When Voltaire said:
“Once a nation begins to think, it is impossible to stop it.”
I don’t think he’d anticipated smartphones.
Food for Thought [Voltaire & Smartphones]
Reply
Tag Archives: Thoughts
Silence [Blank Verse]
This cave is too quiet -- a squeak, a drip, wing snap. But mostly silence & hushed sounds without meanings. Too quiet for my mind. Too quiet for our times.
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The Golden Age Mythos [Common Meter]
There never was a Golden Age,
a time much better than right now.
But playing martyr 's all the rage:
to think our world the garbage scow --
whose stinking mass forever grows.
Lest you think that I'm saying these
are times of pure and sweet repose,
Please, let me put your mind at ease:
These times are best. These times are worst.
(To blatantly steal from Dickens.)
This twist is just how we are cursed
to shriek like that sky fall chicken.
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A Life Improbable [Free Verse]
Each of us lives a life improbable, the gift of an ancestor who struggled through some terror which killed others. We each have an iron impulse to maintain a cracking grip on life, but some won't ever be pried away, growing like the stunted pine that juts from the mountainside: gnarled but indestructible. Live improbably with your life improbable.
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Everything City [Free Verse]
Everything is happening
somewhere in that city.
Blocks of block buildings
broken into smaller blocks,
in turn into smaller ones.
Those blocks -- rooms --
are the city's unit of interest.
So many rooms,
so much potential for the:
-nefarious,
-virtuous,
-ill-advised,
-hideous,
-hopeful,
-hilarious...
Someone is hanging
from a rafter,
waiting to be found.
Thousands are masturbating.
AI surveys the porn they surf,
making new genres in real time
based on unfulfilled search terms...
In one room, a scientist
figured out a cure for cancer
in a burst of inspiration,
but by the time she'd found a pen,
she'd lost it -- no trace remaining.
She then convinced herself
she'd never really had it...
but she had.
Everything that can happen
has happened,
will happen,
and is happening
in the city.
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Under Pressure: Or, A House Divided [Free Verse]
A construction worker once told me -
for a building to last -
depends not so much on
its materials,
nor even on its foundations,
but rather on the building being
in balanced strain throughout.
A building stays up when its
parts press into each other firmly,
or pull at each other strongly,
but never too out of balance.
This web of unseen forces
allows the building stand solid
against any huffing, or puffing,
the world might throw its way.
A democratic society works the same.
It must have an establishment.
It must have a counterculture.
And these two elements must
constantly pull at each other
or mash into each other:
tension & compression,
compression & tension,
tug-of-war & sumo.
If one side is unopposed, or too weak,
the state will crumble into some kind of
authoritarianism by another name.
Destroy your enemies at your own peril.
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Master & Slave [Lyric Poem]
What will be your master,
and what will be your slave?
Will you court disaster
to be perceived as brave?
Will you call your pastor
to hide that which you crave,
or be your own ringmaster
and own how you behave?
And will you choose virtue,
or live in fear of vice?
Will you choose to be true,
or default to being nice?
And when there's much ado
will you jet their paradise?
Or just defer your view,
as act some men and mice?
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Edgeless Edge [Free Verse]
Some speculate about
the edge of the universe,
and what exists beyond.
But that edge - if it exists -
is beyond another edge:
the farthest points
from which we can see light.
In a tower
on a mountain,
there's still an edge
of our eyesight --
like the others,
it's an edgeless edge,
signifying nothing
but our own limitations.
We are builders
of edgeless edges,
fashioning boundaries
that don't bound anything,
but by which we are bound.
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Disintegration [Free Verse]
crack the tablets: smash & shatter them until they flutter into dust, dust that's wisped into eddies and sparkles in the creek bed and is flushed out to sea and is but a glittery trace of what they once were.
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Spontaneous Ideation [Free Verse]
ideas accelerate to the surface like air bubbles from whence they came, i cannot say they passed up from below the lit sea from the darkness maybe, like air bubbles, they follow a mostly straight path, but i cannot say for certain what happens below the light i catch only the vapor that drifts up out of the popping bubbles and it must be gathered quickly before it spreads on the wind, becoming lukewarm nothing... damn increasing entropy!
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