Sunday, June 22, 2014


A Found Poem on the Way We Talk Now

(Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language, 1829)

Disrupt: rend from; tear asunder.

Brand: To burn or impress a mark
With a hot iron; as, to brand a criminal,
Or to brand a cask;
To fix a mark or character of infamy;
To stigmatize as infamous;
As, to brand a vice with infamy.

Efficient: causing effects.

Saturday, June 21, 2014

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Summer Solstice

I slept late before the longest evening,
Tired by heat,
Waiting for rain that did not come,
Red and yellow amoebas scudding across the weather radar,
Shattering to pixels at the cross-hairs 27510.

All morning I thought about the theologians,
Strange men of the English Civil War,
Who called the world the “economy of nature.”

Henry More wrote that if flashes at night were not ghosts or fairies,
There could be no gods or kings.
The atheists would have won.
Democracy, the rule of beasts, would follow.

His “mutual subserviency,” what nature taught,
Is now the flashing global market, nowhere and everywhere,
And the town commons across the street,
Where we trade sweaty dollar bills for carrots
And halfway exemption.

Unfearful symmetries that we can measure:
The world in the balance again.
Solstice afternoon comes down sweltering, waiting for thunder
And the indifferent fireflies
Pulsing like an unmoored second-hand.


Summer Solstice

I slept late before the longest evening,
Tired by heat,
Waiting for rain that did not come,
Red and yellow amoebas scudding across the weather radar,
Shattering to pixels at the cross-hairs 27510.

All morning I thought about the theologians,
Strange men of the English Civil War,
Who called the world the “economy of nature.”

Henry More wrote that if flashes at night were not ghosts or fairies,
There could be no gods or kings.
The atheists would have won.
Democracy, the rule of beasts, would follow.

His “mutual subserviency,” what nature taught,
Is now the flashing global market, nowhere and everywhere,
And the town commons across the street,
Where we trade sweaty dollar bills for carrots
And halfway exemption.

Unfearful symmetries that we can measure:
The world in the balance again.
Solstice afternoon comes down sweltering, waiting for thunder
And the indifferent fireflies
Pulsing like an unmoored second-hand.