Saturday, March 22, 2014

Readings: A Prophetic Poem

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Obituary for the middle class

This whole thing, this way of living beside a can opener
beside a microwave beside a son beside a daughter
beside a river going to college, you get up
and kiss the mortgage and go go go with coffee-veins
and burger-fries and pack your soul on ice
till sixty-five, when you sit down with a lake
and have a long talk with your breath
and cast your mind far away from shore, fish nibbling
the mosquitoes of your thoughts: they will whisper of this life
a hundred years from now to children before sleep
who will call them liars, “Once upon a time,
they had two and half bathrooms and tiny houses
for their cars and doctors who listened
through tubes to their fat hearts, they named
their endeavors and beliefs four-wheel drive,
twenty-percent-off sale, summer vacation, colonoscopy,
variable-rate loan, inheritance,” and we will be
as gods to them in that they won’t believe in us,
and we will be spared the eternity of their worship
as they will be spared money, the counting
and the having and the memory of the middle share
of what gets harder and harder to call a pie

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Friday, March 14, 2014

Rodak's Writings: Optimism



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Optimism

I woke up
feeling nuttier
than a Mormon.

I figured I could take a second wife.
I could turn the two of them out
as a tag team
on the mud wrestling circuit.

I could make a million bucks
and retire to Boca Raton
with my girlfriend.

I could spend
the rest of eternity
on a nude beach,
tossing bright red chunks
of the loser I used to be
to the screaming white gulls
of deep blue heaven.
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Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Rodak's Writings: Whenever

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First I discovered
the poet and writer
Maggie Estep
by reading her obit
in the NY Times.

Next I began
listening to the songs
of Judee Sill dead
way back in ‘79
whose name
I had never known
until someone
dropped it last week.

Now I want
Maggie to tell
me a new story
Judee to sing
me a new song.

Only show me the door.
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Sunday, March 9, 2014

Riffs: Religiolitics

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It now seems certain that the crisis in the Ukraine is merely one more subtle element of B. Hussein Obama's Islamo-Marxist plot to destroy the Church--and thus all true religion--by forcing Catholic employers to indirectly fund employees' demonic use of artificial birth control through ACA-compliant insurance plans. Film at 11.
 

If Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and other atheists are allowed to have fewer children how can the Church long survive?



How long must America's millions of persecuted faithful wait for Pope Francis to raise an army of the righteous in order to launch a Just War in their defense? With many more eager martyrs tunneling in from the south on a daily basis, the time to strike is NOW.



Concerned citizens may wish to form alliances with one of more of the following right-minded organizations:

Lutherans for Large Litters
Calvinists Calving for Christ
The Baby-Bump Baptists
Methodists for the Maintenance of Maternity
Congregationalists Coupling for Conception
Episcopalians for Exponential Population Explosion
Unitarians for Fertile Friendships, or
Mormons for More Mormons
 
Bottom of Form

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Readings: Kurt Vonnegut's Deadeye Dick



Just now, I read the last page of Kurt Vonnegut’s strange and depressing novel, Deadeye Dick. The characters are all very real, in that not one of them has at his or her core any essentially redeeming quality. Unless, that is, one is able to see a futile and ephemeral existence, in itself, as a redeeming quality. This morning, anyway, I cannot.

I characterize the novel as depressing largely because I recognize myself in it. I am depressing—to me anyway. I noted a couple of passages from the novel which illustrate what I’m talking about here:

p. 208  We all see our lives as stories, it seems to me, and I am convinced that psychologists and sociologists and historians and so on would find it useful to acknowledge that. If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended, and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.

            […]

p. 209  This could be true of nations, too. Nations might think of themselves as stories, and the stories end, but life goes on. Maybe my own country’s life as a story ended after the Second World War, when it was the richest and most powerful nation on earth, when it was going to ensure peace and justice everywhere, since it alone had the atom bomb.


Deadeye Dick was published in 1982.  And, like Vonnegut’s earlier novels, it treats of shadowy evils that give rise to various national paranoias, which, seemingly, only small clusters of Americans seem to notice or fret about at any given time.

A plot element in Deadeye Dick is that the narrator’s hometown is mysteriously destroyed by a neutron bomb. The official story is that this was an accident that occurred when a bomb being trucked from some unknown Point A to an unnamed Point B was somehow triggered as it passed through the fictional Midland City, Ohio.

This official version of the total destruction of the citizens of Midland City is accepted as gospel by almost everybody. There is a small organization of activist farmers from Southwestern Ohio, who aren’t buying the government’s explanation of the tragedy. This group is passing out leaflets near the perimeter of the blast zone, the gist of the message of which is: 

p. 231  …that the United States of America was now ruled, evidently, by a small clique of power brokers who believed that most Americans were so boring and ungifted and small time that they could be slain by the tens of thousands without inspiring any long-term regrets on the part of anyone.

And there you have Vonnegut’s prescient description of the paranoiac musings of the “Truthers” with regard to the destruction of the World Trade Center and the lives of several thousand Americans working in the buildings that fell.

And there is more: Midland City, the buildings of which are all still standing, for that is how the neutron bomb is designed to work, is now surrounded by barbed wire, mine fields, and fences—a stockade patrolled by the military and off-limits to all citizens, unless accompanied by soldiers. The rumor is that the city will be used as a dwelling place for refugees from Haiti and other such depressed nations. One of the pamphlet-distributing farmers expresses this opinion:

p. 233-234   “They aim to bring slavery back… They never gave up on it… These slaves aren’t going to be Americans. They’re going to come by the boatload from Haiti and Jamaica and places like that… Do you honestly believe that fence is ever coming down?”

These passages immediately brought to my mind currently circulating speculations about the fenced and very hush-hush “FEMA Camps” supposedly being constructed across the U.S.  What also comes to mind is the very obvious militarization of the municipal police forces (think Watertown, MA during the dragnet following the Boston Marathon incident) and the huge amounts of ammunition being bought up by federal authorities, but not being sent to the war zones.

The farmer, when questioned about just who these people are, says that they have no name:

“They don’t want us to know their name, so they don’t have a name. You can’t fight back against something that don’t have a name.”

And so it goes.

Friday, February 7, 2014

Reflections: On the Execution of a Poet



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Aliki Barnstone has brought to the attention of her Facebook friends the execution in Iran of poet and activist Hashem Shabbani. Among several posts shared by Aliki is this one.



Also shared by Aliki is a prison letter smuggled out through friends of Shabbani, appealing for help from the international community; help which did not prevail. I now use the following excerpt from that prison letter to preface an older poem that I wrote about our society, some twenty years ago:



“I have tried to remove all the obstacles that divide the street (the public eye) from the truth and make it to live in illusion that formulated by the tyrants to design a life according to their will.”



Them


To glimpse one briefly in the flesh
is an occasion,
a topic
for suppertime conversation,
a chance for the limelight
at the pub.
Prolonged exposure, though, might blind,
could well derange a
vulgar mind
with spiteful dreams,
resentments, green
prerequisites to homicide

and crime.  So they have their hired guns,
high-voltage walls and
vicious dogs,
to buffer piqued humanity—
orchestrate nightly
on TV
(boxed high behind the one-way glass)
their coliseum
passion plays
of man and beast,
of dust and blood—
eyes strain to glimpse their fateful thumbs.

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Note: this poem is constructed using a format with which I was experimenting at the time, based on linear syllable counts in repeated patterns.
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Thursday, February 6, 2014

Rodak's Writings: Boundary Violation

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Note: the following poem has been extensively revised from an earlier version, entitled "Down By the River."  The bulk of the revisions were suggested by my Facebook friend, poet and scholar, Aliki Barnstone, who generously took the time to read and make editorial suggestions which she felt would tighten up the piece. I am pleased with the result:




Boundary Violation


I was six, maybe seven,
headed across the broad lawn
beyond the parking lot
from where my father’s sedan
stood witness to my transgression;
the Midwestern morning sun
reflected disapprovingly
from its bisected early post-war windshield.

I stood for a moment on the brink
with its long prospect over the valley,
gazing across to the green hills beyond.
Snug within whose leafy mounds
a lone house gleamed, tiny, white,
nestled deep in mysterious distance.

And then down the long, eroded slope
within whose grainy, rain-riven fissures
could be found fossils, shaken like crumbs
from the bounteous folds of the river’s apron,
more wonderful even than a grandfather’s
gratuitously proffered coin:
the mineralized ghosts of trilobites,
which had waited, dormant in their three dimensions,
beneath these sandy sediments since dinosaurs had grazed,
to be found only now, and held in the palm of my hand.

And at the foot of the slope, a grassless waste,
the sun-baked and redolent plain
adjacent to the university’s landfill,
edged in green, where stood a tangled copse of sumac
with its maroon-colored, lop-headed fruits.

I knew that I mustn’t go down there alone.
There were men who lurked,
who did ‘funny things’ to little boys.
I might lose my way and anxiously wander,
lost and alone in the witchy woods.
I might fall in and be swept downstream
as winter snows are swept away
by the swift campaigns of relentless spring.
I might break my mother’s heart.

The river called, its flavor on the air,
a redolent voice that whispered,
‘Come and see.’
So, through the tangled scruff of brush
that scratched my arms, I fought my way.
And there it was: brown and green and
thick with motion; the channeled mirror
of an awful sky; lazy as a minor god
with no celestial task.

I would have gagged, had I then knowledge
of the source of the stench that engulfed and assailed me.
I suddenly entered an olfactory place,
as into the tent of some hideous sideshow;
a smell that was darkness, that rang like a claxon,
that called out a warning…

By the bank, slowly bobbing, lifted, then dropped,
as if rhythmically forced by the spirit of the river;
black fur soaked in a scum of green algae;
Oh, horrible—a head, with holes full of maggots,
teeming and boiling where eyes had been, feeding;
open muzzle, teeth bared, now long beyond biting.

It’s a dog, I admitted. I had to admit that:
a dog in the river. Or, what had been a dog.
.
Behind the crooned consolations
of priests and morticians; regardless
of philosophy’s water-tight propositions,
or clinical psychology’s most revered rationales,
still the dog’s story stood as stark fact and portent:

the tale told by that dog, down by the river,
the story that was told there was mine.

It was mine.

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Note: the original poem is available for comparison in the left sidebar.