Far right polemic is rehearsed
Hubble bubble toil and trouble
Insanity.. humanity at its worst
Together can burst their bubble
Or in the sh*t forever immersed
Burns and then turns to rubble
As damn it our planet is cursed
We need to do this at the double
Earth’s our home must be nursed
If not then we’re all in real trouble
Climate crises cannot be reversed
Don’t need a telescope like Hubble
The sea rises our cities submersed
Infanticide.. boys won’t get stubble
As all our kids’ futures are hearsed
Just hubble trouble boil and bubble
In AI’s lies we’re now all well versed
Lust for bust as cash must be pursed
What lies within my history?
None other than cats.
Today, where the second generation
conceives new life,
I stand night watch without hesitation.
The cat that once nursed in the past.
The fifth-generation cat I raised—
The moment it first saw this new life,
It mistook it for prey.
Yet now, it does so no longer.
Instead, it protects.
And I, no longer need to stand night watch.
The stars are cold, the room is still,
but sleep is miles and miles away.
I’m haunted by the whiteboard lines
and things I’ll have to teach today.
My stomach turns at the thought of food,
a hollow space where strength should be;
I’m drowning in a crowded room,
where no one’s looking out for me.
I move my lips, I play the part,
the marker squeaks, the children stare.
But I am raw, a jagged edge,
just gasping for a bit of air.
The sentences are broken glass,
they cut my tongue and will not form;
I’m failing at the very task
of standing upright in the storm.
And oh, my heart, it is a weight,
a visceral ache for what is gone.
It misses every dream I nursed
before the light of every dawn.
There is a humility in this break,
in being stripped so completely bare,
feeling like a failure’s ghost
in a world that doesn’t care.
I walk through tides of busy lives,
a lonely pulse in a sea of grey.
I cannot find the words to speak,
the "me" I was, has slipped away.
I’m trying to bridge the hollow gap,
to reach across the dark and see
if I can find a single path,
that leads me back to being me.
Litany
A television plays in the background
while a housemate sits on the couch.
The sun through the window
promises another day.
My basketball team lost in the round
of the Sweet Sixteen, a disappointment.
Afterwards I nursed a drink and sang
a Paul McCartney song.
This morning when I walk barefoot
in my office space words stir inside my head.
When in high school I told my dad
writing was all I wanted to do.
Then I laughed when reading Walter Mitty
while sitting on my parents’ couch. Mitty
was a quiet man who wanted life
to be something more.
Now the cat leaps onto my desk
as I write. Is it so crazy to have another
life, I ask. He blinks his eyes.
Today, a day off from a part-time job
after working four-years traveling
for a flagger job for construction crews.
People in writers’ groups know me
for roads I travelled.
Trees at the end of the street
reach for wispy clouds.
I saw a friend last night as she sat
at an art walk and displayed
the stickers she made.
In college, I studied hard
to become a psychotherapist
but through a litany of poems
and songs my life is found.
We had to be back before the street lamps came on,
our bicycles with pedal brakes and a dynamo-light.
Things were just different when we were still young,
all meeting in the park for a game or clod fight.
We dug several forts and built up dirt ramps.
We found a dog skull near a cold tramp's fire.
We improved my friend’s treehouse with a wooden pallet
and made booby traps out of string and barbed wire.
We competed for height in the avocado trees
and made bows and arrows and spears.
We waged war with the ants using firecrackers
and in the river, we piled deep stoney weirs.
No day was complete without a cut or a roasty
though no one much cried until we got home,
where our mothers nursed us with cups of sugar water
and the stinging red kiss of Mercurochrome.
There's always a day when I wish I couldn't feel anything
Sleeping at night, gaining proper rest without a dream
Having a relationship with someone without growing attached
No hurt feelings or nursed grudges with an unburied hatch
It would make happiness and sadness feel the same
Everyone's efforts to show me love would go in vain
No need to over think anything because I wouldn't care
My feelings being numb like a person's blank stare
Using words that are hard to understand because they're dry
Leave others to wonder if I'm human because I'll never cry
I would experience less worry, anxiety or frustration
I would always deal the same way with every situation
I wouldn't have to try so hard to please anybody
I wouldn't feel what you felt to have to say sorry
Life would be different being unemotional
But at lease I would go through life being very functional.
a cruel act in 1972
On our ship in Kingston, came a sick cat
It was riddled with open sores, and it had fleas
No one wanted to touch it
When the ship sailed and the harbor pilot had
gone ashore, I crushed the cat's head on
the railing and threw it into the sea, and ever
since I feel guilty
I have fantasized that the cat was not dead
that it had drifted ashore on a small island
where the little girl found it, nursed it back to
health
When the cat remembers my cruelty, it does
So with fondness, for without my act it would
Have never met the girl.
One day, when I was gardening,
and putting seeds into the ground
I pushed aside a pile of sticks,
and I heard this tweeting sound
The tweet came from an injured woodpecker
That had a broken left wing
So, I took him in and to the best I could,
I made makeshift sling
I kept him in the basement,
so that I wouldn't hear his noise
And I put him in a giant cage,
with water, food and toys
I nursed him for a while,
and he was looking really great
Until one night when I came home,
from working kind of late
Each night when I'd come home,
I'd fill his bowls and check
To see if he could fly again,
or maybe try to peck
But sadly, when I walked down my steps,
there were feathers on the floor
My cat somehow got to the cage
and opened up the door
I didn't tell my daughter,
that sadly Woody died
I told her that I let him go,
a rare time that I lied
So, after cleaning up the mess,
I gave a feather to my child
And I told her Woody flew away
and he is living in the wild
I told a little white lie,
but I think it was for best
Because, my daughter, she was happy,
when I laid her head to rest
With one breast
you nursed him, Amazon.
The other, cut away,
to aim at males.
The hours passed
with bated breath,
listening to your moans.
As you fed,
you killed,
and for another prey
you hoisted your sails.
You carried him in a sling
and went hunting.
One day, on a boat in the river,
you laid him down
and sailed far away.
With one breast
you nursed him, one-breasted—
and he became a man,
Sovereign of One,
with corrupted ideals.
stubbed toe / during a broken heart—
you said pain is pain, offered to kiss both.
we nursed the plot of a favorite episode,
argued over what constituted foreshadowing.
talking to you about the view was mostly talking to myself;
you liked cliffs, I liked what they overlooked.
on vacation with the lube,
you forgot to pack anything else.
we ate wasabi from the tube like astronauts.
being vegan, you protested animal rights
while wearing leather—not ironically.
I said nothing, ate a pork bun in your honor.
alive with wanting, horny as new hormones,
we ordered room service, slept instead,
called that a success.
our fifties came early—
you there before me, always a decade ahead
in age, on trends, with grief.
neither of us knowing we’d need
a language for this back then.
How fortunate that I, correctly versed,
knew hand-grenades are passive. At their worst,
they maim and kill. But this is interspersed
with usefulness: defenders have no thirst
for carnage. Since the enemy had first
used violence, they had to be dispersed.
It fell to me. How often I’d rehearsed
in nightmares what came next, how often nursed
this killer in my hands. Like Damien Hirst,
I knew that I was certain to be cursed
by those who only see a shark immersed
in urine, not a work of art. Lips pursed,
I threw my bomb, and squatted, for I durst
not look upon the mayhem, when it burst.
I sowed a seed in shadow's gloom,
A whisper nursed within my room.
Its roots grew deep, its branches wide,
Yet still, my secret lay inside.
Beneath the moon, the tree took shape,
Its fruits of envy, fear, and hate.
Each leaf, a thorn; each bough, a snare,
Yet none would see what lingered there.
A neighbor came, with eyes so bright,
He gazed upon the tree by night.
I watched him pluck a gleaming fruit,
And saw his joy take bitter root.
He bit, he wept, he cried my name,
But still, I hid, and felt no shame.
The seed I sowed, its tale now told,
Its fruit bore truths both dark and cold.
So guard the thoughts you let take hold,
For bitter seeds yield trees of old.
"To the White House he strode," sang his choir,
The elephants sparked a dumpster fire,
His words became its fuel,
Deceit was his tool,
While the donkeys cried foul: "He's a liar."
We need no DC to know all these things,
Just stamp your ear on the bald eagle’s wings.
You’ll see Iran sneezing;
And Israel pleasing,
Not too far away Gaza's sorrow rings.
Red Maple touted as the fifty-first.
PM as guvnor, a joke just nursed.
Donald talk’s just full of scare,
Yet Putin listens with care,
With the hope that the North's missiles won’t burst.
Troops in Damascus prepare to leave,
Trump's friend in Istanbul made Assad grieve.
To Moscow he fled,
In his tower he read,
The joy of this win, he wears on his sleeve.
Who is my neighbour? Asked you, a supposed expert in law
Did he know that testing you is like a Babelian flaw?
Being Christ, you knew well that his faith was like a dry reed.
With a breeze of common man's compassion, you shook his creed.
From Jerusalem to Jericho, a man travelled, you said.
Bandits beat him up, looted his wealth, and left him half-dead
Did the priest, though he witnessed him dying, reach him out? Nay.
The Levite too, though he might have felt pity, went his way.
One who was thought to be, in the social ladder, the least
A Samaritan brought back his life that was almost ceased.
He nursed him as though he was losing his only friend.
Shouldn't, before his love, divisions of caste and creed bend?
This was true love. He's the true neighbour. Go and do the same.
The questioner felt his frail question fail and stood in shame.
A giant panda eats leaves and shoots,
several handlers and keepers
fall to a spray of AK-47 bullets.
"Why?"
moans an elderly Chinese lady,
blood oozing from her torn body -
she had nursed him from a cub.
In a less than perfect Mandarin,
the animal replied:
"Madam, humans do not understand
how to bear an unbearable love.
Being insufferably cute
the matter has always been
a black and white issue for us.
We love to shoots first,
then we leaves."
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