Rushing to Obscurity

Desires once built with dreams have crumbled

As the bitter acids of frustration

Gnaw enigmatically at his interior walls

And each spasm - each elaborate betrayal

Becomes his personal Corregidor (small "c" perhaps?)

Blind tunnels and abandoned passages - Deserted halls

Once - His entrails filled with sweetened juices

Confident covenants untroubled and secure

Wonders created with paint and brush are past

Now childish self-promises go unfulfilled

As failures flood him with remorse

The cracked and brittle time-glass spilled

There is no God they say to him

Could this be true? - How do they know?

What's even more important - should he care?

And these assassins who say God is dead

Who asked them anyway? - Why do they inundate

And drown him in such dread despair?

He cannot fight or keep them off him any more

He is exhausted - A cynical and misanthropic mite

They've beaten him - They've chopped him down

Why has he let them do this without even a dissent?

Must he accept his sentence and submit?

Is nothing left except to wear the thorn-filled crown?

Dark Pools

On Thursday afternoon May 6^th in the 15 minutes between 2:42 and 2:47 PM

Wall Street almost committed suicide...

In those few frantic minutes the scenario of Stanley Kubrick’s “Hal 9000”

Became reality... as machines took over markets and shaved almost 1000 points

From the Dow Jones Industrial Average before humans were able to take charge...

The hedge funds’ algorithmic computers were programmed to sell at 1095.74

The 200-Day Moving Average of the S&P Industrial Average

Resulting in more than 2.4 billion shares being dumped by these “Flash” machines

Entering their “High-Frequency” trades executed in nano-seconds...

The New York Stock Exchange was powerless as their 90-second rule was overwhelmed

By the flood of orders that could not find buyers… so the massive sells were shunted

To other fully-electronic “Hal” exchanges... which took on the bulk of the panic sells

And made markets… driving stocks like Accenture, a $26 Billion dollar company

From a price of $41 that morning to 4 cents a share that afternoon!

The abolishment of the Glass-Steagal Act which did not allow banks

To enter markets other than mortgage and commercial lending...

The proliferation of non-bank mortgage hustlers with extremely loose practices...

The take-over of the mortgage business by badly-regulated quasi-government agencies...

The allowance of "naked" short-selling without first borrowing the stock...

The systemic risks that are built into derivative securities

Based upon fraudulent collateral...

All this financial chicanery by sharp individuals and the technical mastery of geekdom

Created these destructive dark pools of paper promises

That now threaten the very existence of the world’s capital structures...

We are at the brink…

Let’s hope someone with some common sense taps the delete button on these guys

Before it's too late...                         

Michaelangelo's Curse

One afternoon many years ago when he was twenty-one

God and Michaelangelo played a cruelty on him

In the catacombs of the Met

Where in those days

Students of art were admitted and then destroyed

As he sat at the heavy ornate table in the soft blue light

They brought him their original study for Pieta 

Pressed between two pieces of glass - air between vacuumed out

God and Michaelangelo

Michaelangelo and God

He cursed them both

They killed him that afternoon - An innocent demolished

And they didn't stop with him

Except for a very few - They decimated all who came after

Unless they were too dumb to understand

It would have been better if they had not lived those two

Still did not live

God and Michaelangelo - They were too good

Michaelangelo and God - Are too good

Ashes

Even now he tells himself

The soft days will come again

And soft air will flow once more across the island land

It will flow from beyond the barrier isles

Gliding in on dim whispers from the great ocean shelf

Where giant swarms of sea creatures are harvested and iced

This joyful breeze will float in - lathering the incremental

Caressing spiny ledges with its salty aromatic

Cooling city-spattered visitors and permanents alike

His heart will happily slow down

His blood will flow merrily through his essential vitals

It will be once more his time of substance

There will be nothing to do - nothing to take care of - nothing

Except to fill this water-laden entity that is he and also us

With far-away cleansing nurtures of scented african deserts

Flowing across countless oceanic leagues

He will be again with loved ones

To breathe with tides

To take and eat from the bountiful sea

To simply and happily exist

But that was then

Now his universe has been switched off for him

Only a faint melody splashing on moonlit rock is heard

In that private place behind his brain

And Sleep is the Dust of Sleep

Forever

The Quarry Ghosts

It's difficult to trace out where the blockhouse stood

Although if you look carefully and slice the brush

The granite base cleared now of strangled berry-wood

Is visible beyond the wash

Once long ago - this place resounded with delighted cries

Of children scampering across the quay

As steamer-cranes lifted huge cuts beyond the rise

Onto the barkantines that lay at lee

Among weed-woven tangles of this ditch

You find old lamps and pots and Leslie Magazines

A shredded doll - A tallow cup stuffed in a niche

A book of verse marked Josephine's

The names and dates are also chiseled there to read

The Abels Joshuas Mollys and the rest

These drillers cutters blasters and their broods

Whisper across the hundred summers that have passed

Note:

The granite quarried on Friendship Long Island in Muscongus Bay Maine, was used

to build Grant’s Tomb in Riverside Park in New York City… Sometime later, the workers

struck for a five-cent hourly raise and the Boston owners shut the quarry down

rather than give in to them… They decided to work the granite themselves

and hired an overzealous young blaster who promptly blew a hole through to the sea

and the pumps could not contain the flooding so the quarry was abandoned…

Blight Days Redux

Then there were these days and nights of spectacular horror and blackened forms   

Charcoaled into curious poses not possible when they were living creatures existing 

In the days of the inharmonious reign of Sarah The Savioress and her yes-mam Michelle The Mole

All this happened those long-ago days of heaven - when smells of earth were still slightly perfumed

With odors of scintillating mind-altering sanctification – Sanctimony was for sale

This was a time of righteousness - When all the folk seemed to be in sacred accord

A reverential neo-tolerance of one another with beliefs preached by this clever wizardess 

Yes, sanctimony was for sale on the cheap and the Beckster was loose in the land

And the folk bought it all – Opened their hearts and minds

Until they were saturated with a glorified and venerated adoration of this sorcereress

How the undoubters reveled in the holy tongue of this mercurial war goddess, this female Woden

Bowing down in sanctified abeyance - then thrusting up with fistfuls of brilliant sovereigns

To pay for the holy war this intolerant liberator preached incessantly at them

They must save this faithless impious world – they must rid it of those unholy charlatans

Those ungodly unbelievers that had ridiculed them for years - Finish them once and for all

Sarah The Savioress had the fire-sticks well-guarded in holes deep under the billowing corn

And everyone knows that fire cleanses all - then renews the disaffected land

New and bountiful harvestings would ripen for virtueous survivors - who could then pick it clean

Black gold would flow from the newly conquered fields of the scruffy unbelievers

Those unholy irreverent Lucifer-loving towel-heads unfit to deserve such riches

Sarah The Savioress had the code to unleash the liquid-fed Titan fire-sticks

Hidden in her Glocksafe – behind her favorite portrait of a gun-toting wild-tundra rig-jockey

She never hesitated - inserting it into her classy red white and blue cell-phone

Thirteen rapid-fire blips shot up to the satellite high above the waving yellow fields

And the world and what was left of humanity changed forever

Memorial                                             

Beyond the mists of memory                                                  

This eccentric artifice is now felt with curious fingers

It defies logic… super-glued…(he is jokingly informed)

To a ventricle of that worm-shaped rounded mass inside his head

A permanent swelling fingered under his scalp

Draining life-threatening moisture

By means of a filtering flow-pipe into his loins

This crucial effluent which sustains each living creature

This fluid without which life on this imperfect earth

Would not be possible… a few random snowflakes on one’s tongue

The simple moistening in the corner of one’s eye

A tear shed at a graveside… A cool drink from a forest spring

This moisture becomes a virtual death sentence… A surgical anomaly

If not drained away before it floods the phrenological pan

There are moments when he gathers left-over thoughts

And arranges them willy-nilly into some orderly semblance

To piece together a rationale and keep the dew of further existence

From drying up before the light fades into that “good night”

But it becomes much more than burdensome

It resembles the scattering of ashes over a neaped-out beach

A disintegration of brilliant anemone drowned... a crushing of dry moss

Worlds come and go… The heavens abound with them seen and unseen

But one’s existence is unique… there is no other similar gathering of cells

Sustained by the fluid gift of an entity which shall never be known…

Byers Ship Ledge

What it is … is a large granite outcropping that was once part of Otter Island

But its history is fascinating and to this day… lore and myth… allow for great amusement

For the natives of the small fishing villages of Friendship and Cushing

On the shores of Muscongus Bay Maine

The story goes… that in the summer of July 1779

Fast sloops manned by renegade revolutionaries

Were smuggling arms, ammunition, foodstuffs and supplies

To the beleaguered peoples of those insurgent villages

And so… Admiral William Byers was charged by his Majesty’s Master Mariner Lord Graves

To sail his Ship-Of-War from Camdentown sporting 50 guns… and seal off the bay

From the jack-rabbit sloops darting in and out of those pesky little harbors

With sorely-needed provender to carry on the insurrection

He arrives at dusk as the dense fog which had been hanging heavily at sea all day

Starts its slithering slowly toward the cooling land-mass as the sun sinks from view…

And he stations his warship in the outer bay in full view of the enemy harbors

His guns poised and loaded... waiting for some unlucky runner making for the towns

Just before false dawn so the story goes… squinting into the obstinate thickness

Of that opaque pea-soup… the wretched swabbie high up in the crow’s nest shouts:

“Runner sighted aft Commodore!”… and the Admiral spots the tips of masts

Poking through the heavy mist and calls for the gunners to touch off their shot

Round after deafening round is loosed upon that unlucky privateer

But it won’t go down… and those gunnies, jack-tars, able-bodies and assorted crew

Cannot believe their eyes… It must be “a phantom” they say… It’s having its way with us…

Those rebels must have found a way to build an unsinkable ship!

Just before dawn a breeze comes up and the fog lifts

And there before their astonished eyes is a spectacular ledge… its silhouette ship-like

With three tall spruce perfectly placed to resemble masts and sails

Hailed and christened for posterity… well, you know the rest…

Today… scuba-divers paddle out in their kayaks

And occasionally come up with a barnacle-covered cannon-ball or two…

Note: Families of ospreys now claim the ledge each spring, building their nests in the highest branches of the spruce

True Love 

Is it possible to find the REAL old man?

Is it possible to find the REAL old woman?

Really OLD man?

Really OLD woman?

Ivan and Josie

The Morses

5-century De Morse blood running through him

She’s down 4 centuries from the Bradfords

Almost nine hundred years of history there

But they accepted us

REALLY accepted us

First generation Italian and Greek

Man Woman Children Dog Cat

Strangers all

They made us welcome on their island

They've lived on this island for over eighty years

Couple of miles from the main

He doesn't have a social security card

Never did

Neither does his wife

House is falling down around them

But garden and sea still provide

They don't “love” each other anymore

They just need each other

More and more

They’re gone now

And we have taken their place

But not on that lovely island

Not being stroked and sung to by a restless sea

Just the two of us

Really OLD man

Really OLD woman

Wasting in an old-age warehouse

We don’t “love” each other any more

We just need each other more and more

The truth is that walls are not nice 

To put it succinctly - Walls kill

Look at what happened in Berlin

How many lives were lost on the Red side of Checkpoint Charlie

Before Reagan bankrupted them and it was torn down?

Movies were made about that wall

Lots of good actors starred in them

Michael Caine and Ian Holm in spy thrillers

John Hurt tried to fly over it with his family in a home-made balloon

And poor Claire Bloom and Richard Burton were massacred at its base

And "Johnboy" Thomas dug a tunnel under it to save his girl and her family

And Werner Meyer and his wife made it across

Suspended in a bucket-crane that he controlled himself

But that wasn't a movie - It was for real!

In Israel they're building a wall to seperate the Palestinians and Jews

It's supposed to keep out suicide bombers

But it's not high enough to stop the rockets that fly over it and kill people

In California, Arizona and Texas they're building a wall to keep out "illegals"

But who is going to pick the tomatoes and lettuce and fruit?

The growers say they'll have to plow everything under if they don't get some help

A few of us might starve eventually - some of those "undesireables" probably will

That's sort of long-term killing... isn't it?

In 1941- the Nazis crammed over four hundred thousand Jews into Warsaw's Ghetto

And forced them to build a 10-foot-high brick wall topped by barbed wire

Effectively walling themselves in… By the end of 1942

Eighty-three thousand men, women and children perished behind that wall

In China centuries ago - they built a wall four thousand miles long

It was supposed to keep out the barbarian Huns

It didn't work even though it cost hundreds of thousands of lives to build it

That's killing... isn't it?

In Beirut they built a wall to protect our Marines but over two hundred of them died anyway

In Baghdad they've built a wall around the Green Zone to keep out most Iraquis

Even though it's part of their city

But they had to protect the Starbucks and McDonalds' and the beauty salons

Mortar-shells can still arch over it though

And people get killed

Since time began - walls have been built to protect people and property

But they don't

No doubt about it…

Walls kill