Single note poems

Single-note poems,

Listen up!

Solos, well & good,

Don’t cut it.

Today, complexities

Rule!

Cacophonous sometimes,

Symphonious

Others, but…

“Collaborative teams” —

That’s our new cachet!

Okay, mister poet.

Slowly. Go slowly.

Add one-part

Harmony. Let’s see

How it goes. (Still…

Isn’t this is a

Single-note poem?)

Not dead yet!

I’m obviously not dedicated enough yet. First Thanksgiving in the US, then a week-long family visit, and next thing you know, three weeks have gone by since I put up a simple photo. Well, here’s another to hold us over for a few days until I get back on the writing horse. From a recent hike in a nearby state park.

Our beautiful fall

We are falling from the moment we are born.
Until forty, we don’t know this.
We think we’re going forward, outward,
“Onward!”
Growing; not understanding we are
Shrinking, no, crystalizing into the final
Jewel we are, will be, maybe. So much
Wiggle-room, so many paths, so
Endowed with timelessness!

At forty, we understand, turn,
Brace for the fall—
Realizing we haven’t jumped up—
Realizing we’ve hurtled ourselves toward our doom—
Realizing falling’s inevitability:
We thought we’re responsible!
We acknowledge falling, but abstractly:
“There’s plenty of time!”

Our sixties—a.k.a. When Our Parents Die—we
See the barrier against which we all
Crash. We understand: not only
Didn’t we start anything,
We won’t be able to
End it, either.

These moments of clearer revelation,
Shorn of pretense (hopefully),
Our backs against the wall of our
Inexcusable behavior, our
Youthful ‘revelations’, our
Moments we thought were heart-rending,
Heart-ending,
Our happiness we thought
Never-ending, our
Aimless or purposeful existence, regardless,
Brought us here,
To this place where
Time is short—
Dreams are ending—
Fruition MUST occur or
Be buried forever while we
Begin to plant ourselves in the ground—
Then…then…we see clearly what can be done,
And what can’t, and
We do it.
Or we don’t.
As it always was!
As it can be!
It’s our best/worst time,
Happiness. Fear. Resignation.

Our diamond-quest involves vast pressure.
Let it come, let it come.
Harden, clarify,
Add color, sparkle, luminescence—
They mean something:
To yourself, to
Those who wait, to
Those who follow, and again,
To yourself.

Dance of Dense

First:
'There’s a problem with poetry,'
He said. 'Today all poets
Want to compress meaning into
Too few words. This squeezing of
Words, accordion-like,
Displays the poet’s desire
To be obscure,
To force the reader
To find the meaning,
Giving away nothing,
Hiding mediocrity by claiming
My meaning is clear to those
Who know.’
Second:
Poetry today problems itself:
Compressing fruitful meaning until
Pulp disappears, leaving it
Compressed to star-dense
Proportions, a light-sucking
Mass. Makes me
Sick
Reading stuff like that.
Third:
Poetry today
Suffering from
Minimalism,
Obscurism,
Densification.
Searching for meaning,
This reader finds only
Sickness.
Fourth:
Consider today’s poem—
Dense with meaning—
Makes me sick!
Finis:
Poem.
Dense.
VomitSPLATTER!

Wokeness versus objective reality

You should use your one or two free articles per month from the New York Times to read Bret Stephens’s column “Why Wokeness Will Fail” (published Nov 9, 2021). Although Stephens dwells overmuch on matters associated with racism and the Black Lives Matter movement in particular—opening himself up to charges of “another white guy doing the defensive thing”—his points are well made, accurate, and most importantly, based in reality.

Stephens notes a particularly chilling example from the American Medical Association which apparently has urged redefining terms for patients such that they reflect the inherent racism that created their situation. As he notes, it is Orwellian. I am reminded of the clients I continually met who believed that they could change corporate culture if they just wrote better SOP’s. This is the ‘hall monitor’ approach: give me more rules and I will be empowered. One cannot redefine the world by redefining language. We cannot introduce matters of opinion into descriptive terms of objective reality. A person with little money is ‘poor’ not ‘the victim of economic inequality’. Terms which carry hateful, opinionated connotations do indeed need to be replaced. But projecting a theory onto every situation and redefining the terms? Ridiculous, inaccurate, group-think, the beginning of totalitarianism.

This recognition that Wokeness is a step toward totalitarianism is refreshing. Stephens’s assertion that it is doomed to fail because of the structure of American government and society? I’m not so sure. I would like it to be true, but I have lived too long through the simple—ketchup is a vegetable—and the complex—there were fine persons on both sides—to believe this constant assault on reality will diminish and ultimately fail. Our would-be emperors are often naked, and we must constantly point this out to the gullible.