---

 Some of this is reasonably finished work, but a lof of it is work in progress, bits of words in the process of discovering their order as poems.

ADT

---

Vignettes from the Seasons

Viking Skaldic Requiem for the SOPA Act

Lines From the Encompass Rehabilitation  Hospital

On the Merits of Writing Software to do Small Tasks

Battle Song of the Cicadas.

---

 


Weary of my spring cleaning,
  like the mole in Wind-in-the-Willows,
    I go out for a walk,
      crossing a secret field,
        behind the computer center.
 
Behold a carpet of flowers,
  dandelions and violets,
    amidst which an earnest workaday bumblebee.
      stolidly forages.
Beside  her, a small yellow butterfly teases,
  in  the warming sum.
But where are the birds?

Looking up, darkening clouds,
  which cover the sun.
Still time, I think,
  to do my errand and get home.
 
On the way back, gray masses slide over,
  and winds blow.
Cherry-tree blossoms scatter in the wind.

The pill factory shift has changed,
  hordes of angry drivers,
     on their way home,
       clenched faces behind steering wheels,
         contemplating how much they hate their bosses.
 
A suddenly mirthless crow,
  drives himself grimly upwind.
Three flags stream from poles,
  at half-mast for crushed coal miners,
    and in frustrated vengeance upon their owner.
 
The rain begins to fall,
   strangely not heralded by thunder,
 I hastily unstrap my poncho,
   in a scene vaguely reminiscent of Wilfred Owen.
     ("an ecstasy of fumbling for gas masks")
 
As the rain escalates across the parking lot,
  a hand-holding couple hurries to shelter,
     his umbrella red, hers  blue.
I arrive home in the nick of time,
   only slightly drenched!



One morning,
  in the early morning cool,
    the young Chinese man upstairs,
     practiced his golf swing,
      by driving ping-pong balls,
        against a chain-link fence.
His small daughter,
  dressed entirely in white,
    stood watching,
      her hands on her hips,
         in the eternal expression
           of women kept waiting.

The lawn-mowing crew,
   half a dozen young men,
     with weed-whackers carried at the trail,
       straggled up the hillside,
         like Shawnee braves,
           on the warpath.

As the heat rose,
  the grass turned to straw

A two-inch  plastic shark,
  lay in the parking lot,
    a child's toy,
      beached on a strange shore.

A dehydrated butterfly,
  lying limply on a concrete sidewalk,
    begged for a drink,
      so I poured it a puddle from my water-bottle.

A busy suburban street is rather like a small desert on a summer day.
Under a blue sky, the sun beats down, and reflects off the pavement,
  both of multiple lanes of traffic, and of the parking lots,
    as if off the desert floor.
As the cars rush past, detached by their motion, they resemble vultures
   riding thermals above,
     and watching for a meal.

The setting is practically unpeopled. Walking is a solitary grind,
   relieved by periodic swigs
from a bottle of water carried in one's pocket.



 
 
Football is conventionally a boy's game,
   being rough and tumble,
     a way to get hurt,
        and among men,
          it can be a deadly sport,
            but up to a certain age,
              girls play football too.
 
On a  morning before a football game,
    in the bright sun of a clear, crisp day,
      a little golden-blonde girl, no more than four,
       tomboyish in a blue windbreaker,
         played football with her father, on the edge of a field,
           where deer had played the previous night.
She rolled over the ball in somersaults,
   and came back to her feet again,
     over and over again, enthusiasm unimpaired,
        loudly giggling all the while.
Playing like nothing so much as a small bear.
 
At noon, in the midst of a tailgate party,
  a somewhat older girl, raven-haired,
     with a face like a fashion model,
       played with her three older brothers.
Three older brothers and a father,
   flutter her eyelashes at,
      and only one mother to scold her.
When the ball came her way,
   she did not strive overly to catch it,
      but as it bounced past her,
         flung up her hands with a comic expression on her face,
           "who, little old me?"

In the dusk, when most of the fuss had died down,
   a young man, sturdy, earnest, a future schoolmaster,
     gave a lesson in football,
        to the Indian and Pakistani children in the apartments,
          half a dozen of them, boys and girls both,
             and none of them much over six.
On the picnic benches sat the mothers, watching,
   in the flowered silks of Asia, to lend an exotic touch.
The young man explained learnedly of the proper posture,
   the better to throw to a backwards-running receiver.
The children listened seriously, chelas of this American guru.
The young man tossed the ball to a little girl, saying,
   "throw it back to me so we can see if you have it right"
For a moment she regarded him,
   with a question in her mysterious eyes,
     eyes which, in their strangeness,
        reached back five thousand years,
          and then, deciding that ,
           "yes, he would do to fall in love with," (*)
               she squared her shoulders in the correct manner,
                  and-- precisely-- threw the ball back.
 
  2012
 
  (*) Vide Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975, the English author, not the actress), _Palladian_ (1946), ch. 4



----------------------------------
And I thought I would do one about winter snowstorms, to give me a set
of poems for each of the four seasons, I've only got rough sketches for this
------------------
After the snow plow has cleared a swath,
several men start digging out their cars.
A young Chinese girl,
perhaps about twelve,
comes skipping by,
with a snow-saucer on top of her head,
stops to give her digging daddy a kiss,
goes on,
exuberantly dances around in a circle,
and dashes off downhill.

maybe throw in a bit about the little brown mouse out in the snow,
looking for food, the cat who was attempting to catch a rabbit one time,
when I came along and spoiled his stalk. etc.

I think there are two kinds of winter to deal with, there are snow
storms, and there is normal winter, when all kinds of animals are trying
to get something to eat.

---

 
 "...a bunch of hairy mouse-clickers with little clout" (said The Economist)
Brown-bearded,
Bearishly shaggy,
Videogame-playing berserkers,
Growlishly peering from basements,
Mouses skid across screens,
Guy Fawkes masks conceal,
> congressmen tremble,
> SOPA shatters, PIPA plunges,
> ACTA aborts, TPP tumbles.
>
> Feb, 2012
>
> http://www.economist.com/node/21547235
> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120210/11023517730/economist-financial-times-already-writing-off-acta-as-dead.shtml#c162
>
Comments for the Uninvolved:

  SOPA = Stop Online Piracy Act
                   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
 
  PIPA = PROTECT IP Act
                  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_IP_Act
 
ACTA = Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
                   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-       Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement
 
 TPP = Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (Trans-Pacific Partnership)
                 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Strategic_Economic_Partnership

  About the Guy Fawkes masks: they are white, with stylized sinister eyebrows, seventeenth-century handlebar mustache, and goatee beard. Suitably vampire-ish. They were originally movie merchandise, but were adopted for the Anonymous protests against Scientology. In Eastern Europe and France, initial resistance to copyright maximalism has been in the streets, linking back to the Solidarity movement against the Soviets, and to May 1968 in France.  The European street protesters adopted the Guy Fawkes masks as a kind of ensign, and the Polish legislators followed suit as a sign of solidarity. The gates of the Sjeym, the Polish parliament, are barred against the Guy Fawkes masks, and suddenly, they pop up inside, across the legislators' benches.
 
 Think of a bunch of paratroops who have landed astride the enemy line of communications, al la St. Mere Eglise, and have dug in. Desperately furious counter-attacks keep coming in, but have utterly failed to dislodge them. Obviously, to a detached mind, the enemy cannot maintain that tempo indefinitely, but at the same time, there is a cumulative frustration among the defenders...

Among the Techdirt crowd, there was this sense that there was this constant flow of new legislative bills, and proposed new international trade agreements having the force of law if ratified. The bills have new names, but they are the same old garbage which was rejected before. Hence SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, TPP, and I don't doubt but there'll be a good many more acronyms before we're done. The internet hackers had built WikiPedia, the best encyclopedia in the world by a large margin, and had used it as a kind of soapbox to recruit a large segment of the public, the way the tool-and-die men, the "Mill English," launched the CIO trade union movement back in the 1930's, carrying the ordinary workers along with them. You know, and I know, that launching a bill in Congress, even if it is a failed bill, still cancels a lot of IOU's from congressmen to lobbyists, and that, at a certain point, the lobbyists' credit is exhausted. However, the initial sponsors of the bills, and selected lobbyists, are still talking publicly about how they are bound to win.

 At any rate, the intent of my SOPA poem was to buck up the troops' morale a bit. I thought I heard a bit of defeatist talk.
 

---

A delicate old lady
essays the stairs--
her husband and I,
in frozen silence,
watch her progress,
but she climbs triumphantly



hard questions in middle of the night
talking through  the curtain diving our beds

Ed Bray in the Gym, grey with strain, his IV tube and bottle had to come with him
His disease pursued him
from the great hospital in Pittsburgh
A naive intelligence
His wife could not visit often-- the compeing claims of children
stolen contact over the telephone


A woman who reminds me of Peppermint Patty,
easily propels her wheelchair with the one foot she can use.
The gym is a circus,
as the people parade past, watched by everyone else.

Doing laps in wheelchairs
unfamiliar muscles
a steady pace
and then,
pour on the coal over the back stretch

The orderly delights in speed, He pushes wheelchairs fast, delights in coming up unsuspected behind pedestrians in the halls. Beep! Beep!


My hospital-girlfriend Teddie does a picture puzzle, spread over a couple of days
not as easy as it looks, a different kind of intelligence.
All the stereotypes you could think of plump and blonde, the fairy godmother of her neighborhood, but a Mind underneath.
The tricky old nurse fixed me up with her
A chaste few hours in the afternoon
like Wendy back in high school all these years ago
we told everyone that we were "just good" friends
and they nodded knowingly




Gold hair, gathered on the top of her head
dark eyes, teething ring in her mouth,
carried on her father's shoulder
She looked down at me with cool disdain

Marvelous rarity in the hospital
where adults reenact the roles of children

Sunflower in purgatory

---

Freely borrowed from Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1 ("To Be Or Not To Be")

To program or not to program, that is the question,
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer,
The tedium of doing the same thing a thousand times,
Or to take arms against a sea of similarities,
And by coding, end them.

To repeat oneself no more,
And let the machine iterate itself,
But ay, there's the rub,
What if the machine should iterate itself in directions unforeseen,
Strewing automatic disaster in all directions at once!

2015

---

Invertebrate kami-kazes,

as numerous as cherry blossoms,

driven by a biological imperative greater than honor.

Forty-seven ronin, seven hundred hussars,

eighteen Douglas Devastators..

Pointless swarming attacks,

heralded by eldrich screeches,

at inanimate night-time light fixtures,

man-made contrivances,

not foreseen in innate genetic programming.

Piles of bodies lying before ramparts irrelevant and indifferent,

which, being un-storm-able, signify nothing.

and not even suffered to carpet the ground.

---

  Index   Home

---