Poetry
My personal poems and works by favorite authors.
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Australopithecus
My wife and I visited with this little creature when she came to Seattle in 2009. Our kinship extends across time and space, where the exploding supernovas of billions of years ago provided the raw materials to allow our creation. Evolution gives us insight into what we are and how we came to be. It…
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Curtis LeMay
Red and orange glints off of the buffered stainless steel bellies of cruel butterflies, and in curious curvatures the collapsing wooden homes are reflected on bubble glass. The flicker and leap of crackling paper browning and blackening where once was a room partition and a sleeping mat. The horrible bee buzz rumble overhead is the…
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The Ballad of Pete Seeger
One of my great heroes has passed. Pete Seeger was America. He stood up for the rights of workers, fought against corporate warmongers, and worked to unite the races. His music is classic and eternal. His dreams a gift to all of us. This is a meager little song I wrote for him: Pete Seeger…
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Listless
There are shallows of water- here after the tides receded. Gathered together lie small urchins and slimy anemones, tentacles laying flaccid in the salty water. The stones around the pool’s perimeter are stained with dark purple mosses and have cracked through over thousands of years of altered weather. The water is hot, hotter…
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Five Til’ Midnight
“What time do you have?” Looking down at his watch he saw in the smallest of flashing increments the minute hand twitch along its orbit, and the second hand swooping past around the face to pass the last notch at vertical zero. “Five til’ midnight,” was the terse reply. And yet he watched the…
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Ignaz Semmelweis
There was a kick into your ribs and the crack of those bones was an echo from memory, breaking open rib cages performing autopsies for knowledge gained-you recall as you spit up your vivid red blood the learned and the wise who challenged your discovery and denied reality. Your sickness is default stress from…
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Gettysburg, 11/19/1863
The ground still had that smell like a butcher shop that was left bloody in the summer and remained unclean to freeze in the winter. Here staged on this acreage was a performance between participants belonging to the same continental genotype- language the same, culture very different. Clad in blue and gray costumes, smoke…
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Titan
Deep in the bosom of the night he trudged on accompanied only by the sound of staccato static weeping in his ears. Long ago his helmet light went out- plunging him into bewildering darkness he was tempted to contact the outside world to seek out what options he had to survive, if only the radio…
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Undermine the System
There is a cell painted charcoal gray where on an industrial mattress, plasticized and devoid of comforting characteristics, lies a man of slight build. He lives but does not live. His whole world is in this concrete shell- he showers, he eats, he shits and he sleeps. His thoughts are different from the other prisoners.…
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Lives of the Red Suns: Coda
Through the void, in silence radio light streams in defiance, to the lack of listeners nearby. In and out of hydrogen clouds losing bits of the data shroud, the answers the Big Ones searched finally coming to receivers perched. Bowls caved, the structures compromised their metal frames heavily oxidized. Around them lie the cities…
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Lives of the Red Suns V
The Big Ones found a way to create tiny suns of their own, pocketing fusion into buildings all along the coast, pumping excess heat into the seas. Celebrations abounding over the endless energy allowing them to create a new world. They harvested protein from vats, they built enormous radio antennae to see the universe in…
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Lives of the Red Suns IV
The Big Ones spoke about the things they had learned and understood, about how the Red Sun was a massive ball of hydrogen, how its heat and light drove the currents in the sea and stirred the clouds in the sky. They learned about and named the elements and broke them down into atoms and…
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Lives of the Red Suns III
“What care the creatures under the Red Sun for the unknowns out there?” -the aged philosopher Until there were some that asked questions of the sand on the sea shore, or observed the stretched membranes of flying beasts- Who ground transparent glass and saw far over the seas the trading rafts bringing in their…
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Lives of the Red Suns II
Self-awareness under the red sky at dawn. Amongst themselves they are the dominant form of life here. How would any other being come close to their intelligence, their beauty and cunning nature? The sky gave birth to these philosophers and artists, these writers and builders. Only them, around the Red Sun, in this unchanging universe.…
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Lives of the Red Suns
PART ONE 60 Billion worlds fed under regal red giants. The dull red glow intolerable to adapted eyes, like stoked fires burning white. The phototropic life evolved here to accept the light and nourish and flourish within its biome. There are some small self replicating creatures in the ‘underbrush,’ they have a need of…
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Mother of All Demos
Doug Englebart single-handedly invented (along with his amazing development team) the modern world of computers as we understand them, geared for use to non experts and useful for more than just calculating. In 1968 he demonstrated in front of a live audience his vision of a networked office environment, with hyperlinks, a mouse oriented GUI,…
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Vivens Machina
I have a deep affection for robots. All sizes and shapes. I long for the day when artificial intelligence that is indistinguishable from a human’s comes into existence. Imagine the conversations with a sentient robot, what insights we will gain about ourselves from having a third party to contemplate them with. I also fear the…
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What do you see?
Philo T. Farnsworth was the American inventor of electronic (as opposed to mechanical) television. He single-handedly designed and built the first complete system, from cameras to receivers. The first person ever broadcast on his system and the first woman on television, was his wife Pem. He credited her equally responsible for the development of the…
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Consider the lilies of the field…
I have read the Bible in many different versions; some strange translations that leave out the sex and the violence. Versions that illuminate Jesus’ words in bright red ink. I have a beautifully illustrated copy where the black lines that make up the agony of patriarch’s faces, the lines that showcase indifference and paternal powers,…
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Watched
Watches don’t tell the time, they manifest it. The various little voices that tick out speculative moments: the second, the minute, the hour, all accordion noise to waltz through the seasons of our lives. Where the passing of time is measured by the heat of the summer sun, its mercurial reflection on winter…
The Numinous Cosmos 