Sunday, August 23, 2015

Nutrition Attrition


***
Welcome. The door is open. Mouths are agape.
The Centers for Disease Control are accepting all applications.
***
We are busy, we have needs, we need to stay busy. Busybodies operating by delivery, remote, wireless, streaming, buffering, glitching, lagging, spiking, numbing up, dumbing down, working our wares as though anyone else cares, but they don't, unless their in on it too. This is where we notice the difference between us, a sea separates our islands made of sand. Deserted.
***
Loneliness, the disease, incurable with its myriad of side effects is considered cosmetic by insurance companies. Cosmetic companies combat loneliness, or so they portray.
***
Cancer makes its rounds in every neighborhood, like the Jehovah's Mormons gang, making house calls and leaving an (un)open invitation to witness the good news about the end of times, (un)fortunately membership is (not)free.
***
Western medicine has noted an epidemic of anti-bio-tics. Farm-a-sue-ticals and their cash crops are thriving, leaving a scar of deforestation where there were once trees.
***
A slow death. Suicide. Genocide. A plague of nations, we spread our reach, teach about an ounce of prevention, administered with a pound of sugar. You catch more bees with honey. Honey, have you seen a bee recently?
***
The doctor doesn't know. The future is blight. The end is in sight, one by one, until the bottle is done.
Sober is a scary word. Perceptive is not just a perception. Being alert is arousing. Sobriety may stimulate the regions where none should tread (lightly). Participation is elective in mandatory matters such as free radicals and anti-oxi-dants.
***
Peering through the icy front windows whose pains are laced by (in)valance, we see details in the decor. The eyes may lie, but the pupil's nose grows by learning and building (in)tolerance for other's taste, style, decor, or motif.
***
Daily doses of digestives are dissolving among the colorful diet of extra letters. Randomly assigned, codes for the ingredients, pronunciation not required.
***
Voluntarily we ingest our synthetics. Artificial intelligence is (well) underway. Open wide, step inside. Don't worry, there are no mirrors in this fun house.
***
Malnourishment of the soul is the new starving children once prayed for and invited to the dinner table. The dinner table was a square, rectangle or ideally round price of furniture once used that was burned in the Baby Boom ban against insidious domestication. Consumed in consumerism, convenience in a chewable.
***
Physicians do not treat (mal)nutrition. You are what you eat. Unsympathetic synthetics are ungrateful guests, taking up residence in your brain making sweet misery and harvesting sour grapes.
***
No pain, no gain does not mean (just) addicted and (not) afflicted.
***
SRO-No Vacancy.



Image of painting By Anonymous (Düsseldorfer Auktionshaus) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Saturday, August 15, 2015

Home-less-ness


Plenty are at perfect peace with their past. That is a private residence.
They always say they wouldn't want it any other way.
After all, it made them who they are today, and I guess tomorrow too.
Some of these people play the lottery, they have hope.
Of course, I am jumping too far ahead,
off a cliffhanger
I will backtrack seven paces-
_The gamble of being born, a sense of place you were told
Welcome and Home,
Home means Safe
You are always Welcome Here.

They say you can't win the jackpot unless you play the lottery.
They should say there is a winner and many losers, don't let chance decide.

My home felt bigger than the Heidegger house in which I dwelt.
My house felt like someone else's I was sitting in for safe keeping.
I never liked playing house.
__I was 11 when I became a woman, an elementary vixen, periodically out of my element.
___I was 12 when I received my first catcall. It was Spanglish which I didn't comprehend but felt the words like acupuncture beneath my summer clothes. I can still see his cigar brown skin thirsty for my foreign skin.
But I was safe.

We had a group home come to my little town.
____I was 13 when I was robbed of my first kiss, my girlfriends new boyfriend new how to speak in drooling tongues, his black eyes describing his wants.
But I was safe.
_____At 14 my green eyed boyfriend tried to kill me.
______At 16 a wizard tried to take me to Never Land forever,
I returned home despite his plans.
_______At 18 a professor told me all females fail his science class, he failed me,
I left home forever.

I took a gamble (I paid with free will)
I wait for my number to be called.

I wrote a poem as a little girl about suicide, it was loved.
As a woman I write poems about life, they are hated.

Now I am at Home wondering how I got
(out of)
Here
looking around, I fear nothing
is mine, like this borrowed time that cannot be returned.
I am Spent,
I am no longer safe.




Image titled 'The Way Home', By Cecile Walton, illustrator (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36668) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. 

Sunday, August 9, 2015

Articulating Plankton


'Tis nothing new that poets should speak with such passion that their syllables ooze with emphasis and project consonants that bounce off the walls, each whole word ending up stretching into its own elongated echo chamber.
And poets that use their hands like composers of the Sea Symphony, filling even the empty silence with so many notes the empty becomes loud. Knowing that to gesticulate is far too forceful, instead they demonstrate that a magic spell is made from thin air, naturally. Not of invisible nature, but so thin you could not see it until this poet who keeps trying to touch it and show it to you, to trace its outlines between the two of you...finds some semblance of rhythm and notices you hear it too.
A particular poet passionately appeals to professionals. The artists collar is colored blue for the speech, among his serious peers he evokes the voice of reason, a scientific observation posing clearly for the rational, logical and bromidic.
In the fields of ever altering change that is both constrained and contained by subjective experience,
Hypothesis are proposed: Problems are solved (ac-cord-ing to the values we plug in)

A poet is describing this brilliant oceanic phenomena as though it were a recently uncovered lyrical language, an opportunistic new found flow of vocabulary like rich nutrients abundant in the cyclical occurrence of upwelling.
Where every change is the constant, from the Galapagos, David Whyte ponders first deeply, the mixing of worlds...
Poets and scientists, the clash of temperatures where laws are asserted as theories and expression explodes into reaction, a fission of fusion striking agitated chaos which elicits sparks from his eyes, a magic trick. The eyes navigate around the work of art like a sailor at night on land, terrestrial in his element, grounded and in awe of bioluminescence of the sea that flickers gaseous royal blue arching splotches of the elusive green flash.
Bioluminescence, light of life in the language of liquid mixology from the shore, the poet writes the score and the scientist keeps notes.
“To my mind, the whole of existence and/or creation is actually trying to find an internal anchorage inside us which reflects its astonishing symmetry outside of us.” -David Whyte @PugetSoundTEDX-David Whyte @ PugetSoundTEDX
An additional note by David Whyte (also read aloud at TEDX Puget Sound):


Image By Shane Anderson [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Friday, August 7, 2015

Caught in a Web of Cliché’s


I.
Growing up in a small town made me want to travel.
Maybe it was the tall trees that made me believe growing up means moving out of the tree house and not letting roots sink in the same grove.
Then again, maybe it was all that camping as a kid. A taste of the gypsy life.
I have been lost in the woods, more than once metaphorically and twice physically.
Even with this experience under my belt I have wondered how one could successfully achieve getting lost when asked to, it's very difficult to plan. 
This is also sometimes called “running away”.
When I was 13, I boarded a Greyhound bus from Northern California to Colorado alone to see a boy whose family lived in Dot Zero, a decent place to start a life of discovery.
II.
Explorers have no fear of getting lost or of foreign objects nor of mythical creatures. Our imagination is able to create places and things better than reality, which makes it easy to overlook what you are seeking. Marco Polo was disappointed with the unicorn which is why explorers should leave their expectations in their own small towns. 
Explorers and Gypsies are not the same thing, one travels for leisure the other for survival, I forget which is which.
To Explore we are searching, seeking.
To Wander we are finding, discovering.
When one explores, they have plotted expectations and projections onto their mind map.
When one wanders, they discover what could not have been predicted. They find serendipity growing like fungi, strange exotic gems in dark places, like behind eyelids, noticing the smoothest stone and pondering how a rock can resemble a baby's soft cool cheek and not needing an answer from the rattling, gurgling creek. 
Echoes are nothing to fear.
Shadows remind us we are never alone.
III.
Near my desk there is a wooden square piece of art that features the quote, “Not all who wander are lost.”
That sign is everywhere. 
It does not tell one where to go but provides directions.
My step-father never graduated high-school since rock and roll guitar players 'don't need no education'. After battling some sort of “leukemia” or “cancer” and winning, he thinks he is wiser for it, that he was chosen to be stronger than X. 
It sleeps inside his body, he was chosen to finish learning his elementary lessons. 
On my last visit he had read an autobiography of some guitar player like Santana-living vicariously only costs $22.90 (Hardcover)-My stepfather regurgitated to me some profound thought from this book as though it were his own formulation of truth, something like "I may be religiously homeless, but I am spiritually at home" or maybe it was "I may not be religious but my spirituality is sacred," I don't know-each of those are cliché’s that you can hang a priest's robe on. I am not pro (being) found anyway.
In a class I took on Dante I used a paraphrasing of the last cliché about not being religious but my beliefs are sacred (in lieu of the hippie spirituality reference), a classmate called the comment "flap-doodle", I had to look that up. 
Sturgeon's Law applies to everything subject to subjectivity.
IV.
The movie Interstellar  was epic by definition. 
"We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars, now we just look down at our place in the dirt," says Cooper in the movie. 
"When you look up you see very different things than when you look down." Brian Greene noted this astute observation in his book, “The Fabric of the Cosmos”.
Perspective is subjective, Sturgeon's Law applies.
In the bold and daring movie, exploration is emphasized often as a noble goal, although its actually more like a noble gas. Evoking the explorer in us, provoking our inner pioneer, incanting Marco Polo, is laced with a venomous ingredient called "Manifest Destiny", a different type of MSG. 
V.
We just flew by Pluto, a decade too late for it to matter.
We are on our way to Mars to pee on it, put a flag on it, figure out where all that methane is coming from. Here on Earth science has theorized that methane is toxic hot gas, waste in excess, sounds like our type of environment.
VI.
Dark matter is still debated. How will they know when they bump into it? Will it resist or devour or pretend it doesn't care if we are there are here, or not?
Time travel will always be a thing. Travel will always be the thing that yields the highest interest for your time spent. 
Considering how often people dwell in their sweet memories, remembering has become a second home sweet home except the housing is free and everything works out better than anticipated.
Travel nudges us so we can remember how to use all of our five or six senses. 
Wandering is traveling without a destination, wandering is the journey, the view, the experience that takes you from who you were to who you are and possibly who you can become. Infinite paths open.
Of course “not all who wander are lost” but maybe the wanderers are still working on it. 
Looking up at the sky at night it seems like it should be easy to become lost in a sea of expanding infinity, our own atomic volume being relationally a speck of dust in the cosmic thrust of “things”.
Looking down at the “pale blue dot”-seeing pictures from Hubble of our luscious spinning planet amid black space and amidst astronomical violence it seems impossible to become lost on this little encased bubble of paradoxical paradise, the probabilities, the possibilities all seem finite and calculable, reasonable considering the underlying chaos. 
VII.
Looking down, I have seen the forest for the trees. As a frequent traveler among the deep woods, I have learned the architecture, heard the whispers, smelled spring leaps, and touched soft skin that also bleeds.
Looking up, I have seen just beyond what I cannot see, a speck of blue, a hint of the beyond, a sense that I am trapped inside with the trees, rooted and I reach and stretch with them. I have seen the trees for the forest just passing by.
I always stop to wonder why people keep wanting to get discovered, to make discoveries, to pee on planets, prove that dark matter notices us, to reverse or distort the time we created as anatomically correct-
and I have such a hard time getting lost, even in Dot Zero.
A pioneer sees the trees for the forest. 
VIII.
Not to lose perspective but if spacetime travel becomes human practice I see unlimited potential. 
If spacetime travel grows into fruition, the soul mate theory contained in the apple of knowledge just fell on Newton's head, dropping the singularity of the one and only right one dead. I’d hitch a ride on that bus. Kismet will never find me. Maybe I could become invisible, or is that dark matter? Does it matter if no one can see me? I guess it depends on your perspective.
Sometimes spacetime travel is called “running away”(with reality), theoretically.
Conditions are infinitely subject to change. Sturgeon’s Law always applies.

Image By NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute (http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA17171) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. 
Earth is noted by the arrow as seen from Cassini positioned near Saturn.