history
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No Big Decision
Truman sat and stared out of an Oval Office window the rose garden was bare and the old President dead. Here before him was a weapon to cease all war unspeakable destruction, but unspeakable attraction. He was shown the footage a mushroom cloud rising from the desert floor briefly a new sun in the dark…
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Herculaneum (morning)
Tufa, its all tufa underfoot and of course Mount Vesuvius stands beyond – mist obscuring the upper slopes. Cold rain, so unusual falls and fills the pool in the courtyard porphyry tiles, marble tiles amplified and magnified under the water, the amplitude of drops creating overlapping wave fronts obscuring designs of little brown clams and…
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Frozen Waltz
Those long marching columns of Slavic men, moving feet to rhythms immoral, unpluralistic uniforms flashy enameled buttons and badges shinning well-timed clouds of breath issuing on each exhale in Red Square. The television, garish color and static of NTSC, those tanks roll and those feet go solid and secure they sing: Sing to…
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26 April 1986
I don’t know what I am doing but that’s just how it goes from this control room I can see a march of lights bright red and gold like May Day in Moscow missles rolling away on diesel trucks the crowds in awe at apparatchiks in uniform vibrations underfoot like the stamping feet of endless…
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Sci-Fi Society
We were young crowded around those tables knocking elbows cockeyed looking at the ladies trying to be suave trying to be Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart with Cagney faces but we played fire with words hitting keys hard typewriters splintering that wide future seductive, erotic in the way virgin boys dreamed about it while the…
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Idols of the World
There are idols in the world. The dark, churlish lurkers, the bright and shiny golden calves, the multi-headed monstrosities of ancient times; unambiguously different yet they all share the same origin: made by the hands of humans. It is almost impossible to express the reason for this type of work. Why do people create gods…
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Carl Sagan Portrait
I enjoy portraiture, though often they end up being more caricatures than perfect likenesses. This is a multi-format painting done with Japanese ink, watercolor, color pencil, pastel, and acrylic paints. The subject is Carl Sagan in the middle of speaking to someone(s). Here is our pale blue dot the Earth and in the foreground, Mars.…
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Welcome to the Machine
It was a red-letter day in the history of science. They had come to the Artificial Intelligence laboratory by the dozens; each of them one of the greatest minds from nearly every field of human intellectual endeavor. Here they congregated to participate in the penultimate Turing test of the Google Omni-Device™, the world’s most advanced…
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Old Editions Live
While walking through a bookstore, new or used, I always stop and look for my favorite authors. I idle by their alphabetical presence and run my eyes hungrily over the spines of their books. I am always looking for first editions, or copies of works I do not possess. But sometimes I find a unique…
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Some Recent Drawings
I’ve been working on several writing projects lately…poetry, short stories, and a big essay on the lyrics of Van Dyke Parks. In the interim I have also completed some new artwork. There are not enough hours in the month to work on everything equally, as my brain jumps from one thing to another so my…
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Da Vinci’s Folly
She hides, huddled behind packing crates wrapped in muslin, jarred from riding over the one-two thrusts of cobblestone road. She’s on a hide out from Hitler. How many journeys has she been on? Several – some shorter than others. Slipshod movement from one room to another, minor fingerprints leaving trace oils on her desperately dry…
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A Poetry Reading 3
Here is a recording of me reading “Funeral Train.” Time travel expenses are all paid for.
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Yet Galileo Still Moves
“I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments and demonstrations.” -Galileo Galilei
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ET Calls Collect
This essay is in response to the open letter recently published by several luminaries in many diverse fields regarding active attempts at communication with ETIs . You can read the open letter here: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/meti_statement_0.html First contact. This two word sentence can birth evocations broad and diverse: horror, fear, hope. The meetings between one society less advanced than another have…
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2015: A Choice of Futures
Arthur C. Clarke wrote a book titled 1984, Spring: a Choice of Futures, similar in format to his earlier nonfiction book Profiles of the Future about mankind’s options for that hallowed, once future year. I yanked the title for my essay as it is most apt to describe our current state of flux here on planet Earth. We have…
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The Future Past Due
My new book, The Future Past Due, is now available on Amazon.com and other distribution outlets! As the back description states, “The future is long past due. Inside this book is an equal mix of mystery, history, imagination, poetry, and science fiction. From worlds long turned to ash, to ashes reborn into worlds; find within…
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Arthur Charles Clarke
How many fathers can one child have? You have your biological father, sure. But, if you were like me and that man was not present in your formative years, who would take his place? I was raised by my grandparents, and while they provided a roof over my head and an education, they did not…
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Gordon House
My wife and I recently had the privilege to visit the only “open to the public” Frank Lloyd Wright house in the Pacific Northwest. The home, known after its original owners as the Gordon House, is located at 869 West Main Street in Silverton, Oregon. The house is located in a public garden where it was…
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the Salk Vaccine
Suspended ruefully in its own shine an object of vast proportion, it heaves forth light in all spectrums gamma, ultraviolet, radio spinning off photons to travel 4 or 5 or 6 million million miles across infinity settling on satellites and gas giants on our own blue-green world. Its hydrogen fusing in a core unseen the…
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1989 (Birthday)
This poem was written for my step-son Josh for his 25th birthday: Hirohito, Emperor Showa goes and dies, some Eastern gods fail no matter where the sun rise sizes up the island chains, and cold January rains. To see in time a new reign too from the USA, with a Vice President shallowing in the…
The Numinous Cosmos 