Modern Shakespeare: a birthday poem 20161026

Shakespeare would have no place in the modern world.  Will would be consider a creeper.  Expressing love, professing adoration is icky stalker go away.  I don’t know you that well, maybe after sex, emptied lattes, and months of ritualized desensitization then maybe a molecule of emotion might surface, until then I don’t have time for your drama Bob.  Poet’s hearts are heavy, weighted with witnessing the insides of everyone encountered.  The modern severed the necessity of intimacy for connection.  We can text, email, or post on a website.  Even the secondary sensorial paradigm of talking on the telephone is considered too much of an intrusion or investment to respond. 

To speak in person or dare convey inspiration of a muse in the loftiness of art or love is to be called a fool by a sea of digital cynics and cast as obsessive or fixated when one is engaged in a moment not beholden to the mythology of love as control or shackle, but as wing and liberation from the gravity of judgment piloting the ethereal unknown of possibility.  We become open like darkness inspired in the fragrance of romance to pen wafting ambrosia.  Though we do not smell, we feel and be in thy luscious curl making words that quench the soul and damn the tide to rise and state I hath lived.  I hath sensed beauty and grace and this day thy tiny hamlet quaked, a flower bloomed so that one cannot help imbibe, to witness a painted sky and cracking youth’s wonder with a savored tongue, this sight, this taste, thy lovely wing hath lifted me.

We are our universal ecstatic ebullition exploding into the infinite. We become detailed in the tongue of poets riding mathematics beyond normal language.  To do so is to stare into stars fissuring the commotion of the herd into one and another fused in presence.  To attempt to describe peering into such a vision requires a Shakespearean tongue, to be willing to be misunderstood and dare labeled fool.  For what is love if not foolish?  For what is love if not madness?  To make sense of these gallops of time I dare say laugh, laugh into that sun intrepid.  For we are all but rays of varied vibration connecting in a gallery of light.  Thy most gorgeous wave’s fruition is love.

Shakespeare’s sonnets extend salvos of romantic letters that reek of desperation if that is how one perceives the stanzas in iPhone light.  A human says what he feels in his being and does not apologize for coming from a place of awe and hunger for the force above all in this universe: love.  What a sin it has become to be a romantic or to be enraptured in the fancy of coquettish poetry, to fly sonnets with reckless hope as if love is an affliction of the mad, drunk in lust or illusion of who a person is.  The sterile doctrine of text messages and digital representation of humans clogging libidinous excitation and romance into microchips and source code!  

Dare worse the trumpery of Trumps, patriarchal grab hands salting the garden with rapacious spades.  Thy flower wilted bludgeoned in wrath of Rohypnol, tic-tacs, and thieving palms.  Years of learning how to take back taken space and a poet speaks and stem cowers for fear of a honeyed tongue so that romance sounds like piracy.  To stand this commemoration of my exit from mother's womb shared thirty years from our soon to be woman president's day of birth.  Let thy gardens castigate these wolves of men which hath made poetry a dead thing.  Let love in sweetness be not the troll's tooth behind mine nectar.  For be pure seed for pure fire.  

Enflame dear poetry and light this world in conflagration for love’s majesty!  Be in a moment and bear a breast wide to the needle of thy judgment.  Spear the ignominy of adoration for pastoral beauty.  Tis a goddess about spinning life in mortal coil.  To be but witness to such grace one must speak, one must act and be made alive to dance in poetry.  One will not shutter into the conformity of metallic tow.  One will burn!  Burn a lover’s gravity hurling one’s self into the atmosphere of beauty, but to bear witness in thy lovely fire.  Tis this and nothing else; the remainder laid cinders.  Fire hath devoured in such luscious heat.  Thy love in enflamed bloom!

In the Limens Between

Default settings are difficult to disrupt, the autopilot nature of being a person

of how to respond or move forward, process, close the eyes and go, no yes or no,

just floating in a stream of not trying to be anybody’s possession,

maybe an indulgence for a taste wafting curiosity, siren songs, and liquid sea salt,

wondering maybe and declination, and who knows and how it goes,

in the remote contraction of fear and tight in that pit of personal history

like a vault of interest and meaningful revelations across whiskey and a drum beat

next to blue eyes, midnights, rock and roll, and losing uptight,

then maybe the current tastes differently with the age of the batch,

the barrel rolled and timing matched to a moment of staring

across a neutral ground of motions and construction sounds;

what do you want; what do you need;

these sunrises counting down to boredom and indifference,

explosions and the decisions that sit with one night after night in an empty pillow to the right

staring up at a white ceiling under that infinite possibility darkness into space

and you say why not now, why not ask questions and laugh,

because we are all afraid and the chances of anything working with anyone are miniscule,

and most people are horrendously incompatible mathematics spread on bedroom table puzzles

of run away so fast or freaking out the thought of personal time taken away and having to explain

what one really wants and risked being summed up by a statement,

encapsulated in a microcosm, backing one’s self into a cul-de-sac of awkward

and penance for ideas one should not question or speak and one does for why like a flare

from that spark of wonder in the heart of the old romantics and questioning what life is

this journey and the power of people gone atomic, nuclear fuel

radiating in a way that melts the hardness commercial life paints on you from the get-go,

you fight noticing or commenting or asking odd questions about knowing or guessing, pondering, and assumption

in the limens between how any one person can infer who another is in these circus acts of perception and

tight-roping for the crowd basic and true step toes in front of one foot hearing nothing up on that wire

but the beat of the universe inside one’s self emanating feeling like this is why I am here

to take chances and be in this, bear this energy like a peeled chest cavity blasting light

in routine actions of presence of participating, noticing, and creating with the vulnerability

of a human heart and body capable of plummeting off this sky wire with the bonfires below

blazing about what it means to be noticed or to notice another human being

stating I think I see you, rays of you and maybe that is where my words will truncate

in that chalky talk of trying to compliment someone post declination

To offer speech like oil slick pouring onto one’s feet trying not to 

Understanding the Rise of Trump

Understanding the rise of Trump is about mathematics.  This article outlines the disaffection of poor rural white America rallying around a loudmouthed asshole like a brick through a window.  Those are outcomes to an engineered American aversion to mathematics, intellectualism, and investigation into systematic correlations.  Neoliberalism is subject to the mathematics of space on the planet, resources for habitat and survival of an extrapolating human population where capitalist firms consolidate power into under-regulated gargantuan global behemoths who control governments, squash competition, answer only to money, and market the public to vote and choose paths against the interest of the masses. 

The reason the factory shut down, Bobby died in Iraq, the shrimp are mucked in oil, minimum wage is not a living wage, American healthcare is the most economically inefficient on the planet, educators are undermined, the drug war creates neo-plantations in the prison industrial complex, Christian fundamentalism acts like a form of American Taliban against women’s health, social assistance, sexuality, addressing climate change, and evolution is very much related to how a man like Trump brags about not paying taxes and people applaud him as an outsider coming out and saying it.  Trump supports know something is wrong, but failed math class like almost every voter in America voting for every major presidential candidate Democrat or Republican since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 

Under Eisenhower after Truman, Christianity was merged with capitalism in the 1950’s.  Richard Nixon was vice president.  Billy Graham was pivotal.  The path of business interests, military dominance, and the pulpit was a trinity of marketing to take the technological advances of the post WWII era and create profit machines where the mathematics led to prosperity based on demand, available resources, population, and an American empire in a position of strength over a war-ravaged Europe and Southeast Asia using the Soviet Union as a counterweight.  In the modern era the factories that built that empire seek lowest common denominator global labor outside the United States and a man like Trump says he will fix everything after benefiting from the system his entire life.  Trump was born in 1946.  To think Trump will make America great again requires cognitive dissonance of what a white Christian heterosexual cisgender male American 1950’s was.  Add wealth from the cradle and you have Trump. 

Trade agreements, anti-labor union, socialism equals atheism equals un-America dogma, the myth of white supremacy who cares about poor brown civilians in foreign counties subject to American bombs or energy or drug policies, repression of what slavery and indigenous American genocide were, who cares about where what is on the shelf at Walmart comes from or who was involved in its production or if they earn a living wage or its environmental impact, who notices the revenue missing from the tax coffers to pay the teacher, police officer, or doctor because of a tax deduction for a wealthy individual or firm, who cares about a worker’s lower wage because management and stockholders are keeping the difference and forcing taxpayers to supplement living wages because who wants to do the math? 

Clinton, her husband, and Obama are neoliberals as well.  Yes, there is less racism, sexism, homophobia, better tax policy, but at the end of the day the record shows when in office: pro trade deals, big military, still bombing, deporting, the health industry is still Wall Street driven, and identity politics, platitudes, and patronage abound.  The roots of what America is are founded in genocide, economic exploitation, and marketing.  We vote for this.  The Democrats are a domestic counterweight to the Republicans like the Soviets in the cold war.  Nationalism, partisanship, and any group think is a lie.  There are only humans and our volition in a passive democracy planted and let rot through apathy.  Democracy is organic and a shift towards Democratic socialist policies represented in the Sanders campaign resonated with so many Americans and was sabotaged by the Democratic Party in part because of the neoliberal root in the one-party system America has chosen.  The better path is to change the parties and that is what Trump and Sanders are.

Just like the Roman empire before it the mathematics reach a breaking point.  That is where we are because the Earth is only is so big, to fit so many people, with so many natural resources in reserve to deplete at such rates for so long before there is no water in the lake to drink.  This is our species.  If you think this election is just about Trump you really don’t understand why he is so popular. 

If you think Democratic socialist ideas like a global tax on capital, universal healthcare, addressing systematic racism in the prison industrial complex, decreasing the resources invested in the military industrial complex, ending the drug war on sun-based drugs to treat addiction as a medical problem, implementing parental leave, gender wage equity, human rights activism, changing monetary policy to decrease the power of the Federal Reserve and Wall Street, changing the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Energy towards sustainability of humanity on Earth before corporate profits are unaffordable pipedream into the modern culture of debt then you have to do the math to understand where the money is and how it got there.  When you do that you will see Neoliberal policies at the throne.   

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about_p2/

Three fictional

I thought about the internet participation project of three fictional characters I identified.  I thought characters in books and films were best suited.  Edmund Dantes from The Count of Monte Cristo, Andy Dufresne from Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, and Severus Snape from the Harry Potter stories.

Maybe it feels a bit linear of the core of where I am at in the current season of my life reflecting on the predecessors.  Each character bears secrets and is wrongly accused, imprisoned, imperfect, struggling the bigger picture and ultimately a man who has lost even the idea of love in a woman who is either murdered or converted into a stranger.  These are ideas in my story that are central to fuel my art.  I can relate to their fictional portrayals in ways that are my most powerful tinder. 

Dantes is a simple man of faith on the verge of all his dreams caught into a web of politics.  He is betrayed into the Chateau D’if made to awaken with the Abbe to understand the world he lives.  There is a path of revenge found hollow and ultimately in the novel he does not live out his days with Mercedes.  There are parts of me that resent and relish the lie of the movie version, how the public would better taste love eternal, but nothing in reality reflects this notion.  There is darkness and acceptance, struggles of faith and power that are in the pith.  Dantes journey of faith is feeling forsaken, lost, wanting answers and never finding anything but the minds of other humans in books and a path farther into the openness of that darkness away from the definitive. 

In Dufresne you have a bit of the professional accountant in me of trying to talk sense and details into the face of a brute on the roof.  Dufresne’s relationship with the law feels kindred to mine with the corporate realm.  What is legal and what is right are separate brothers.  The world is madness and we contort ourselves to fit inside it.  I appreciate Dufresne’s planning the arc of a man of libraries and earthen rocks.  The idea of a duality in identities appears in all the characters of what the public may think and who a person is inside, judged and there is nothing to say to defend oneself, a human simply must be.  The risk of becoming the evil that condemns a person is present.  The lines within a person are constantly tested, blurred, and ultimately an act of balance.

Snape is a secret keeper, pledged into a dual life at the loss of an unrequited love.  There is a psychological illness in Snape’s behavior.  He was the pariah of the schoolyard teased, intelligent, finding his own magic spurned into darkness and an inability to let go and respect himself enough to learn how to un-love a person.  Un-loving a person is an act of will, to divest energy and in this sense Snape’s confliction breathes in his inability to disconnect wishing to protect and harm the son of the woman he believed he loved always and the man who spawned him.  There is such madness in Snape's nobility and sickness. 

There is also a measure of digesting loving a person in a different way than ownership or having to be with them and being happy for them for having the person they love who is not you in their life.  In my own experience I have found gardens to love two women in this genuine separate way with whom I know I cannot and do not wish to be with in the traditional couplehood form of love.  Our paths are not meant to diverge in order that we each can be the unique human we need to be.  Understanding this is one of the highest forms of love I can imagine.  

One comprehends that love is not finite.  Love is not restrained within a contract or contextual prism.  Love is recognition of the interconnected whole within a being, another, the self, a former or current lover, a child, a stranger, or a friend.  This is all love is.  The remainder are shells of ego applied and layered to appease societal navigation and the genetic perpetuation drive.  The compulsion of gametes is hormonal biological force.  Love transcends the body into a dimension beyond our traditional sensorial paradigms and evokes the interdimensional mathematics of what existence is.  

There is no limit of energy, of what can flow through us, there is only what we block through attempts to control an idea of love balancing within the self.  Love balances in the whole of the universe, not the individual, to attempt otherwise produces excessive entropy that destroys human relationships. In this love permeates through pain.  People we love hurt us, a potential most deep.  In this we often compute how if this person hurt me in this way that I should not love.  I will flip a switch.  I will stop, but love is not allowing a person to do whatever they wish to you as an individual.  One can love and say,"No, this behavior is unacceptable."  We can no longer continue this other behavior because of choices a beloved has made, yet we still can love this other.  We may never see them again, but we can still love them in a way that recognizes the segmentation between social arenas, the body, and the divinity in the mass and energy we are independent of geometric tangible perceptions.  

When we simply love a person for who they are flawed and beautiful, not because of what they give us, but seeing the divinity of the universe inside them and cherishing that spark and force for the moments that energy affected our path, this is love.  One is forever grateful or bitter or stoned in prison for how one accepts this reality.  I would like to believe Snape loved Lily this way and not obsession or clutching, but with open hands in appreciation for the glow of a young girl sitting by a young school boy in the grass letting him know it was ok to be who he is.   

I can identify with Snape's isolation in not offering an explanation, to do what needs doing, which was for the greater good through an act of darkness.  He had to protect the child for slaughter at the proper time.  He had to kill Dumbledore. The confliction of these acts are carried in Snape.  We are creatures of dark and light, evil and good, and to paint a human as absolute in one derivation is falsehood. 

Maybe there is an old Catholic whisper in atheist me that seeks martyrdom, the masochist in a man who struggles with figuring out how to ever open his heart again.  How do you want love over alone; they both hurt.  A person wants to be witnessed, the seed of emotion and identity are wrapped in false packaging of past.  Past is a narrative, whispers by a burning fire, smoke drifting away one keeps conjuring into tales of now on the canvas of revolving moons. 

Dantes, Dufresne, and Snape struggle with self-acceptance in prisons and contracts of principle.  None are perfect, each trying to escape from those prisons in the self only finding more questions.  



 

A Tone in Singularity 20161008

Our choices float logs into the media stream in a letter box stuffed with coupons and credit card applications.  What we click on or focus for how many ticks in a twenty four hour cycle.  The mirage is intentional of painted clowns in masks, orange makeup, and power suits.  We herd reluctant sheep towards wolves we now spout as single alternative saviors bequeathing volition to systematic maze running.  We try to see each other through videos and hear each other through texts.  We carry that fuzzy distance of better not speak on that level of too-human of noticing what is beneath the patterns. 

The sexism grab the pussy is a planted landmine long ago for an intentional news cycle before this second presidential debate on Sunday.  Could you not see the marketing coming America; this entire charade of neo-liberal storylines and how can we get the herd to behave.  There is barely any talk of banking, healthcare, wage-slavery, drone-bombs, systematic racism, lowest-common denominator global labor, or climate change on a detailed mathmatically based policy debate.  No, we have grab her by the pussy.

We ignore the real political issues to debate that effect the basic living of humans across this planet.  Understanding the path of engorged hurricanes across former slave colonies ravaged by earthquake and storm in a blanket of a black island and white streaks evacuating from a U.S. Eastern coastline used as port from Africa.  The costs of two degrees and four of global temperature rise in oceanaic energy.  How we are not independent of the mathematics.  What we purchase, click-on, support, eat, burn-fuel for, love with, acknowledge with what choices we are willing to make. 

I listened to Cuban pianist Ernan Lopez-Nussa at the Jazz and Heritage Center on Rampart Street last night.  He was accompanied by members of Preservation Hall.  Ukulele, tuba, clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, and bongo drums fused New Orleans and Havana.  Only in New Orleans would this have no price of admission but consciousness.

I closed my eyes in a swirl of rhythms and scales meditating standing dead center in the rear of the hall next to a fellow poet.  There are visions inside us of what reality actually is inside the mathematics of the dimensions beyond the surface which is so obsessed with genetic procreation, power, and fear.  We can feel drum and the soft key of fingers triggering chords into what we are.  We begin to open our hearts after tragedies, of being told to stay quiet, to not be anywhere but in the digital idea of a human being hidden under rubble and cholera, minivans piloting west out of harm’s way with children strapped in and afraid.  The electricity we use and react with lack of access for a week, for a year. 

I hear you.  I see you.  I am imperfect.  I feel the waters rising.  I am offering my payment of attention to the ferryman hoping we will find passage together for neither of us can do this alone.  There is a sound we are making, a tone in singularity where all of this finds balance, not in the chest of you or me or any individual, but in the collective universe, let us sing our part, we players brave. 

Some days 20161001

Some days just grip you in a dastardly pinch of inertia.  You see the arc of months plowing into the present moment, your body careening into the tension of the recycling malaise that has become customary, you seize for therapy or some inserted stimuli to shock the system, the energetic charge of the universe to beg collision, to force a delta into the equation and rewire the mathematics for altered output.  The grind of this is it; all there is, some cliché impasse of melted existential crayons creamed in commute hours, keyboard punches, a war within your body, and the echoing silence mitigating by pet turtles that won’t eat their dried shrimp, perch hibernated drying waiting for the season to shift before feet or beak find energy to bite.  The toothless quill to mouth animal or dare sun, just phone calls to therapists that go to voicemail and computer hard drives dead with files wiped, errors in programming of knowing one should want to plug in or get out and one eyes the collision, fixates on the head through the windshield, fearing more the idea that the machine will reboot, not cease, and waking up to more beeping and some asshole with a savior complex spouting lies about better and regret.  There is something naked in the numb gangly grip of being pulled down to the trench of drowning while hibernating, of taking the secrets one keeps and laughing about who gives a fuck about truth or knowledge or stories in a burnt forest.  The days bleed together like match sticks seeing the charcoal gray and black smoldering in traffic and empty living rooms, heating up food cooked once a week in mass to avoid having to realize one needs to eat, just facilitate the mandatory survival pellet and turn the sensorial intake into a surrogate dream of internet, movie, book, or written page tasting the dirt of art fecund, chalky, and blasphemous.  That the art is tears and the street is tears.  It all hurts.  The pain of a mirror and walrus mouth and tasting words that sound like gibberish and participating in conversations like bullets, just swallowing pharmaceutical bloody valentines of arsenic and dried lavender and orchid petals, something grown and died and would kill you if it could and that is at least something other than indifference.