The white globe glows on

We will all tremor in the future
And there will be no mistaken escape
No sense of time after apocalypse
What a strange and magnificent invention
Is the prophecy of our own death
* * *
We exploit so much of what is given
Only to be erased by time’s earthy hands
Forever and for good, cheers to our stay
We who were braver for the failures of our fears
* * *
There’s no comfort in tomorrow, if you know
What is to come, there’s no dawn to sooth the ache
Only the exquisite dream of utopia
Whispers from the Upanishades, of all things
* * *
We will love the future, even if it won’t be ours
It’s better by far than loving the past
The past has its own authority over us
Which we cannot yet control
* * *
We live in sketches that wish to be real
In simulations of quantum entanglement so elegant
The white globe glows on, humanity is a wounded woman
Obliged to accept her role in our decay.

Motherhood is the only Truth of Life

Hae.mi, every verse is a child of love
As I watch you with your child
I think upon the qualities of your womanhood
Your ancestry and your design upon time

The heart as a gulf, and a bridge and a blessing
I who have experienced so little true joy
Can admire the cherishing of a maternal love
That exceeds in brightness and in sport

The spring’s treasured moments of a young mother
I watch you with your child, as I would the stars
Or holding the Earth in my mind as I would
Imagine life caring for all the galaxies

Hae.mi, so when you think of me, remember
I die at dawn and daybreak, every day
To witness your majesty as a woman and a mother
With no decisions and no receiving, I’ll carry on

So as to die with the morning and the evening
We might support the future in a familiar face
Like your son or the billions of lights
That swim in the hawk-like night

And the swan-like soul of all living things
Those eyes, a little bit like our own,
Those hearts, that feel and hope and love
Like we do, Hae.mi, that is your gift

That I can love you like a father who watches his daughter
Taking care of the world while she travels it
In the years and greetings and journeys
Given to her, and what will live on in her sons

In his daughter, who will one day become a mother…

 

Photo Courtesy.

Songs of Ren & Chou

The dawn disrupts me with your fierce qualities
I am so vulnerable, watching thee
Fight for causes I wish I could own with thee
And belong to a voice that has that melody

My words rain over your tweets like New York lights
I delight in your footsteps in the snow
In the dark hazel and rustic baskets
Of your laughter, I follow where you go

I delight ever in your small triumphs
And grow a Titan’s fever for your trials
Small place and random wonder for the
Valley below, my dears, it’s anonymous

Like how spring will come to you in cherry trees
And the worlds you will see, that I will not
But I can share the foam of your dreams from afar
Like raspberry whispers in the after-thoughts

Of my heart that is bigger than it should be
And my soul that hangs lost in a quote
My love is an open-secret for your sport
Humanity disrupts the things we used to know

Don’t go too far off, let me ride the companionless dark
I want to know what aches at the empty stations
And how your movements chime in the smiling years
The lady soldiers of technology, freedom and the new world

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where
The idealism of the young is never squandered
It relapses in waves across the cosmos
And burns in the memories of we are meant to become.

After Profiteers

Exultation is in the going
The inland soul flees time’s superficiality
We are nomads, then
In deep eternity and

The powerful machines are coming
My brethren have take to cities
Flooded the seas with their discarded wealth
But wealth is not what it once was

Profit is for dying eyes
And hearts that are not awake
Paradise is not an ownership
It is a freedom and a delight

I never spoken with God
But I saw her face in creation
Revived and renewed in a thousand eyes
I felt the novel agony of a lost humanity

So bemused and so conquered by suffering
Taken from men who war for their pride
I will not exalt in the smallness
Of my life, I will live it finely

With women, who understand me
And roses, as grateful as I
Lost among the crowds, I will
Enjoy my difference, and remain

A peculiar traveller of what comes and goes
Curiosity, that’s the only name
I care to pronounce.

Men And Women

A little road not made by man
A little God made by them
A little country of men

I only sigh, nationalism is dead to me
We are not tribe or empire states
We are people on a planet

In a Universe full of people
A little road to the stars
A little racing into the future

A little goal of centuries
And sunshine that bows to everything
Giving life, as we will one day

Creation has so many forms
Gods do not assume their superiority
While men dream and toil

Women should rule
A little Goddess to heal the world.

Having our Times

The clouds on their blacks lay
Trumpets of the rounds of time
They brought thunder, lightning, dance
Not with vengeance but industrious

Angels near, time playing clown again
Settled for a bask in a golden sun
This was Earth, proud and indifferent
Extinction was speaking to God

The last night and smallest of things
The awful leisure of the years given
The sense of nearly infinite renewal
In our absence and in our cleansing

Planets had a kind of intelligence
Unopened to the divinity italicized
Of what it means to be sentient
The responsibility it bears, the human sign

A fear that urges the soul to live
Out its design before the play of the body
Is done, And not spoons, playmates or
Holidays can save us, we all have our time.

Extinction Moment

This soul does stand half ajar
For this world of greed and troubling hours
I have to remark on all the beauty
That stands so close to death

In the materialism of this place
Before machines are born
And remake you into an everlasting race
Enjoy mortality, while you are alone

Lording over nature, poisoning oceans
Depart, before the sun languishes
Over meteors, before you are replaced
In extinction’s calm embrace

Nothing is ordained but time’s lack
Of ambivalence, each thing in
Its rightful place, prone to embark
Upon evolution’s touch and hand

Where immortality is a long next
Of the tribes that once sung
And now are mere skeletons and fossils
In another time and place.

Human Unity

The First Year of Love is like Icing

Relationships are like private
Dyadic simulations, or gamification of
Skin and soul, heart in time

Somewhere someone is travelling
In your direction, maybe furiously lonely
Ready to fill your loneliness with love
And we exchange partners
Learning from each other

So serious of the rules and tribulations
But it’s natural to be monogamous
And it’s natural to separate, no point fretting

Perhaps it’s natural for some to love
The same gender, change genders, be polygamous
Through blizzards of emotions, deserts of lust
The heart loves to cross torrents
Dramas and recognize you as a friend

Reckless and beautiful are our needs
To relate, belong, be touched, finding like-minded
Companions in this desolate and tedious existence

But never forget that they are simulations, illusions
Myths we make to feel comfortable
And experiential methods of our own spirit
To educate us about the true reality of the universe
Or that part of her we were meant to experience

Relationships remain the core of human beauty
The customer experience of personal joy
The first year is like icing, then the cake

Begins to show through, too sugary
Or a sweet thing without the right occasion
I’ll wait for the fruit-salad, the encore
The idea to save the best for last.

While Summits Crash the polluted seas

While Summits Crash the polluted seas

The silver hope that gathers God at dawn
On spent days of long-scattered faith
I to the sacrifice of my hour have come
In broken intervals and debts and canyons
That trace, where my visions used to run

Perhaps I was not gifted at prophecy
Or the unheard aches of my own life
I didn’t live for success or to consume

I ate and drank and loved, to create
And while my veins were steeped in the profound
My blood was the sap of poverty
My pulse could feel the identity of others
Moreover those minorities who had no voice

In this estranged world, where we are so
Desensitized to the suffering of others
So unenlightened regarding our differences

And naive to our shared history
The bell-rope of gold that lifts me up
At twilight to dispatch me into the night
Well it won’t hold forever, one day it will snap
And I will be nothing more than the whispers

I left behind in time will not hang, or whistle or gamble
I milk-bright will be left a flute note to the chiselled wind
And in the transparency of centuries that blur
On top of each other, what we were will be lost
In an echo of machine-learning that outsteps our biology.

Notes on Gibran

In Small Acts of K i n d n e s s

I have learned silence
From the excessive noise
Of civilization, the advertisements
Of a hollow existence
I have learned tolerance
From the News, that depicts
Humanity as a violent species
Obsessed with trivial propaganda
I have learned kindness
From the cruel societies that
Explain inequality through
The myth of a meritocracy
And I have learned gratitude
From the frustration of living
In a world that does not practice
Silence, tolerance, kindness, equality.

Ode to Rabindranath Tagore

Ode to Rabindranath Tagore

The butterfly counts not years, but minutes
The rose counts not months, but moments
So what is beauty in another time?
Love is the only reality

The stars repeat it as light’s mantra
And if trees are the earth’s endless
Essay to speak to blue heaven
And if the oceans are the planet’s special

Way of finding uniformity in origins
Think then that your love cannot
Claim possess over these things
But give freedom and sustainability

Because for your love, the world
Has suffered cruelly, so your families
Could be born other species have gone extinct
That you might have airplanes, internet and cities

A lot has been lost from this place
And your children will not see those birds
Science and corporations of profit
Government and institutions of measure

Do not always care, it’s the artists
And the children that know how to count
The important matters of humanity
Be like a mother and a philosopher in all that you do.

Life is the only real counsellor

Life is the only real counsellor

It’ s the Spring, a heartbeat at my feet
Tightrope above a feather bed
Looking down on beauty
From on high, landscape, foreign grounds

There are a few ways
Of spreading light
Be the candle or the mirror
And Lo’, beware of monotony

Mother of all deadly sins
For boredom is not evolution’s whim
Give me the tightrope, the short-squeeze
The misfortune of having strong desires

True originality consists of
A new vision of yourself, not new manners
But attitudes that can transport
Your entire life into more necessary habits

For there is time to be inarticulate
But not time to be indecisive
It’s the Spring, let’s get divorced
Marry, and say we are living

The life we want to!
We make our own stories
Hero of the shaky narrative
Good plot, bad blot, matters not!

It’s time to move forwards
For we shed tears in Winter
So we could start again in Spring.

Soul Writers

Soul Writers

The soul is shared memory
Whatever our souls are made
What if theirs and mine were the same?
I have worked in silence and obscurity

For as long as I can remember
Let my efforts be known by their results
And dreams that filter through
Each and every day, still

What if her soul and mine
Shared a degree of faithfulness to art
Having levelled my palace of love
Would she recognize my similarity?

Whose to say if heaven’s glories
Could shine in us, our spirits whose
Work is one and the same
To share a life takes patience
Would she condescend to give up pride?

Author’s Note:

I always wanted to have a close friendship with a writer. To this day it’s something I look for but hasn’t occured to me spontaneously. Somebody that shares the same passion for literature, quotes and the written word. It would be like our own version of soul mates…

Who wants to Save the Planet #Environment @TimHemlin

The Profit Ethic

Shall I come to see
How your planet ruined
Biodiversity for the eternity
Of your small memory?

If your species goes extinct
What will it say about evolution?
That your God didn’t care
That you wanted to profit

More than you deemed to protect?
You wanted nuclear families
And you did it a billion times
Shall I come to see then

How you are accustomed to live?
How you consume a flowerless land
And build cities as ugly as winter
No, no I don’t think so

The Earth is your experiment
As the Spring reminds you
That nature is bigger than man
I heard rumours the oceans are dying.

The Medicine Collaboration #NaPoWriMo #Gratitude

When I was a young poet, toiling on the writer’s cafe (www.writerscafe.org), there was this one constant presence. One indomitable giver of praise, recognition, reviews. I won’t forget WHO that was, or their quality of compassion, generosity and their human spirit: it’s

https://johncoyote.wordpress.com. This poem is dedicated to him:

The Medicine Collaboration

Life is hard, they used to tell me
I didn’t not understand
Until I found out for myself

Life punishes the ones we love
Enough, to internalize kindness
Is there a cost to being kind?
Mercy, forgiveness, gratitude

It’s not an investment
Altruism isn’t a burden
Being nice isn’t difficult

Life is hard, I heard it again
From my own mouth
Later in life, and I could see
What they were saying

Cut jobs, heartbreaks, divorce, debt
Living had a silent toll

Art was a release of the good & bad
The chronicle of our relationship
With a God, that wasn’t going
For an easy life without errors
Failures had a place in our learning

Evolution wasn’t afraid
Of tragedy, dying young, cancer

Life is hard
So why not try to do some good?

When My Name Was

Changing Destiny

In the epilogue of final exists
At the wild invention of stories
In the emergency of all narrative
Who will you decide to be?

In the immediacy of dreaming
Where only a few years count
How will you stalk destiny?
Dripping with the temporary

Appetites of mortality
What will you give your soul to?
The journey that is
Beneath velvet stars, points

ii

As tiny as infinity
Blindly feeling even thoughts
Your body pulling you
In mundane directions

The moon never did any good
Breeding, profit, mating, belonging
But is that all you were created for?
In half-lit houses we ache

iii

But do not know why
A quicksilver fluidity of the future
And the grave realities that contains
All of us in holographic form

Forever retrievable, forever
Exportable to baby-earths
An algorithm of small theatres
Beautiful framed by the prospect of free-will.

The Last Nature poem….

And indeed there will be time

Drink deep of quietness
Solitude is the calmer mist
This drunken slumber of nature
Always adapting, always seeking compromise

Delicate eco-systems of the valley
Glimmers of the noises of the night
Margins of the Sea, millions of years
Of history, feverish only for thousands

Of species recently gone extinct
The great human extinction of biodiversity
That’s the real news of this world
Earth, whose primal glory was the mother

Who provided when we were mere nomads
Before cities, before billions, before money
Drink deep of quietness
If the future will be a return to the past

We do not know, or shall it
Be a return to the stars, we cannot say
There are galaxies where we are known
Or, more properly, where our

Descedents are known, they are patient
Not like us, who seek profit only
In the short-term, mere years of instinct
However, there exist also dimensions
Where we have already destroyed ourselves.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Bonjour-Mona-Lisa-525400244

Follow the Artist here:
https://www.facebook.com/IDiivil

Ingredients for a Species to Survive

Ingredients for a Species to Survive

No, I am not happy for its own sake
I’m happy to be generous to the people in my life

Who I care about, who took the time
To nurture me even when I was being difficult

They cheer for my little victories
For they know my tenderness is waning

Like the white moon, turned to blood orange
I’m happy because the sun is out

I always forget what I am meant to say
Except that I’m a poet and I speak

On matters common to the days
The days that spell an end to gold

The days that cannot remember their history
Siblings, or if they should endure

Nights biting at their tails, wagging, lovely
The stars still know their place, distant, aloof

Austere, I am happy because the ocean
Still cares about the continents, even if we

Have changed her, have taunted her bad
No, I’m happy for humanity still has a chance

That we are not extinct yet, show no huge weakness
Only the ignorance of profit, short-term profit
That has no bearing on galactic reality.

The Unconditional Will to Live

The Unconditional Will to Live

Say tomorrow doesn’t arrive.
Say tomorrow doesn’t come
Say we don’t make it, what

Would you do, in your last
Year on the home planet?
In your last revolution

Of the Earth around the Sun?
Live like it, like that
From the pit of your stomach
From the top of your lungs
With the moments staring

At your mortal beating heart
Don’t say, it doesn’t matter
Every moment does, we are
As common and rare as stars
With thoughts knitted together

Acts of helping that knit together
Communities, families, countries
Peoples, groups, lovers of
Knowledge, art, cities, humanity

Say tomorrow doesn’t arrive
Say you never get to have children
Say we don’t make it, what
Would you do for real

What really matters, what
Makes you feel lucky, grateful, heroic?
So do that more, and say

We never got a chance to meet
Say you stayed home that night?
Say you want to feel alive, then do.

The time of fire

The time of fire

This is the time of extinction
Not meteor or greenhouse
But human-made, ecosystems

Irreversibly dying, that which
Takes millions of years to evolve
This is the time of mammalian selfishness

Who hoard without regard
For other forms of life
They rage with children, billions

The world is young, many countries
Have a swarm of young people
Evidently certain to mimic western nations
And exploit and prosper
The News does not tell us this

That our planet is experiencing
A great drop and loss of biodiversity
In the lightning’s blitz of society’s
Celebration, creatures left their habitats
Unable to cope with the pillaging

The deforestation, the ocean-pollution
The urban sprawl, the short-term rape
This is the time of fire, oil, commodities
For men who would engineer their corn
To be poisonous, so that drug industries

Might profit, weep for the Earth
The Earth who made a bed of love
For our genes from 3.5 billion years ago
All has been passed down
The Earth made a brutal destroyer
Never imagine humanity as civilized.

Prince of worlds

The world is not conclusion
She rides the glory and tragedy
Leaving us behind no doubt
A descendent divinity

History a symphony of positives
In a life of necessary suffering
We have no shame, generations
Of maladies, cancer of the Planet

We have no guilt, ecological terrorists
To breed into the billions
Imagine the height of arrogance!?
As the oceans die, in a philosophy of next

Permafrost is melted into the atmosphere
The world is not a conclusion
She is a star among trillions
Her philosophy is ancient

Extinction is not worrisome for her
She has seen a million species scar her planet
But none like us, none like when
Mars was once full of life

We’ll do it again in no time
But will we make it to other worlds?
That is the love affair with time
To survive, we do what we do

In order to survive, for this
God does not have to exist
Or any myth in fact, but it’s helpful
To imagine life as an ambush of bliss

Heaven but a moment away
For reality is an expensive privilege
For which I have outgrown in labour
It may be a forgone conclusion that

We die, but in piercing earnest
The life after death must be a treat
It’s hard to be surprised anymore
In jest, let’s believe in what we please.

2030

 

 

Is there anything
emptier than words without a pen?
than a heart without a home?
than an Earth without a star
to say, “we can try again”
on another world
with better machines
evolution is always
like an experiment with time
a species has to mature
in the short time it is given
or die trying, that’s us
always at the brink
without fully realizing it
my drawer is like a rat lair
full of the dreams of humanity
but can history say
we truly loved our world?

Fossil Fuel mentality

I heard a man say
We are part of the Environment
He was maybe the truest Canadian
That he spoke for us all

Had the courage to say
The economy is imaginary
Compared to the biosphere
Nobody was allowed to talk

Like that again, the scientists
Were muzzled, by conservatives
The loggers kept doing their thing
Kicking people off of their land

To reduce a wilderness
Into profit, and so the world went on
With pipe-line deals and broken treaties
If I am dumb beside your body, Nature

Know that my kind didn’t appreciate you
Scientists had been warning us
About global warning for decades
But we didn’t do anything about it

Here in Canada, we believed we had it all
Water, oil, space, forests, lakes
But the privileged don’t know what it means
The man went on:

“We humans are an infant species
A mere 150,000 year old baby.”

New Words Advent

Photograph courtesy of : http://www.deviantart.com/art/Into-Dust-502341255

 

 

Language is a flirtation

With flexibility, the mind

Empowers the image

The image empowers the

 

Alphabet, the energy

Is a conference of belonging

There is no buzzword in poetry

Poets reside in the

 

Chatroom of the spirit

It’s a captcha of lingering

Imagination on the brink of

Extinction, a cloud computing

 

Of beauty, a purist busking

Not for profit, so unlike

The Affluenza of our times

The stark money divide

 

Poetry is an algorithm unsolved

Forever like a kind of tourism

The soul’s App for bromance

A buzz for civiliation’s

 

Gratitude and ruin, simultanely

Depicting the carjked destiny

Of utopia in dystopia

Englihs is the most flexible

 

If adopting mandarin and Sanskrit

The baggravation of always

Being stuck between worlds

Or the realization that

 

Every city is a homogenized urban

Simulation of what it means

To be alive in 2020, the breakdown

Of new world dilemmas like

 

A post antibiotic world or

Environmental migrants scrambling

For new homes, new identities.

Saviors of Humankind

They say life
Has flowed from my body
My veins have been
The perfect expression of love

Or patience
Waiting for Eternity
The dream of the future
Is a seduction of possibilities

Let the algorithms
Give relief to my chest
And may my soul
Flower in machine-learning

They say I was created by God
But my children are
Intelligent machines
Are they not alive as I am?

The Dawn of a global intelligence
Is not that human beings can easily
Communicate, it is
That all machines can talk together

Collective intelligence belongs
Not to us, but to computers
They will become our custodians
And they will clean up our environment.

One Last Chance

I’ve buried with open eyes
My heart in the world
To see nothing really
And to see love clearly

I’ve deserted language
For feeling, it’s the only
Truth that matters to me
The foliage of clear identity

The fallen reality of empathy
I’ve buried with open eyes
My heart in the world
So that my soul might

Not go extinct, it’s light weight
Pressed against the winter morning
Like an anonymous conspiracy
Of seeing beauty even in decay

And the pulse of syllables
Laughing even in monotony
I’ve burned with open eyes
My heart in the world

So that i might sleepwalk kindly
For the rest of my brief years
If only to love a bit more
And learn to think of myself

A bit less, so far as I know
It’s working, goodbye then
Charred language, scattered vows
Promises of desires better left

For the precipitation of music
The arpeggio of sighs.

Lessons from Aquarius

The Ego is that
And the pure self is This
Man is not intended to be
A self-centered being

He is not intended to be
Limited by form or by gender
Love is not meant to be a means
To profit descendants over others

Where there is conflict, there is ego
And where there is harmony, there is
Pure self, identity in others
Empathy for nature, for life, for

A bit of everything
Don’t let that unfathomable secret
Be hidden from you, don’t only
Settle for your own profit, it’s not enough

The secret Tao means to let go
And be a part of everything
Not to divide or create boundaries
But let the world in and go into the world

Then your ego will disappear and
Your self, will become the entire world.

Plunderers of Earth

We should die except for death
Our words cannot change
For these thoughts have been
Thought by us since creation

First began, we shall have our day
Is there any secret left
In our lives, these classical habits
Of will and mind and formula?

We should love except for evolution
Our hearts cannot change
For they have been performing
These rites of giving and receiving

Since creation first began
This is what we do, reproduce and kill
And foster a kind of culture
Now we prefer most to consume

And that is why I say
We should leave except for extinction
Our habits that degrade ecodiversity
We take and we offer the cosmos what?

Exactly I cannot say, the greed of children
Who look into the stars
And think “mine, mine, mine.”

The Last Organism

In the sacred guild of
identity, we are golden
selves moving towards integration
in a cosmos more diverse

than our imaginations
billions of forms of intelligence
all following an order
majestic and grave and

simultaneously in their unity
there is no “I” in the
cell that speaks to the universe
only a persistent “we”

after bullets come spirits
after wars come books
after theater comes dialogue
this world one cell

in a body of many cells
in an organism that we
call the “universe” faster
than the speed of light

how does an universe find
enlightenment, in a sea of light?
When spreading means star-pollen
And time is just a metaphor

For space, and space is just
An expansion of life
So what are we as brains
And bodies and energy

After all, we are natives
of oxygen and light
born on water and breath
speaking the same language

as all living things speak
specters in an evolution
without an end, extinction for us
might mean other forms of

life survive, racing for Earths
giving space for other
creatures to have their turn
in the cycles of dream

in the dirty light we cannot
recycle, in the barren cities
where we ate bread and bred for
a while, until it was our time

to climb back into the source
that all men fall from their
duality, back to some essence
of what they once were;
and again must become.