rAnts &

(Some jingles from a few years back)

Alas, Babylon

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.”
— “The Rubaiyat” Omar Khayyam, 12th century (trans. Edward Fitzgerald, 1859)

I
They are bombing
the poetry out of Iraq.
Who can write poems
when each one dead
is a dead poem?
Who can write
when even
the moving finger
stops, when
the wall has been bombed,
the handwriting lost?
Each one dead in Iraq
is a poem not written.
Iraq is filling with
dead poems.

They are bombing
the poetry out of Iraq.

In retaliation, the poetry of America
gives up its ghost,
ranting. A cold
moon over Babylon:
the poetry of America
drops its pants
on history.

II
Starting his Third-World
War, the president sends
his warheads –
Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice –
our appointed
war heads.

New Babylon
buries the old
for oil: blood
of Eden. Lost
where we found it,
exiled, buried
Eden. Living
off the bones
of our ancestors,
milking the black
blood of Eden
in our not-so-
original sin.

Drinking the blood of
Eden, drunk now
on the blood of war –
cut-rate Humvees
for the grunts, tricked-
out Hummers and SUVs
at home – it’s our
hangover. Every
drop counts, the
clock counting down...


["Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones."
— Donald Rumsfeld, Feb. 17, 2002]



Preaching to the Choir

It is not by your patriotism that you support
and spread the new imperialism –
global corporate empire-building.
It is not by your Pledge of Allegiance that you keep flags covering truth.
Not your vote or your note to the editor.
No need to buy your vote.
They have bought your life
with your burger and fries,
the SUV and one-car-per-person.
Not by just the sweatshop
cranking out Nikes overseas,
but the imported produce pickers,
house-cleaners, cooks, dishwashers –
those who clean up after us, do
our dirty work –
the nuts and bolts, tape & glue holding
our way of life together.

*****

I'm sometimes asked why my work is so sad... why I'm so sad.

I'm not sad. But I am melancholy... I guess that's the best word for it, if one has to be chosen.

I believe my life is an elegy.

We have such short lives
and even shorter
memories.

So much has happened
and we have forgotten.

Maybe to make ourselves feel better,
we keep the pace of life fast,
faster, hurrying one thought
after another. Training ourselves
to feel it's OK that we forget,
that we lose things,
that so much is lost.

Time is made to be lost.
It's made to make tomorrows,
it's made to retire yesterdays into numbness.

So much history. So many generations. So many ancestors. So many fathers and mothers
and lost children.
We are our own lost children
waiting for parents.

We create societies and that creates power and that allows us the illusion
of independence, self-sufficiency.
Separation.

We're just a collection of things.

So caught up in things
we can't perceive the Whole.
The Whole
is not a thing.
It's not made up of little things
or big things.
It's not a collection of things.
The Whole is nothing like
a thing.

The Whole
requires a new way of thinking, relating,
communicating. Perhaps even
not thinking.
Our imagination might be a better
way of knowing
but as David Hume said,
how can you imagine a gold mountain?
You imagine gold,
you imagine a mountain,
but it's hard to really picture
a gold mountain.
We can only imagine things
we've known before.

We use words... those
things that were designed
to describe things, to explain
things. But the Whole
isn't described, isn't explained...
it's sensed, felt. Understood.
Or not.

We're missing the Whole.
We're seeking the Whole.

we aRtists

"We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell."
— Pablo Picasso




"You study, you learn, but you guard the original naiveté. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love within the lover."
— Henri Matisse



"There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls."
— George Carlin



"Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music."
— George Carlin


"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book."
– Marcus Tullius Cicero, statesman, orator and writer (106-43 BCE)