i applied for a PhD in English Literature, then came the plague . .

courtesy of Stoneartist.com

I applied for a PHD years ago thinking it funny that people still laugh at Geoffrey Chaucer an English author from the 14th Century. I was intrigued by the fact that when he was young, every third person in England died from the plague. For perspective, imagine laughing after 2 billion 300 million people died while you were in middle school, and you not only laugh at the tragedy, but tell stories about it in such a way that people, if we still exist, will be laughing at your stories 600 years from now. Humor tends not to stay fresh, to paraphrase Dr. Victor Comerchero “humor has a short ‘shelf life’, but tragedy lives forever.” This paradox holds true today - few will recognize the name Studs Terkel (1912-2008), but many will read or know of Ann Frank’s Diary (1929-1945) - neither contemporary figures. Consider the ironic absurdity in which the state of Israel bombs a captive Palestine into the stone age while Palestine is to Israel, as the Roadrunner is to Wily Coyote. Worldwide outrage over this depraved act of cowardice has done nothing to staunch bloodletting, maybe laughing at these neofascist bureaucratic knaves will make a difference.

If our civilization is no longer capable of instructing it’s intellectuals how to improve the lives of the species, for what do we train our scholars? Let’s just skip the ivory towers and storm the citadels of commerce. There is a handful of 1,467 persons worldwide - each possessing a billion dollars or more. This cluster of uber-rich has hijacked unimaginable wealth, and enthralled 7 billion other human beings with the charade that 1,467 persons are actually worth 90% of the planet’s financial output; not only that, but as valuable as these nouveau rich are, the other 7 billion humans are not. This makes no sense to me. I often find it difficult to explain myself - not so funny. How can we extract, not only humor from the macabre, but reason from the paroxysms of chronic violence which describe leadership in our current form of governance. Those dualities in a narrowing field of options mean at this juncture in history the odds that what you do will contribute to the success or failure of our entire species are better than ever - and that’s kind of funny. The bad news is that in a world spilling over with superheroes, we got none.

There is a cruel irony that at that precise moment in history when we are in dire need of the greatest humanity can provide, every channel and method of training and indoctrination is demanding the least, propagating the cheapest and convincing the greatest number that they are the least powerful - i find that odd. Capitalist stormtroopers are branding “cheap” as the new manna with blessings from he who art in heaven. Today’s zealots claim great faith, enough to keep the world at war forever; not vastly different from the clergy during the bubonic plague - a mixture of venal and craven acts as with all walks of life during cataclysmic events. Unfortunately we’ve neutered the social frameworks which previous generations relied on - sewing bees, volunteer fireman, conversations. Ours is the internet generation which means human hubris which has clouded the thinking and interactions of humans besotted with love, death, greed etc. has an additional buffer between the world and human heart - the internet. Vaunted as the “information age” savior for a world losing meaning this lean-forward, time-sucking apparatus now more closely resembles that stack of magazines at your doctors office - expired and picked over.

It is the learning loss for which no one has yet answered. There is much ballyhoo about standards and money; few willing to concede they have consigned the human baby to a corporate maw from birth. I have no doubt of that enterprising father who has his child’s birth on a phone. . be mindful this apparatus is barely an infant as far as the public knows, yet as master Stephan Hawking has said, “I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive.” That the ISP masters of the universe want to charge a lord’s ransom for what is virtually the cost of 5v current traveling in Plato’s Aether. This ransom for a communication channel is perverse and will ultimately be brought down by its own evil - witness glyphosate and monsatan, or the Walton House of Harkonnen about to topple from its adventures in aristocracy. These are monolithic monetary sinkholes that reflect a narrow ambition for which they are rewarded with narrow rewards. We must stop the erosion of our collective skill as a species, and remember we are capable of turning a bicycle into an airplane. Know that without this “fineness” in what you do - you’ll remain no more than scribble on a street corner posing as art

knowledge: the locus of today’s techno-wizards virtuosity is metadata, as though having an algorithm capable of processing photos of a bag of potato chips into an audio signal describes the world’s “mystery” anymore clearly is as vacuous as the potato chips are nutritional. The internet’s more insidious contribution to humanity is the ham-fisted conceit that such manipulation will yield anything but social carnage; consider brain surgery using a shovel. The real guide to what is in the interest of humanity will come from a careful awareness of the people and their behavior - learn, “read, rather than write to their disc” so to speak. The telescopic/magnifying lens that is the computer age has greatly distorted assumptions which leaders have been making from time immemorial about the mind of the people. Using a purloined conversation or a text message, social seers now feel that they understand - understand so well they have mortgaged the mandate for consent of the governed for that “feathered nest” FDR warned us about. Today’s terrified leaders are swamped by images and calculations which describe the onrushing annihilation - they are shitting their pants, and as anyone who’s ever worked knows “shit rolls down hill.” So like the old French adage “Plus les choses changent, plus elles restent les mêmes”, (the more things change, the more they remain the same), we may want to learn from the earliest of human civilizers and move the latrine out of our camp or vice versa .  .
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the Purple Pillow Covers of Paris - the sonnet

"The Purple Pillow Covers of Paris" . .
makes more sense than bombing children for peace.
.  . " they bombed the hospitals just to harass,"
versus : " purple pillows aid rest's release " . .

One is as far from beauty as man from love,
the other - kindness in a world on fumes;
one purpose is enriching sleep's alcove,
the other creating bestial-like dooms.

In times when water may be gone itself,
i prefer special care for a pillow
to humanity's betrayal to the pelf -
why not spit at g_d if you're so macho?

Murder won't make you a sacred subject;
you kill; and so become mammon's project.

jts 6 August 2014
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synchronicity - the sonnet

synchronicity has five syllables

today it rained; i live in the desert.

when young i read “Dune” and sold Falafels.

today i watched “Dune” - again a convert.

soaking with “Man and His Symbols” opened

to heroes who don’t need us as we them.

Medusa as mama Jung posited.

i've had wives, women ain’t always a gem.

but like rain in a world quickly drying

to see and feel kinship with humanity

right when tyrants flog fear as meaning

our demons teach us how to be free.

it is not to kill, but to live, not to fear

nor frighten, but to welcome joy and tear.

jts 3 August 2014

Bathtub Poet - the sonnet

I  write my poetry in the bathtub,
more than one hundred sonnets; i like baths.
I promised pop i'd write, and there's the rub -
what one does comes from the heart, not oaths.

The  best part of work is how it feels done .  .
not declarations made before one starts.
I listen to my heart - no place to run,
transmuting sense and events into the "arts."

From words, i've learned pop cared not for swearing,
though my liege; oaths aren't needed to grow trees.
You show them sky and how to seek moistening;
if karma smiles - roots sink, branches bring bees.

Is this poem's persona bees, trees or son . ?
Does it matter ? we shared a soak - what fun . !

jts 072714

An Humble Argument for Worldwide Revolution

What are the odds of these 5 paragraphs effecting an overthrow of world order - then again, who’d have thought I may be amongst the last of human generations? Even in the darkest heyday of nuclear Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), people clung to the insane notion of surviving a nuclear holocaust. Today there is a sickness inside the human soul, like fruit dying on the vine, or Leonard Cohen’s “heart without a home.” The running dogs of the all powerful are so far removed from the charnel floor they cannot see that the noble human desire to survive which had been harnessed and capitalized on to defeat the Nazis of the planet and her tyrants throughout history has now withered like some exotic cactus suffering climate change. The blindness that comes from ruling by keyboard also informs the hubris of the invulnerable, so what had been a “perfect storm” of technological advances coupled with a deliberate or random spike in fear due to the 9/11 carnage has now facilitated an industry of hatred on a scale unimaginable to any despot ever. Yet like the training of gladiators must have seemed like a good idea at the time to some, that same martial genie is hard to get back in the bottle once uncorked whether it’s used for killing Christians in the Coliseum, or funding militias for the private taking of public property.

As the Roman Empire collapsed into the cultural warren of middle ages, our planet enjoyed a wide cross-pollination of methods for human cooperation and advancement from the trading influence of the nomad, to advances in crop yields from farming clusters. However, as populations expanded war became coin of the realm for defining national boundaries, as well as anointing and normalizing the ruling class for rapidly shifting city-state/nation-states. Those elite individuals or entities able to consistently pick victors no longer required nations for cultural identity, only banks to contain the profits. The ability to dictate the outcome of conflicts and eventually determine the nature of those conflicts eliminated the need for any semblance of democracy and only utilizes the spectacle of royal pageantry and illusion of public scrutiny as straw dogs and quaint appendages from a long gone age of consensus; absolute prerogative has been conveyed to the ruling class using the digital sleight-of-hand. It is at this point in history we rest - an apex between doom and heroism. Conflicts today are no more than a cycle of depletion and renewal which provide little or no security but occupy populations in a superheated state of “fight or flight” from either invaders from without or enemies from within. There is no longer discussion for the cessation of hostilities only the shifting tally of who is vulnerable to whom. We the population of the world have been abandoned by leadership and set upon by corporate overlords whose positions reflect no more than access to either revenue streams, food, fuel or materiel, and of course their armored enclaves wherein they will witness the cataclysms of their amoral ambitions 

The means of production which had been the prime objective of the communist insurrection is now completely subordinated to the emerging media technology for dictating consumer addictions to a quiescent population in thrall and rapidly loosing its inherent capacity for reason to a narrowing spectrum of digital distraction. No longer honing its faculty for critical thinking through innovation from the rigors of survival, the general population is enticed, cajoled or menaced into hysteria and back into quiet by the chimera of state security any threat to which is also used as justification for deteriorating conditions and scarcity of resources. Conditions will continue to decay and the options of those fortunate to have been born into privilege and advantage will exert more control using greater force over the world population which has already been successfully persuaded their enemies are the same screen objects conjured up by the corporate media narrative. Using this very loose framework 1,565 human beings have become the only billionaires on a planet occupied by 7 billion human beings (2.57-e7, .00000257% of the population)- stark testimony to the pernicious lie of war and our lax hold on any capacity for recognizing friend, much less foe. 

It is no longer reasonable to fight for g_d and country when the enemies are some number of the 1,565 billionaires and whatever private armies these petite princes have purchased for protection and anonymity. Of the arguments in favor of worldwide revolution near the top of the list would have to be digital reciprocity, e.g. the right to focus the digital lens both ways. If the technology is so useful and those wielding it have that much confidence in the benign nature of enhanced scrutiny, let these same leaders accede to reciprocal scrutiny. This concept evolves from a precept for rule of law - consent of the governed. We have long since passed the point where the lax concept of secrecy shrouding pre-digital decision making can continue. If anything, the level of rapacious larceny engendered by the powerful algorithms that define so much in our daily lives demands a reciprocal capacity for the viewed to peer back up the food chain at who is peering so as to ask "what the fuck do you want and why don’t you just ask?" 

We are now at Frank Zappa’s “crux of the biscuit” - why revolt? Short a literary Deus ex Machina, our planet will soon be visited by carnage the likes of which are unknown to our species. This mass die-off will run from the slow withering of generations to complete genocides; reported or not. There is no demonstrated willingness by the wealthiest and most powerful to act with the fundamental concepts of human decency; rather today’s leadership is content to ransack the commons and assign themselves 1st class seats for the spectacle, up to and including apocalyptic flavored entertainment for the masses - bedtime stories to calm panic that chickens in our food cycle may experience as their beaks are amputated and they are boiled alive in one of our food factories coming soon to reality television. If we are destined for extinction, and if there is a margin of habitable world left occupied by cogent determined people applying themselves to a worthy future, there I will go to work for the greater good rather than pay an iota to Empire Coliseum Inc. to watch my brothers and sisters, fowl or otherwise slaughtering each other at Mammon’s command.

(veracity note: Errol Flynn - Robin Hood suspected as Nazi sympathizer)

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how to wish well one not known - the sonnet

Fiction is that she cares if i'm cruel , 

which i am not , anymore than she cares - 

enough though i'd rather be thought a fool

than harm mine whose hunger's so full it tears.

So like an ancient scribe's fantasy

of flesh and blood cloaked in goddess form

or fearful practice rehearsed by proxy

i thrash demons in ways outside the norm .

If there be lives affected , be it well

for generosity freely given

might ring human hearts hocked to that long bell

with more than madness at being driven.

I cannot stop time's effect on beauty

but muse kindness for hearts of such duty .

3 June 2014 its
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doubt - the sonnet

Doubt is by definition - illusion.
One lives, or dies and nothing will stop that.
Religion and faith add more confusion
by giving credence to a kind of hat.

Faith in day during night welcomes the dawn
much as love blunts loss while it wears down grief.
Again life sniffs its muzzle like a fawn .  . 
CLAP ! goes thunder - fear being the fucking thief.

What is, will always be that which one does,
be that sucking for air from a wave-ride
or clawing for same after a war-plane's buzz; 
There's always choice - with, or against the tide.

This choice is not always easy to see,
and doubt that not, for it's reality.

042814 jts
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