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Irises

Mockingbird


    ELUSIVE, EFFERVESCENT
In the yellow fingers of forsythia,
in the pink blossoming quince,
where fleeting wrens flit between branches
amongst oscillating cold showers and smiling sunshine;
and, where February marches off the stage.
Nestled in the valley's sumptuous flesh
and upon the West Hills breast lie Portland,
    I ride with a spray of sweet smelling Daphne
    beside me, a present for the queen of hearts,
    drunk on Spring and singing for joy
    and the brevity of life.

Arching across a classical sky
a radiant rainbow,
elusive, effervescent,
rivers of electric lights,
translucent green and melodies sing,
city of bridges that span
mysterious waters,
calm and meaningless
and forever receding.

Wrinkled and wizened
the gray afternoon limps off
grumbling to the breeze,
while young whores,
with pig tails and baseball caps
predatorily stalk adults
their sick, pimp parents target-
    its a poorly kept secret,
    no one is supposed to know.

Mannequins in cars
carefully made up,
their thighs caressing
wrinkle-free garments,
street lights, soft drinks
and silent cemeteries
quietly folding into night.

A flash of lightening
briefly illuminates oblivion
merrily, merrily
merrily
    a velvet glove
    darkness descends
    through the gracious quiet.
 
 

    GOD'S HOUSE
God's house is in heaven,
but He resides here on Earth, too.
Deciduous trees bud in the woods,
where song birds sing from their foliage.

Spring spreads across the hills and valleys
like the diffuse colors of dawn, joyous,
and soaring on sweet dream's gossamer wings-
its in Spring that angels visit us.

God, if I speak the truth,
and am humbly trying
to convey your will with these poems;
then, grace me with a sign.

Show, not as a burning bush
or dark towering cloud, yourself
to her who, weary with sorrow, sleeps;
and, flood her every moment with your love.

You know, better than Spring showers,
better than birds can sing,
is the warm smile on my love's face,
and radiant happiness emanating from her gentle eyes..
 
 

 NEVER A SECOND GLANCE
No one gives you a second glance,
as day by day, year after year
you drag your weary way,
dull and listless with misery.
Nature like an engaged machine
grinding away is implacable to our fate.

The mind, they say, is free: to agree;
but, now minds are rusty and rutted
and admit only vice and corruption,
like arcade games that accept only plug tokens.

So at last your arrogant faces
turn further from the Sun.
Its been years since you've noticed anything
the large buildings with dead eyes,
singing song birds, the first Spring sprays.
For your interest always passes relentlessly towards business.

And, anyway, the intense young are more strident,
they get their marching orders
from those who avoid the open air
and lurk behind locked doors,

where hired darkness plots
the next assault against your existence.
 
 

                IMAGINATION
Trudging down the rain drenched sidewalks,
when suddenly, the bright blossoming colors,
of a Sun swept landscape, embrace me,
all about are musical sounds,
vast expansive panoramas extend away
in every direction, and, the world is bursting
with an infinity of possibilities.

The people passing around me
are so many muted shadows,
whose hopeless hearts can't realize
the promises that their brains create.
And so they repudiate and reject
all life outside the narrow twisted ruts
they're conditioned to endure.

Even if they found themselves
miraculously transported beneath
star filled Southern skies,
still they carry their torturous cages with them,
like so much superfluous baggage.

Its amazing how one's imagination
exceeds one's capacity to experience.
 
 
 

    OCEANS OF GRAY
Day dawns on oceans of gray
while song birds persistently sing
in the trees that groan
under the assault of chain saws.
Our forests are being destroyed!

And, while some harvesting is necessary
to build homes, furniture
and a thousand other things
that our civilization requires,
still millions of trees are destroyed;

because, we are lazy and stupid.
Man has been blessed by God
with a mind so that he
might reason and create,
and instead all he does is destroy.

The environment, which serves as home
to the animals are ravaged,
the rivers choked with silt and pollution
are turning into open sewers,
and wonderful landscapes are disappearing forever!

There are fewer and fewer forests,
rivers vanish into irrigation pipes,
wild animals are exterminated,
and the productive land becomes poorer each day-
the environment, which grows uglier and exhausted is being ruined.

However, today I'll prune the fruit trees
I planted with my own hands,
and enjoy the mini environment of my garden-park
that's a refuge for birds, squirrels, raccoons and man
near the heart of the city.

Each of us does what we can.
 
 

        TO BE HAPPY
To be happy that is the great thing.
But, how does one accomplish
this august feat?  Obviously, for God
to be good, it wants all of its children
to enjoy this gracious gift of life-
in other words to be happy!
And, equally obvious is the fact
that all individuals are unique creations-
so many walking miracles.
However, the surest way to attain happiness
is to use reason, to further our understanding
of the nature of anything and how it inter-relates
with the rest of the universe.
For ourselves, we should sincerely be honest;
and, earnestly speak the truth,
as Shakespeare says, "to thine own self be true".
Then, accept what Nature gives us
cheerfully and with a good grace,
in accordance with the nature of our being,
to the extent that it does not
directly deprive others form doing the same.
 
 

        TO THE MOUNTAINS
Dawn breaks cold and sad.
The cupola sky is slate gray.
Across the valley austere mountains
are vague with distance,
no features are visible
in the scanty light.

As more light begins to filter
through the clouds,
the landscape becomes more distinct.
I can see lakes of argent fog
nestled near the bottom of blue foothills.

Driving towards them,
the mountains start to grow;
gradually, their sides are covered
with fissures, outcrops and autumn colored trees.

People are like the mountains:
the closer one gets,
the better one can see them.
 
 

    SEATTLE RIOT
Behind the headlines
hides the truth-
of staged riots.

The bruised buildings,
the shattered glass.

All the World's a stage,
whose play tonight-
the Martyrdom of freedom.

Funeral urns
tell tales
of moral bankruptcies
brought about
by brooding power
who weaves chapters
of deliberate destruction.

But, the umbilical cords
of phrases ineffably tears
at our moderatelly
imbibed enjoyments-
while furtive whispering

confesses its dark secrets,
how tyranny's corruption
sinks joyous celebrations
into the World's wound,
and blasphemously steals
our own ruin
from children's nurseries.
 
 

    MEDIA EVENTS
Graves call at infinity
for healing herbs
for soul's wounds.

The salty brine of the sea
surges against the body shore.

Already hair ignites
the dark distances,
already seeking
crevices in the void
finger nails and toe nails
scratch at the great beyond.

At the extreme limits
our porous skin
gropes, though dead,
in blind fear
of second births;

where silent skulls
grin celebrating
the many resurrections,

while witnessing
deliberately induced
youth's deaths-
drinking into oblivion.

All aboard
the Right Wing's ship:
the good ship
PROHIBITION!
 
 

                                                                RUMOR MILL
    Rumor Mill contends that the radical right is now actively engaged in trying to expand their policies of prohibition to include alchohol.  The following is a preview of what, some believe, can be expected from the radical right in the months to come. It has been their publicly stated objective for over 20 years.  It is believed, by them, that to succeed a propaganda campaign of massive proportions will be necessary, which means a dramatic increase in the number of highly visibile violent crimes, and all the human tragedies that will cause in order to condition the public to accept Prohibition.  If this is true then quite literally no one will be safe and no one's property will be secure.
    At first observers of the radical right thought that efforts were being made to improve their field agents moral, but it is now believed to be more devious than just that.  About three months ago local radical right field agents were reported as saying everyone in the Pacific North West was busted and there was nothing left to do.  A lot of disgruntlement began to become apparent, due to their loss of income.  Then, the radical right agents suddenly changed their tune.  Statements were publicly made that there was more to do, and their customary arrogance returned.  A multi-phase media blitzerig commenced.  First, its believed that a 14 yr. old girl was induced to drink herself to death, and the people who were present were charged with felonies.  Further, it is believed that the one adult (who is retarded) and the two other youths were deliberately set up for what eventually resulted in a $10,000 pay day for the radical right agents.  Consider the needs of the radical right propaganda machine: who would get more attention an adult drinking themself to death or a child (?); who would get more attention a male or female (?); how have the radical right field agents been padding their bank accounts and getting more media attention by having only one person involved or several people invoved - in this instance at a "drinking party"(?).  Second, a contrived knife attack on one of their high school students resulting in a serious wound and two arrests.  This incident was designed to generate support from the field agents (a child operative injured but not killed in one of their operations will tend to rally sagging moral more effectively than almost anything else they could contrive).  This incident was designed to generate disatisfaction with public schools and more support for republican education proposals, which are designed to give 80% of children worse education.  Further, besides rallying support for belegured field agents, who had been caught supposedly systimatically exploiting their own and their neighbors children (for financial gain) by having them sexually abused by adults who had been deliberately perverted for that purpose, which gained them $5,000 and didn't hurt moral.  The kid had been placed in the school to fulfill two functions.  One, to set up other children,. to get them to break the law, and, two, to physically intimidate other children by beating up classmates, which is what started the retaliatory knife fight incident.  Third, a riot was said to have been staged again in Seatle, to give drinking college kids bad publicity - they wanted to have drinking associated with violence and the destruction of public property.  The incident was designed to establish in the public, via the propaganda machine, the association of drinking and danger.
    Two other prohibition related stories were manufactured.  They are mentioned to demonstrate what we can realistically expect, except on a much broader scale.  First, Rumor Mill contends that the story about a $10 million marijuana growing ring is phony.  For example how could 2 or 3 people single handedly run 25 houses, transport and sell that much 'pot' and make all the connections necessary, while obtaining a specially constructed truck in a couple of  years without being busted.  The operation was induced, set up, and operated by the radical right from beginning to end.  Remember each house in the greated Portland area had been checked out by house breaking teams and thermal imaging squads during the time frame in question.  They couldn't find 25 houses?   The $10 million figure was ridiculously high, too.  Who operated the houses with impunity if not radical right agents?  And why weren't they busted too?  Also, the only people who can move  that volume of marijuana are the radical right.  Rumor Mill contends the story is a fake designed to distract and decieve the public.  Second, there was a tragedy that was said to have been bogus.  A young teen went to two men's house (the men were in their early 20's) and took her very young sister, rather then go to church.  In the house were amphetamines.  You know stimulants similar to the ones our president Bush used to use.  The men were Hispanics.  Kidnapping charges were pressed.  Some beleive that mom and dad deliberately set their kids up, in other words pimped them.  The younger one was sent because of the propaganda value of such a young child.  What teenager will voluntarily take a troublesome sister to meet boy friends, especially if they are 'men' and drugs are involved.  Some believe, because there are not any more speed freaks left to bust locally that the radical right brought these two Hispanics up here expressly for the purpose of setting them up and busting them.  Another $5,000 pay day for the field agents involved.  You know the familiar scenario import the drugs and the users, just like they've done numerous times before (see previous essays) so as to decieve the public by pretending that their is a problem.  If true it is a perfect example of the extremely sordid, vice ridden and corrupt scenarios we can look forward to when the radical right expands its favorite policy - prohibition.  Remember, it is maintained that the radical right can not exist without crime and sin.  Supposedly it is their function, that is how they make their money, and if they aren't active enough they are dropped.  Further, if true, there is every monetary incentive to generate as many of  these tradgedies as possible.  Any one and everyone becomes a possible target.  Beside, they believe it will require an incredibly expanded effort, in order for the radical right to shape public opinion.  For the radical right agents this means going from a situation where there is nothing left to do, which means no more money, to a situation where more money will come rolling in, for a greater number of crimes, than ever before.
    Rumor Mill contends initially it worked something like this,  starting at the first of the year, the agents were given hit targets and re-activated.  This helpted to further the process of their corruption by keeping them active in the above way, while providing them with recent substantial pay offs .  It also helped to distract the agents from national politics, where a 1.6 trillion Repulican tax cut would underfund medicare, and socail security to name but 2 vitally important domesticat programs.  It would also impair our ability to buy down the national debt, which would result in higher interest rates for the owners of the debt; but would impair our ability to generate an economic recovery from the current recession.  The field agents would erroneously think themselves immune, because of the flood of 'new' victims with their subsequent pay days.  The radical right's factional interests would then try to camoflage an effort to introduce foreign labor laws, which would reduce labor costs (depressing salaries) and injure while impairing American markets and injuring organized labor - their political opponents.  However, a large percent of American citizens' standard of living would go down the toilet.  Meanwhile, we watch the further constiction of wealth, instead of sound economic policies and lower interest rates that would broaden prosperity and provide a wide enough economic base to generate a sustainable period of economic expansion. Instead, if the radical right has its way, we will watch the radical right become more vice ridden and more corrupt - so contends the Rumor Mill.
 
 
 
 
 

    Rumor Mill suggests that there are some amazing parallels between the two Bush administrations and Iraq.  If, as some contend that the Iraq vrs. U.S.A. war was a media event designed to get king george the first re-elected and shore up sagging political support in Iraq for Hussein; then, with a recession on tap, disastrous education proposals, exploitative environmental proposals, and inadequate energy proposals the need was there to distract the public again.  And, surprise with the same people ruining things now, as when his father was President, the Iraq connection has been called into play again.  Iraq is currently dissatisfied with it's leader, and King George the II could use the help here in the polls.  Its just like last time, when they tried to pay for Iraq's war debt with agricultural loans through a bank in Rome, a bogus military operation designed to distract the public and generate support from a perceived foreign threat.  In other words, to place it in a transitive or Aristotelian logic If A=B and B=C, then A=C.      If Pres. Bush started a bogus war with Iraq for political purposes  (A=B) and if a military conflict were started with Iraq by Pres. Bush's son acting as Pres. for political purposes (B=C); then, (A=C) and both are phony contrived events.  Further, if we conclude that the people who ran the first Bush Presidency were in league with Hussein in Iraq, then it makes no sense for those same people to suddenly attack Iraq now!  It becomes, what some people contend, a logical imperative, which the facts seem to support - so they say.
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