The larger hurts.

For those who lose more than they gain, and give more than they get, thank you.  I pray indifference and disdain can have a powerful, radical force on economics.  Grubby fingers splitting hairs leave us with crazy bald-heads wed to greed.  Wealthiness and a healthy world are not proving to be successful bed-fellows. Someone's getting fucked in this scenario, and there do not appear to be any effective safe-words to stop the rape.  I live in a country that was once a haven for ideas, with a political landscape that was still in an innocent state of growth and self-consciousness.  Canada right now is no longer such a place.  We're mired in muck by a government of small-minded, power-hungry, white, Anglophone men who busily, behind closed doors, sell freedom and the wilderness that fosters us (and for which we are here to protect) wholesale to the highest corporate bidder.  Our country is sick.  People have been manipulated and polarized, and the centre has imploded.  There are not enough tears, but there are always enough opportunities to make a difference. First thing, we must vote. Second thing, we must write and think. A smart friend of mine said recently that "thinking is painless".  The fear, the emotion, the stress: those bring pain.  But thinking, with an open mind and a view to learning and changing one's perspective should it be necessary, painless. Priceless. Love and understanding before Hate and thoughtless fear, every single day.  That's all.

lolling in the rain

To be so happy as to spill
A trillion, trillion joyful tears
All in a moment
I am the sky.

yet more swimming Siamese cats

A lark for a pussy-cat, getting something for nothing
Siamese cats swimming Southward
Swallowing the small birds they seduce
Whose titterings seem
Like non-sense
'…zmzgbzn…? ' mangled consonants
Murmurred together 
Throat to throat. 

27072014poem

The news is grim
For the wild old world
Long black veils
Dim the skies,
Forest falls as
Chimneys rise.

Yet may we live
And the years unfurl
Reams and sails
Tangled rope,
A wilderness
Of change is hope.

Upon reading 3/4 of Michael Crichton's "Sphere" and reviewing blog history.

This alien monster appears to have a pulse.  Your readership keeps it alive.  First it nibbles away at your eyes.  Then it burrows into your brain.  It may hide away in there for a time, ruminating, making cud of your lost memories, regurgitating them as your dreams, masticating them over and over again until they form a tiny doorway into your heart.  The creature will try to squeeze its bulk through the orifice.  It will clutch its jaws around the organ.  Your heart and the creature will entangle and become indistinguishable.  You have given it life.  The story is within you now.  May your alien life also find a pulse, and spawn in others.

Grassed

He wrote a new poem today
Composed after hours
There in the middle-distance
Down the street half a block
Then straight up half a mile:
In the diminishing place.
I arose on a green, reedy carpet
Adroning
And stole it away.

Uncertainty

Poetry or prose?  Nobody knows.  Do you sometimes want to write everything in riddles?  Language is a game.  Writing is like playing solitaire with seven-eighths of a deck.  The cards you cannot reveal might be the most important.  But, it depends on your point of view, or what it is you are trying to achieve in playing the game.  Maybe you are building a house.  It could be that you are practicing a magic trick.  We just don't know.  Please will you tell us though?

number sine pome at sine Steussie

#pomes ar dum
excep teh juans i mek
sais all le franch
an tou les poemetieres
@Steussie

web pepole for space plankton

Web people Live in a web But those who Pull the strings Clip their little wings And suck their juices

Grandma

First, a singular spirit who
Comes to us now and then
Goes without saying
Goodbye

The second, now lonely and
Briefly, a magistrate,
Spied from a disc
In the sky

Here Jill, a fine girl
There Jack, a young cad
Elsewhere, a place or
A thing?

We souls who are searching for
Meaning may find it
In our own
Desiring

Transormerz

Thirteen is a number
and this number thirteen
is a number that only goes into
thirteen
the same number thirteen
some think unlucky
but there is no luck
and therefore no unluck
unless all is unluck
and then all is
thirteen
the same number thirteen
a mistake by the baker
who rolled too much dough
and has too many buns
so now we have plenty
to eat with thirteen
and some think it lucky
but really
thirteen
all these thirteens
are best described as
at optimum
prime

Prescription

You say the pain is back
behind your face
between your ears?
Place one plump blueberry
in your mouth and roll it around
on your tongue
then catch it between cuspids
don't crush it
just the weight of a nibble
tantalizingly incomplete
enough to release a dribble
of sweet juice that settles
sublingually
then move the ripe berry
between tongue and hard palate
and suck it dry.
Call me
in the morning.

Opitulation

Two eyes, afloat
Sloshing about on a bus
Buoyant on the tide of
Watery ooze -that is to say,
Humanity -and hard, angular minerals-
More or less concretely,
The traffic.

Perception arrives
A giddy trampolinist
Out of breath, bounced and bent
Into shapes and colours
By the message from
The stars.

Many moons to come.

Awakening on the couch, I am not alone.  The darkest hour is said to come before the dawn, but a stream of cool white light filters through the leafless branches of the elms.  The moon is high in the sky, her belly filled with the light of the coming sun, her horns drive into the darkness and subdue it.  We mark time together, in the ancient way.  As she slips past each frozen bough, her face, winking, remains constant.  She will never turn away.  She is a dervish, a dancer, with an eye only for this world. What need then for clocks? She is on watch for me, many moons to come.

Suspicions

Wait, what?  Was that the green thing?  No, it was one of the purple things from over there, it must have been.  We can't afford to lose another green one, though the cylindrical things are easy enough to replace.  Mr. Brown is thinking about getting one of the low, flat ones.  They are very well put together, and nobody would be able to fit through the opening with one.  The purple ones could be hidden under Mrs. Vee's cloak and spirited away, however.  We are installing more of the hemispheres to record the progress of time, so even if a blue thing does go walking we'll be able to note who acted as bandit.  A small number of suspicions rest on Ms. Queue.  She is forever rubbing her scent perceptor.  Some of the white granules may be going in there.  We'll let you know.

gun control

She's riding shotgun in his heart

Never pull the trigger

And there's no concern for safety

Now she has a wing-man.

Too few words

Gathering thoughts.  In need of rest.  Identity assumed, no need for pronouns.  Keeping it brief.  Taking off briefs.  Pulling up covers.  Turning out lights.  Saying good night.  Hoping for dreams.  Wishing you well.  Taking a breath, in through the nose.  Lungs filling up.  Listen to heart.  Breathe out through the mouth.  Repeat.  Closing the eyes one by one, drawing the blinds.  Leave it behind.  Here we are, now.  Outside of time.

A poem about more than vision.

Slowly shaking her head, Mouthing words, She warned me away; But I saw you Waiting at the window Undraped And your tattoo, A heart beating.

We lie by a stream
Flooding its banks
In the night.
Siamese cats
Swim through the foam
And tell us:
Water is more real
When it is unseen,
Don't be afraid
To trust what you feel.
Truth is invisible,
So, too, is love.

OMG GMO.

The dream of two nights ago had an obvious source in earlier waking hours.  All the same, it was a strange thing to dream that oats as we know them no longer exist.  The staple of Scottish and Equine diets alike was no longer available in markets the world over.  The country of Scotland was in a greater uproar than it was in the year 1745.  Could this have been the work of a porridge-hating super-villain?  Or maybe there was a plot afoot to horde the common grain, drive up its price, and make billions?

The day before the emaciated nightmare ran its course on hooves of flame, our Proto had been reading about the truth and lies concerning genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.  Homo sapiens sapiens never cease to amaze.  The lengths to which they will go to make a mockery of their name-sake --wisdom-- is staggering.  Once again, as with the missionaries preaching their notion of "god" and "right" to the indigenous peoples of North America and reeking havoc on these cultures, the privileged priests of science are playing god with the building blocks of life.  They don't know what will happen, only what they want to see happen.  Giant corporations like Monsanto are changing the genetic make-up of our food by inserting DNA from one species into another to which the first is unrelated.  They say that this is just selective breeding, but this does not happen in nature.  It is dangerous manipulation.  They can breed a crop that, due to their imposed and carefully selected mutations, will die out after one growing season.  Farmers who would otherwise be able to harvest from their crop the seed required for the next season, are now beholden to the corporation in a new form of planned obsolescence.  These modified crops do not provide more yield than natural ones, but they are invasive and threaten to spread their mutated genes.  When this happens, a natural or organic crop-growing farmer faces the threat of legal action for growing the GMO crop without having first purchased it, or "stealing" it.  Another one bites the dust, and the corporation scoops up the land for more industrial GMO farming.

There is no solid science supporting the benefits of GMO crops.  Scientific method -- hypotheses and complicated procedures -- are at work, but there remains a huge burden of proof.  That burden lies on the corporation doing the research and creating the GMO crops in the first place, and may be the spur that drives the nag onward.  However, they plant this burden in our soils, and in our minds with half-truths, fear-mongering, and bullying.  They reap profit.  In the end, that is their main interest. But there can be no profit on a dead planet.  Utopia is "not-place": no-where.  Trying to achieve utopia gets you just that.  An old Jewish fellow once said, or so it is written, "for ye have the poor with ye always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good".  It is misguided to believe that manipulating them for your own cause and personal gain is doing them "good".  Taking something apart just to see how it works is only wise if that thing can once again be put back together as it was.  The GMO experiment is foolhardy in the extreme.  Perhaps a better name for humans these days is homo sapiens peurilis (feel free to correct my terrible Latin).  The beautiful thing is, we always have much to learn, and, for now at least, there is still porridge in the morning.

Mental illness or just bad manners?

Hello, how is your day going?  This is your morning transit bus speaking.  I believe when I stopped to pick you up today I was a little bit early.  Or was I a little bit late?  I really couldn't say for certain which.  Hopefully you planned for just such an inevitability with a flexible itinerary.  I should really start writing my own transit poems.  Maybe I could retire early and live off the royalties.  There must be some hippies left out there in need of affordable accommodation.  I burn "bio-fuel".  I'm green.  I'm hip.  I can get those organic mushrooms to market on time.  My third cousin Otto was almost chosen to read for the part of the VW bus in the movie Cars, which was filmed in California don't you know.  Anyway.

Back to this morning.  I saw you hesitate before climbing on board.  There was a dour, thin, pale-faced young woman standing right at the door.  You gave her time and space to exit before boarding, but when you caught her gaze enquiringly a blank and icy stare was the only thing forthcoming.  So, you squeezed past (excusing yourself, how polite), paid your fare, marvelled at my commodious interior, and took a comfortable (dare I say luxurious?) seat.  Off we went.

You probably don't think I'm watching.  I'd bet tickets to a seniors' passes you have no idea I'm sentient, but I am.  I saw you scoff at the icy lady as she continued to block the way of people entering and exiting at my front door at the next few stops.  Did you know I can read your thoughts?  I know that you almost got into a huff over her behaviour.  However, you looked out my panoramic windows at the early morning sun pouring in, and laughed it off.  What did it matter to you what she chose to do?

Now, I know that you asked that question of yourself rhetorically.  It helped you to get things into a balanced perspective, and move on.  Unfortunately, the dour and icy lady forced you to ask it of yourself again.  She had been standing up at my front, almost directly beside my driver, listening to her headphones and playing with her mobile device.  Driver was beginning to feel crowded.  She invited the lady to take a seat, and was told to get on with her job of driving.

Driver is no slouch.  She's been doing the job of directing me through the busy streets for twenty years.  She has seen it all.  Her response was to tell me to apply the brakes. I pulled over and stopped.  We gave that lady a polite talking-to and again asked her to move back or sit down.  She refused.  Driver called for back-up and told her to sit down or get off the bus.  At this point you exclaimed your displeasure at the inconvenience.  I believe you said the lady was "foolish" and "selfish".  You kept it simple: she was inconveniencing everyone and should either sit or get off.  Others weren't so kind.  It is odd and a bit disheartening how quickly the words "crazy" and "psycho" get bandied about.  She may have mental issues, but mostly her behaviour was a sign of a massively inflated ego, a desire to draw attention to herself, and a disregard for the concerns of others.  These ingredients appear in the very rich and "successful" who cut me off in their Beamers and Audis every other day.

You know what?  I'm tired of talking about her.  Before she finally exited by my hydraulic front doors she did have a nose-to-nose shouting match with a tough little lady from the Philippines, which I'd say she lost.  There was some mild applause after she left in which I noticed you saw fit to participate.  Really though, it's been a long day that started out kind of strangely, so it's time to park it.  Why give the dour and icy lady any more attention than she has already gained?  It would be nice to think that she learned something about herself from the situation.  Maybe it was a performance-art piece.  Oh well, whatever. I'm glad it's over.  See you tomorrow.

Ichthyo-sapiens.

The human sole (often written soul) is a fish that resides in the mind of homo sapiens sapiens and can sometimes not be spotted --as it is invisible-- floating just above the ground at roughly sandal-height.  It has been classified as a member of the Soleidae family, and, on the North American continent specifically, as belonging to Pleuronectidae because of its tendency to flounder there.  Though invisible, the human sole can be any colour in the spectrum between microwave (ensure it is fully defrosted first, then cook on high for about 2 aeons) to X-ray (very boney, though wonderful ground-up into fishcakes).  My own Grannie's recipe called for pan-frying with a grain of ethically mined Himalayan salt rock, but there are quite likely as many recipes for human sole as there are people to devise and prepare them.  Regardless, this elusive fish can be very difficult to catch, and even harder to kill since it is said to be immortal.

Interestingly, a pictorial representation of the creature has come to be associated with a sub-sect of the Judaic religion whose leader, one J. Christ --who may or may not have claimed to be the son of YHWH-- implored his friends and followers to become "fishers of men".  If this all sounds a little bit like cannibalism, the rest of J's story is most compelling, and may just turn out to be a plea against any such behaviour.  In any case, the crude drawing of the human sole can most often be seen plastered to the rear-end of Oldsmobiles being driven at half the posted speed limit and using the left turn-indicator when turning right on a Sunday morning.   Depictions of the creature with two feet are also extant, but harder to pin down.  The inclusion of feet may be a reference to the human sole's Prehistoric antecedent, or artistic whim:  we may never be able fully to know the whole truth.

Remember, human soles are all around us, floating about, nuzzling newborn kittens, knocking over Jenga towers.  Please watch your step.  These marvellous creatures may be so flat that they only have one side, but they can still feel pain and suffer from abuse.  Consider adopting one as your own.  For pennies a day (an invalid form of currency in most countries) you can enjoy the mind-enhancing, emotion-stabilizing effects of the human sole on your life.

So much for so much more.

It is difficult to write anything useful or interesting presently, so please stop reading at once.  It is agony writing from a position so low.  If he wore a beret he would say that it must be done 'for the love of the craft' or something, but he isn't here any longer: he's dead, and I never even met him anyway.  She looks over my shoulder sometimes and can't quite contain her surprise when something halfway decent comes of all the struggling.  I can smell the antiseptic corridors of her mind.  Somewhere beyond the bright pastel halls where the white-coats strut, there is a room.  The scent of cleaning solution fails to mask entirely the whiff of dirt, grease, and blood slithering out from the crack beneath a door marked 246-A.  Behind that door sits a large sum of money.  The door is locked.

She loses interest.  Whether this is feigned or not, I cannot tell.  Grandpa walks in stiffly.  It is difficult to recall having seen him walking about because he was usually seated and talking, often with a glass of Scotch in hand, and also because he too is dead.  His appearance is a statement that echoes in the empty vaults above: "Study your idea of another's mind as carefully as you like, but you can never know their true mind itself".

Factory farming in two easy steps.

There is a special group of human beings I know.  At one time all of us worked together on a factory-farm.  We did not raise kine, or pigs, or sheep.  Nor did we sow acres of land with one genetically modified crop.  Instead, with the aid of telephones and computers that were well out-of-date, we farmed sorrow.  We were hired by this sorrow-farm to provide the customers of large, bloated, un-feeling, and miserly corporations with answers that they did not wish to hear to questions they did not want to be asking.  Times were tough, but we found a way to stick together and laugh about things.

One of the young farm-hands who had been there longer than most of us went by the name of Fenake.  It occurred to me at some point that this was quite an odd name, so I looked it up at the urging of Jams, one of the best farmers in our clique. We found that "the internet" has an Urban Dictionary that defines it a couple of ways:

1. fenake: a male cross dresser that is too manly looking for the attempt.

    That fenake looks like a Viking warlord. That fenake reminded me of Silence of the Lambs.

2. fenake: a word that i made up when i accidentally typed the wrong word in the search bar [sic].

    I accidentally typed fenake instead of female.

Both seem to capture what is essential about Fenake, especially the first, since his hair is long, blonde, and beautiful.  However, there is a sister Fenake as well, who greatly enjoys slurpees.  It seems only fair that one of the definitions apply to she for whom Jams lusts endlessly.  The latter definition seems to fit her best, so Fenake (masculine) has been allotted the former.

It is many moons since our last harvest, and we have gone our separate ways, but the legend of the Fenake and his sister lives on in our hearts.  Rbrty yimr I svvifrnyslly, um…. Every time I accidentally start typing with my fingers in the wrong spot, she haunts me.  Every time I see an Icelandic man from behind and mistake him for her, I think of him.  That's about it really.  That's all I wanted to say.  Bye for now, and stay warm.  The city I inhabit recently experienced colder temperatures than Mars.  It feels like home.

Zmz