Here's a line in the sand:
surf breaking there, here shifting strand.
Out there swells planetary ocean;
it rolls in with universal motion.
This continent begins here, between my toes
with little grains that stretch to grandiose shows:
mountains untamed beyond cultivated grass,
miniscule creatures in habitats vast.
Who formed this strand I think I know;
It wasn't Michelangelo. No,
it wasn't Newton or Sagan or Copernicus.
'Though they played their part to show us
the dynamics of this present shifting locus,
it's no result of human focus.
Nor do our carbon-laden spewings
amount to any significant doings.
Our refuse is but momentary trash
sliding up on shores of civilizations past;
it comes, it goes, but no one knows
what bosons do beneath atomic shows.
If we think it's in our power
to determine planet emissions of any given hour,
then I've got some beachfront land to sell you
in Arizona; here, let me tell you.
CR, with new novel, Smoke, soon
Saturday, March 1, 2014
Saturday, February 15, 2014
Roomey's Crisis Critter
Roomey is a zookeeper; a global caretaker is he,
with his flockey herd of critters, the endangered managerie.
He tends glazeebos, ampheebos, orangoupangs and slangs,
while feeding facecub pups and reptilimups, doozyewes and falangs.
One day he had a scare event, urgent animal alert,
when he found his biggy globelephant flailing in the dirt.
So he called in a panel of pakkidharmologists for their expert opinions
as to how this mammouth mammalian crisis could strike down the flappy-eared minions.
The first 'xpert said I believe we have here a globel problem of elephantal proportions,
with overextended ears, trunkated dysfunctions, and pakkidharmal distortions.
The next guy grabbed our pakkidharmal hunk's trunk,
proclaimed this big critter's really in a funk,
asked how this catastrophe could have struck, who'd have thunk?
I think our globelephant is sunk!
The third 'xpert held the critter's ears.
"Oh my!" he cried. The core data confirms our worsest fears.
This mammal's flappy ears have been caught up in the gears
of all our das kapital industrial carbon-spewing years.
Authority number four stroked the mammoth critter's world-class tusk.
Methinks this overprized trophy's been the object of some rapacious hunters' lust.
It's time to save globelephant-- We must!
To prevent it getting caught in carbon dust.
The next pakkidharmologist grabbed that globel animal's legs.
There oughta be a law! he said. What we need are more strong regs!
If we're gonna arrest this sixth extinction, we really gots to peg
this carbon contagion down; coal and oil and gas spews out emissionary dregs!
Now the next guy took up the matter of globelephant's long tail.
I do believe this monster's like a rope, said he. It keeps us tied to stinkin' gas, oil shale.
Now the climate's waggin' us all around with floods and snows and what the hail.
If we don't put a stop to this dirty carbonous gale, the whole frackin' planet's gonna fail!
Here we stand beneath biggy globelephant's vast belly.
Now something's dropping from behind, something rather smelly.
Better turn on the tube, the phone or web, to view it on the telly,
where we learn at last the sky's been fallen, our true foundations turned to jelly.
Have a Smoke
with his flockey herd of critters, the endangered managerie.
He tends glazeebos, ampheebos, orangoupangs and slangs,
while feeding facecub pups and reptilimups, doozyewes and falangs.
One day he had a scare event, urgent animal alert,
when he found his biggy globelephant flailing in the dirt.
So he called in a panel of pakkidharmologists for their expert opinions
as to how this mammouth mammalian crisis could strike down the flappy-eared minions.
The first 'xpert said I believe we have here a globel problem of elephantal proportions,
with overextended ears, trunkated dysfunctions, and pakkidharmal distortions.
The next guy grabbed our pakkidharmal hunk's trunk,
proclaimed this big critter's really in a funk,
asked how this catastrophe could have struck, who'd have thunk?
I think our globelephant is sunk!
The third 'xpert held the critter's ears.
"Oh my!" he cried. The core data confirms our worsest fears.
This mammal's flappy ears have been caught up in the gears
of all our das kapital industrial carbon-spewing years.
Authority number four stroked the mammoth critter's world-class tusk.
Methinks this overprized trophy's been the object of some rapacious hunters' lust.
It's time to save globelephant-- We must!
To prevent it getting caught in carbon dust.
The next pakkidharmologist grabbed that globel animal's legs.
There oughta be a law! he said. What we need are more strong regs!
If we're gonna arrest this sixth extinction, we really gots to peg
this carbon contagion down; coal and oil and gas spews out emissionary dregs!
Now the next guy took up the matter of globelephant's long tail.
I do believe this monster's like a rope, said he. It keeps us tied to stinkin' gas, oil shale.
Now the climate's waggin' us all around with floods and snows and what the hail.
If we don't put a stop to this dirty carbonous gale, the whole frackin' planet's gonna fail!
Here we stand beneath biggy globelephant's vast belly.
Now something's dropping from behind, something rather smelly.
Better turn on the tube, the phone or web, to view it on the telly,
where we learn at last the sky's been fallen, our true foundations turned to jelly.
Have a Smoke
Sunday, February 9, 2014
Jesus quotes often overlooked, here reconsidered:
He said:
~ " Isn't it written in the scriptures that 'my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples?' But you are making it a robbers's den."
Consider this: What if we applied his admonition to the world, generally, not just the "house of God" or religious institutions?
~ " The Spirit of the Lord is upon me . . . to set free those who are oppressed."
Think about it: Are you oppressed? If so, in what way? Or, are you, perhaps, an oppressor?
~ " The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit."
Contemplate: Do you know who, or what, is this Spirit? Or are you clueless? Is the answer just, for you, "blowin' in the wind?"
~ " To the person who overcomes . . . I will give a white stone, and a new name written on the stone which no one knows but the one who receives it."
Meditate: Would you want a new identity, or are content with the one you've got now?
~ " Isn't it written in the scriptures that 'my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples?' But you are making it a robbers's den."
Consider this: What if we applied his admonition to the world, generally, not just the "house of God" or religious institutions?
~ " The Spirit of the Lord is upon me . . . to set free those who are oppressed."
Think about it: Are you oppressed? If so, in what way? Or, are you, perhaps, an oppressor?
~ " The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit."
Contemplate: Do you know who, or what, is this Spirit? Or are you clueless? Is the answer just, for you, "blowin' in the wind?"
~ " To the person who overcomes . . . I will give a white stone, and a new name written on the stone which no one knows but the one who receives it."
Meditate: Would you want a new identity, or are content with the one you've got now?
Saturday, January 25, 2014
The "class" thing
I am an American, a southerner, college-educated working fellow, married with three grown, and reasonably happy. I love my wife and I love my life. I am a follower of Jesus. Although I do a 40-hour gig as a maintenance guy for 92 apartments, I am not a member of the working "class."
All this talk these days, arising from the Democrats and sociologists and talking media heads, about "class" this and "class" that, the "working class," the "privileged" class, the so-called "disappearing middle class"--I wouldn't give you a nickel for all of it.
As far as I'm concerned, I am an individual, my own man, and beyond classification. God made me just the way I am, thank you, and I thank Him for that. So you can call me middle-class if you want to. You can classify me in the disappearing middle because my working wage is 2/3 of what I was bringing in at my peak, a dozen or so years ago when I was fifty years old. You can call me middle class, working class, dumb-ass, or whatever you wanna call me, you can call me ray, you can call me jay, or ray jay, or you can call me "hey" or "hey you," but ya doesn't have to call me anything at all.
The only identity that matters is what my wife, my grownup young-uns, loved ones and friends call me--Carey. And btw I'll soon be publishing the third novel, which is named Smoke. So put that in your literary pipe and smoke it.
This little class rant came up this morning because I have been hearing more and more about these designated class distinctions lately, ever since, oh, couple years ago when the Occupy thing started and they were out in the streets--I watched them for two days in Vancouver and Seattle--with their signs about the 1% and the 99% and all that redistributionist and income disparity hype.
Maybe I'm in the 99%, maybe I'm way down in the 50% or even below that. I don't care. If I had a chance to join the 1%, I would jump at it. This great country was built on upward mobility.
We used to call it the American Dream. I still do. I'm not subscribing to this neo-marxian class stuff. No thank you. It's just for political manipulation, and I am no political hack's lackey. Therefore am I not pleased to accept some sociologist's semi-permanent societal place assignment. Well, maybe "first class". I would settle for that, but I'm not buying the proletarian, nor the bourgeois label.
Speaking of "not buying". . .
This morning I began reading David Horowitz' excellent autobiography, Radical Son.
Here is a passage from page 39 that got my attention, then became, it seems, the impetus for the little bloggish rumination you are now reading. From Radical Son:
Why did David's parents not buy their house when they had the chance to do it? Weren't they Americans? Well not yet, apparently.
They were second generation Americans, from Russian immigrants, and they identified themselves as communists. I understand that angst; its where they came from, how they were brought up and so forth. They did not subscribe to the American dream, but to the Russian communist dream that they had brought with them, and then dragged it as excess baggage off the boat at Ellis Island.
Son David later learned, in the school of hard knocks, what it means to be an American, to be an opportunist for yourself and your family, instead of letting yourself be limited by an imposed class identity. If his parents had been willing to learn that lesson in 1940 when they bought their home in Sunnyside Gardens, maybe they would have acceded a little more successfully to the American Dream motivator. But hey, they were immigrants; what can you expect? It takes a generation or two off the boat to acquire a taste for this melting pot porridge. David Horowitz' life is testimony to that, and that is what his book is about.
Now I'm a southerner, and very different from all those immigrants and their Old World forebears who got off the boat at New York Harbor. (My wife, Pat, is however from an Irish family from New Jersey.) And although my life experience is very different from that of Mr. Horowitz, I sure enjoy reading a good book, which is btw, the key (reading and education) to overcoming all this classist entrapment that's going around now.
Try it some time, you'll learn a thing or two from reading a book, even if its on your Kindle.
Smoke
All this talk these days, arising from the Democrats and sociologists and talking media heads, about "class" this and "class" that, the "working class," the "privileged" class, the so-called "disappearing middle class"--I wouldn't give you a nickel for all of it.
As far as I'm concerned, I am an individual, my own man, and beyond classification. God made me just the way I am, thank you, and I thank Him for that. So you can call me middle-class if you want to. You can classify me in the disappearing middle because my working wage is 2/3 of what I was bringing in at my peak, a dozen or so years ago when I was fifty years old. You can call me middle class, working class, dumb-ass, or whatever you wanna call me, you can call me ray, you can call me jay, or ray jay, or you can call me "hey" or "hey you," but ya doesn't have to call me anything at all.
The only identity that matters is what my wife, my grownup young-uns, loved ones and friends call me--Carey. And btw I'll soon be publishing the third novel, which is named Smoke. So put that in your literary pipe and smoke it.
This little class rant came up this morning because I have been hearing more and more about these designated class distinctions lately, ever since, oh, couple years ago when the Occupy thing started and they were out in the streets--I watched them for two days in Vancouver and Seattle--with their signs about the 1% and the 99% and all that redistributionist and income disparity hype.
Maybe I'm in the 99%, maybe I'm way down in the 50% or even below that. I don't care. If I had a chance to join the 1%, I would jump at it. This great country was built on upward mobility.
We used to call it the American Dream. I still do. I'm not subscribing to this neo-marxian class stuff. No thank you. It's just for political manipulation, and I am no political hack's lackey. Therefore am I not pleased to accept some sociologist's semi-permanent societal place assignment. Well, maybe "first class". I would settle for that, but I'm not buying the proletarian, nor the bourgeois label.
Speaking of "not buying". . .
This morning I began reading David Horowitz' excellent autobiography, Radical Son.
Here is a passage from page 39 that got my attention, then became, it seems, the impetus for the little bloggish rumination you are now reading. From Radical Son:
"At the time my parents moved into the (Sunnyside) Gardens in 1940, they could have purchased the house on Bliss Street for $4000--less than its original price. But as radicals, they had scorned the opportunity to own property and moved in as renters. Seven years later, the Gardens were acquired by new owners, who decided to sell of the individual units, including our house. A Sunnyside Tenants' Association was organized to resist the sales."
Why did David's parents not buy their house when they had the chance to do it? Weren't they Americans? Well not yet, apparently.
They were second generation Americans, from Russian immigrants, and they identified themselves as communists. I understand that angst; its where they came from, how they were brought up and so forth. They did not subscribe to the American dream, but to the Russian communist dream that they had brought with them, and then dragged it as excess baggage off the boat at Ellis Island.
Son David later learned, in the school of hard knocks, what it means to be an American, to be an opportunist for yourself and your family, instead of letting yourself be limited by an imposed class identity. If his parents had been willing to learn that lesson in 1940 when they bought their home in Sunnyside Gardens, maybe they would have acceded a little more successfully to the American Dream motivator. But hey, they were immigrants; what can you expect? It takes a generation or two off the boat to acquire a taste for this melting pot porridge. David Horowitz' life is testimony to that, and that is what his book is about.
Now I'm a southerner, and very different from all those immigrants and their Old World forebears who got off the boat at New York Harbor. (My wife, Pat, is however from an Irish family from New Jersey.) And although my life experience is very different from that of Mr. Horowitz, I sure enjoy reading a good book, which is btw, the key (reading and education) to overcoming all this classist entrapment that's going around now.
Try it some time, you'll learn a thing or two from reading a book, even if its on your Kindle.
Smoke
Saturday, January 18, 2014
Angela and David: Tale of Two Citizens
I was reading David's book on
why he switched sides in
the war between Left and Right,
and I was very moved by his life-changing event,
when the Panthers killed his coworker
in Oakland in 1974.
But then I took a Netflix break like
so many citizens do these days and so there was I
hearing Angela's soulful lament to a Swedish reporter
about growing up in
violence
in Birmingham, contending with KKK and Bull Connor
and for me it was like tale of two cities:
Brooklyn and Birmingham.
David grew up communist household in Brooklyn;
Angela grew up black neighborhood in Birmingham.
But then in their diverging odysseys
they both gravitated to other far-ranging places like
(tale of two cities) San Francisco and Oakland,
left and right, black and white, male and female,
gut and theory, feel and think, stare and blink.
One switched sides and the other
didn't.
Now I'm a white guy in sixties who grew up in the sixties and
I can understand why David switched from radical left to
conservative right
cuz I be little bit like that myself but not nearly as extreme as
his sitiation,
since i grew up in baton rouge, upriver from n'orleans.
That be the deep south you know where magnolias grow
and de moss hang low and de thinkin is slow
lit bit like over in Birmingham where Angela was raised up
'xcept she be black and i be white so I don't know
bout her sitiation, but she did get to study in Paris
at the Sorbonne so what does that tell you bout black folks in
Birmingham or Oakland?
Tale of two cities I guess:
theory and gut
heal and cut
oh shut
my mouth.
Glass half-Full
why he switched sides in
the war between Left and Right,
and I was very moved by his life-changing event,
when the Panthers killed his coworker
in Oakland in 1974.
But then I took a Netflix break like
so many citizens do these days and so there was I
hearing Angela's soulful lament to a Swedish reporter
about growing up in
violence
in Birmingham, contending with KKK and Bull Connor
and for me it was like tale of two cities:
Brooklyn and Birmingham.
David grew up communist household in Brooklyn;
Angela grew up black neighborhood in Birmingham.
But then in their diverging odysseys
they both gravitated to other far-ranging places like
(tale of two cities) San Francisco and Oakland,
left and right, black and white, male and female,
gut and theory, feel and think, stare and blink.
One switched sides and the other
didn't.
Now I'm a white guy in sixties who grew up in the sixties and
I can understand why David switched from radical left to
conservative right
cuz I be little bit like that myself but not nearly as extreme as
his sitiation,
since i grew up in baton rouge, upriver from n'orleans.
That be the deep south you know where magnolias grow
and de moss hang low and de thinkin is slow
lit bit like over in Birmingham where Angela was raised up
'xcept she be black and i be white so I don't know
bout her sitiation, but she did get to study in Paris
at the Sorbonne so what does that tell you bout black folks in
Birmingham or Oakland?
Tale of two cities I guess:
theory and gut
heal and cut
oh shut
my mouth.
Glass half-Full
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Left Right might fight
Right will fight,
while Left is deft
with dialectic theory;
But Left is bereft
of any reasonable query
when theoretical might
turns to gulag fright.
Left is cleft,
when Right makes Might
with military surging;
but Right is quite
insensitive to diplomatic urging
when armed might
explodes in war-torn blight.
Fascist pigs will fly
when Communist hogs do die;
Lefty cadres then wail
as Right-wing gangs prevail.
But Fascist hogs do die
when Commie pigs espy
Right-wingers as they fail.
Collateral damages turn pale as hail.
Meanwhile back at the tranche:
Jihadi cells collaborate
while Western minds elaborate
on Left, on Right, what's wrong, what's right,
and what will happen with the terror'd fright
when keffiyah'd thugs find Might:
Probably a fight.
Smoke
while Left is deft
with dialectic theory;
But Left is bereft
of any reasonable query
when theoretical might
turns to gulag fright.
Left is cleft,
when Right makes Might
with military surging;
but Right is quite
insensitive to diplomatic urging
when armed might
explodes in war-torn blight.
Fascist pigs will fly
when Communist hogs do die;
Lefty cadres then wail
as Right-wing gangs prevail.
But Fascist hogs do die
when Commie pigs espy
Right-wingers as they fail.
Collateral damages turn pale as hail.
Meanwhile back at the tranche:
Jihadi cells collaborate
while Western minds elaborate
on Left, on Right, what's wrong, what's right,
and what will happen with the terror'd fright
when keffiyah'd thugs find Might:
Probably a fight.
Smoke
Wednesday, January 1, 2014
Dinosaur Ozymandius
Dinosaur, oh dinosaur, what happened to you?
Did you get stuck in the mud?
Did you fall with a thud?
Did you get bogged in a bog?
Did you get lost in the fog?
Dinosaur, oh dinosaur, what now will you do?
Boomer, oh baby boomer, what's happening to you?
Are you mired in routine?
Are you caught in between
being red, blue, or green?
Did you get old while caught up in the dream?
Boomer, oh baby boomer, what now will you do?
Worker, oh worker, what has happened to you?
Are you still working, are you doing full-time?
Or are you in that frumpy unemployment line?
Have you lost your top dollar, waiting on a dime?
Did you do some retraining to buy you some time?
Worker, oh worker, oh what now will you do?
Yuppie, oh yuppie, what's up with you?
Did you hook up with prosperity?
Did you pair up with some parity?
Did you give some to charity?
Or Is your generosity a rarity?
Yuppie, oh yuppie, you know what to do.
Person, oh person, now what will you do?
now that the many has fizzled to few,
now that the few has dwindled to you,
now that the turning has turned round to you,
do you know what to do, do you see what is true?
Maybe it's not, after all, all about you.
Smoke
Did you get stuck in the mud?
Did you fall with a thud?
Did you get bogged in a bog?
Did you get lost in the fog?
Dinosaur, oh dinosaur, what now will you do?
Boomer, oh baby boomer, what's happening to you?
Are you mired in routine?
Are you caught in between
being red, blue, or green?
Did you get old while caught up in the dream?
Boomer, oh baby boomer, what now will you do?
Worker, oh worker, what has happened to you?
Are you still working, are you doing full-time?
Or are you in that frumpy unemployment line?
Have you lost your top dollar, waiting on a dime?
Did you do some retraining to buy you some time?
Worker, oh worker, oh what now will you do?
Yuppie, oh yuppie, what's up with you?
Did you hook up with prosperity?
Did you pair up with some parity?
Did you give some to charity?
Or Is your generosity a rarity?
Yuppie, oh yuppie, you know what to do.
Person, oh person, now what will you do?
now that the many has fizzled to few,
now that the few has dwindled to you,
now that the turning has turned round to you,
do you know what to do, do you see what is true?
Maybe it's not, after all, all about you.
Smoke
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