
I
three monkeys
look down from a high branch;
one throws a pit;
a tourist dodges left,
right into the pit’s path
II
a goose struts,
then wheels about – wings flaring –
Karate Kid,
but standing on both legs —
feint with foot, jab with beak
III
a llama
spits in some poor girl’s face
as if she
were Hitler or Kim Jong-Un
classy, Llama, real classy
The scrub and tumble weed are scant
against colorful sands.
The burning heat will ensure rants
while crossing desert lands.
The heat is felt, and rage supplants
the awe of the badlands.
A broken mind enters a trance
as it dreams choking hands.
The hands enwrap, at just a glance,
the throat of a strange man,
who offended with just a stance,
given the heat’s dead hand.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 