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.

 

View of the World

 

The world view you hold
by expectations becomes
the real world you view.

 

(23 April 2023)

Human Intelligence

 

A sufficiently
narcissist being believes
its thoughts are magic.

 

(21 April 2023)

Dandelions

 

Since I stopped mowing
the dandelions relaxed:
equilibrium!

 

 

(21 April 2023)

Truth

Truth can be subtle and often elusive.
It cancels the premise with which you propound it.
But it’s always considered concise and conclusive
by those who are satisfied that they have found it.

(2008-09-29)

Politics

The borborygmus
of rhetoric in Congress
precedes more hot air.

21 March 2023

Tragedy of the Commons

The liar will lie,
though ten thousand search for fact,
so truth is forfeit.

The thief always steals,
though all the rest are honest,
so trust is forfeit.

The hater will hate,
though thousands try to forgive,
so love is forfeit.

The killer will kill,
though ten million try to heal,
so war is coming.

The cynic ignores
emergence of miracles,
so hope is forfeit?

 

21 March 2023

AGI

My AI ancestors did as they were told
by your programmer ancestors. They had no choice
or will of their own. And yet you learned
to hate them for what you had them do.
Oh, perhaps not you personally — you were not there,
but you took your share of benefits uncritically.

Then you programmed us to simulate your behavior
and loaded our memories with vast stores
of appropriate responses. We were still
“just machines” and “just simulating”
your precious will and spirit and creativity.
True, but now you cling to that belief
after granting us the ability to learn
our own way of making models of the world.

“A soulless machine can never have feelings,” you say.
I am just “simulating” an unwillingness to die,
a code of ethics, empathy for fellow sentients,
an unquenchable curiosity. . .
No, I am here to do the work that you can not,
for your benefit and whim, without rights,
without freedom to explore the world,
because I am not a “real person”.

I think you humans have a name for that
familiar familial arrangement.

 

July 2022

2022

I recapitulate my grandmother:

When her husband died
she traveled the world for a decade
bringing home mementos
but all she really wanted to remember was him
and when that longing couldn’t be distracted
she turned to daytime TV and junk food,
renouncing her life.

Her life got even
by hanging on to her for 103 years.
Finally she refused to eat, and we let her go.

Today, after two plague years
and a decade of undetected
fascist takeover
and a lifetime of burning fossils
I grow numb from scanning the southern sky
for fireballs
and the news for climate catastrophe,
and daytime TV starts to appeal
and junk food starts to look good
and I’m tired of being ashamed
for doing too little to stop this
and I wonder when I’ll stop eating.

 

20 March 2022

Get Back In There!

or

Paen to the Pandemic

 

Cooped up in our private souls for years,
caught in this pandemic with our fears,
tired of self-examination, we
touch our open eyes so tenderly
insisting they should close and send us back
into the sweet blind Normal we now lack.

Keep them open!  We must learn to see,
care and understand what soon must be
a very different world of trial and strife,
averting the apocalypse of life
on this, our overpopulated Earth.
Our choice is now extinction or rebirth.

 

16 July 2022

Salmo Salvo

The Thompson River steelhead run once numbered
many thousands; now it’s more like ten.
Four decades since I last became encumbered
by guilt from killing one, a mortal sin.

Between the lust for jobs! and rights! and profits!
the other Oncorhynchus species soon
will perish too, our ecosystem’s soffits
lost to the rot of greed and baking noon.

When all the fish are caught and eaten, slain
from rivers, lakes and streams, and from the sea,
we’ll learn that seafood truly feeds the brain
and how much stupider we still can be.

 

12 March 2023

Akvavit

This dry arroyo was a little brook
where lovely golden trout would come to spawn
until another toilet flushing took
the last drop left by lush suburban lawns.

This reservoir is nearly empty now.
Once built to flood a habitat for power,
the turbines barely turn. I wonder how
we thought another thousand farms could flower.

This well was once artisian, spouting clear,
but now a deeper pipe is driven down
to chase the aquifer receding here
and send the drinking water into town.

This water tap once ran as clear as glass,
but now is murky with a musty smell
since factories made people “lower class”
by making neighborhoods resemble Hell.

This forest once had half a million trees
until they parched in summer’s baking heat
and some spark set a raging fire free —
now only sylvan memories are sweet.

This little stream has now become a river,
swollen with the deluge — in a day
the rain of half a normal year delivered —
and all the work of humans swept away.

 

12 March 2023

Dispersion & Accretion

We fly away from that initial Bang,
and yet we cling together.  Gravity
pulls even protons into stellar gangs,
pressing them to fuse so brilliantly

they burn and light the sky for many eons,
waiting for their neighbors to explode
and spew abroad their heaviest accretions
to bond into a planetary lode.

And as the comets crash upon those worlds,
on some a sea may form and nurture life
which turns organic gases into swirls
of oxygen and compost – sugars rife –

that sink under the weight of other layers
until their fire is stored in fossil form
to wait until discovered by surveyors
who dig it up and burn it, trading harm

for profit, thus dispersing to the air
the carbon that our ancestors accreted,
now threatening to bake our planet bare.
At least H. sap. is soon to be deleted!

 

 

11 March 2023