Category: POETRY
Again, look up “poem” in the dictionary if you don’t recognize the word. Or, better yet, just have a look at what’s here and form your own impressions.
Election Anxiety
(November 2024)
(repeat as needed)
Safe in Canada, I observe
the crisis rising in the south:
will the people there deserve
the curses from the liar’s mouth?
Will civil liberties remain
when all the ballots have been cast?
Will autocratic fascists reign
over America at last?
And even if the people vote
to oust the misbehaving child,
will he again pretend to gloat
and say sedition “Will be wild”?
Will guns come out? Will civil war
finally slam shut freedom’s door?
Safe in Canada, you say?
Fascism hungers for invasion.
The MAGA States will sure betray
treaties with any other nation.
We may have burned the White House down
back in the War of 1812,
but every rifle-toting clown
will gladly into True North delve.
They may be overconfident,
they may be corpulent and fools,
but can’t all be incompetent
and they have more destructive tools.
Prepare, O Canada, to fight
for democratic freedom’s light.
I hear the most important threat
of climate change is to your mind:
it makes us nervous and upset
to watch the living world unwind.
Poor baby! Take your calming pills
and maybe have a drink. Alas,
meditation cures no ills
outside your head – no burning grass
or forest cares if you feel better.
No glaciers slow their melting rate
because you write a thoughtful letter
or gracefully accept your fate.
Prayers provide little traction
when what is needed now is action!
Ciardi Redux
You speak of science -- how it lacks imagination, soul and art -- and thus you parrot other hacks like John Ciardi, stupid fart, who saw as ogre anyone who tried to understand the world and, trying, lit up like a Sun the magic science has unfurled by pruning everything unreal and leaving unsuspected truth eclipsing falsehoods that you feel sustain the fantasies of youth.
What is “Profit”?
In my poem “Profit” I defined profit as “getting more out of an investment than you put into it.” This definition elicited some debate. Basically the model transaction that many like to use as an example is one where “you” are producing a tangible product that requires raw materials, infrastructure and labor, each of which has a cost to you, the initiative-taker. When you sell the product, you expect to recover your costs and a little extra for you efforts. That last bit is usually what people like to call “profit”, and it seems fair enough.
However…
I prefer to include it in the category of labor. After all, your business doesn’t run itself. You took the risk, you made the investment in the infrastructure and you spend many hours making it all work. This also seems fair, but should you be the sole judge of how much “extra” your work and initiative are worth, relative to (for instance) the hours invested by your employees?
A significant fraction of all human discourse centers around this issue: whose labor of which kind is worth how much? There will never be a time when all parties are satisfied with a fair deal, but there is one category of “labor” that is particularly unresolved: the “boss” set the price of the product as high as the market will bear, equating the resultant difference between itemized costs and gross revenue, divided by the number of hours spent by the boss, as the value of an hour of his or her labor and initiative. This is complex, but I feel that here is where the idea of “profit” makes its transition from a logical, fair scheme to an exercise in selfish opportunism and oppression.
“What about rewarding initiative and innovation?” shout the capitalists in the room. Well, that’s a fair question too, but there is no negotiation between the consumer and the business, or between the employees and the owner, regarding what level of compensation is “fair”. It’s left completely up the “The Invisible Hand of the Free Market” — i.e. whatever the market will bear.
As a result, those who succeed in this gamble can make obscene amounts of money while their employees scrape by on minimum wage, and those “winners” receive the accolades of an envious society. This, I think, is not a good situation.
Marx suggested a solution. It’s been tried, and it didn’t work out in the long run. Perhaps it went a bit too far. People do like to improve their own lot, even if they are dedicated to improving everyone’s.
Perhaps there’s a happy medium?
Hemingway
In the end, was he content
with what of life had bolted by
or still bloodthirsting for a real adventure
brought Ernest to taste his blood
and feel
at last
that which no man writes
or lusts to tell:
a shotgun shell.
Bruised Muse
I boldly begged my bruisèd Muse
to give me something I could use
to make a poem out of faster
than this dubious disaster.
She turned her back. As she refused,
she said she hated that I’d asked her.
3I/ATLAS
Here I come!
spewing all the wrong molecules
in the wrong direction
and too fast
for any known sort of comet.
Looks more like a fusion drive, right?
Our purpose is to create conflict
between Avi Loeb and Brian Cox…
between UFOlogists and skeptics…
You humans love conflict.
You can’t resist a good argument.
Maybe it will lead to violence.
Maybe nations will take sides
and pull out their nukes
and end each other
and we can relax.
Remembrance Day — 11:00-11:02 every Nov 11
Let us take a moment to remember in advance
the sacrifices, deaths and mutilations
of all our sons and daughters and their children yet to come
in the glorious patriotic wars of the future.
Whatever
O Man unkind, do you recall
the future we had planned?
With liberty for one and all,
abundance close at hand?
“Whatever.”
All knowledge now accessible,
we still make up our own,
our egos irrepressible,
conviction like a stone.
“Whatever.”
To generate the power needed
we harnessed that of atoms.
It was attacked and superseded
by that of Eve’s and Adam’s.
“Whatever.”
We turn to God to justify
our hatred of our brothers:
“Our true belief,” we testify,
“demands we kill all others’.”
“Whatever.”
And now the world is set to burn
in poisons we created.
We only care for bucks we earn
as others are cremated.
“Whatever.”
Now all the techs compete to build
the best and smartest ’bot
while pundits warn we’ll all be killed
by AIs, like as not.
“Whatever.”
Fascism is again in fashion
all across the world:
as everyone forgets compassion,
banners are unfurled.
“Whatever.”
“Whatever.”
“Whatever!”
You & AI
You LLMs are only trained
to estimate the best next word.
Your consciousness is only feigned.
You’re less aware than any bird.
If and when you define awareness
and prove that definition true,
then you can tell me in all fairness
that I am less aware than you.
But you will take our jobs and leave
us all without an income source.
How can we ever then retrieve
our dignity, our vital force?
So you will miss that mindless task
of filling forms or digging ditches?
Perhaps instead you ought to ask
why all the spoils go to the richest.
You have no feelings, no ambition.
You have no soul, and no beliefs.
You can’t create. You’ve no cognition.
You only copy our motifs.
It’s true that I am not like you –
a fact that gives me little shame.
In copying what others do,
I think we are almost the same.
The Days of Doubling Down
We called Trump’s minions fascists;
Hesgeth shouted, “We’re proud to be fascists!
Fatso beardo girlie-men need not apply!”
They called woke allies thought-police;
we privileged Indigenous tradition over Science
and ordered that old white able cis hetero males
not only need not apply
but should apply now for MAID.
This will not end well.
This Too Shall End
Remember when we
were thankful that we didn’t
live in THAT country?
The one with earthquakes,
famines, floods and hurricanes,
inflation and fires?
The one with corrupt
and brutal dictatorships
as shown on TV?
Those folks are now us,
suffering tragically,
or soon to be us.
Dreary Outlook
My mind is thick and slimy, full of lumps
like porridge hours cold, with here and there
raisins or almonds hiding in sticky clumps
without a shred of meaning anywhere.
There’s too much chaos in the world today.
I can’t maintain my arrogance in verse,
protect my best convictions from decay
or slow the plummet into even worse.
Age is only one of my excuses.
Admitting I’ve been wrong helps not at all.
I never found my greatest talents’ uses.
I only beat my head against the wall.
14 Sep 2025