Guard the Poet [Today's News Poem, April 8, 2011]

Guard the Poet [Today's News Poem, April 8, 2011]

Ah muses I've served you with focused devotion;
I've served as your goblet, I've served you as jester.
I used to be bitter—but now I'm ecstatic;
My heart's uninstalled and you've turned me to poem.

Poison nutritious; nomad exquisite;
Pantomime artist loves all this sadness.
Farewell my folly, grant me your magic
Save all my foolish songs in the ether:

Stave off the darkness—it's calling me softly,
Shave off the edges of pummeling sidewalks;
Call all the cables and seagulls and airplanes—
Hold it together, preserve all this chaos.

Return to Toylit
Subscribe to Toylit

Tastes of Home [Today's News Poem, April 7 2011]

Tastes of Home [Today's News Poem, April 7 2011]

Slush on the sidewalk
Snow in the doorway,
Beaks in the salad—
A seabird's attacking.

Shells were the home,
Yolk was the baby,
Whites were the mother
Hugging the offspring.

Home: where the flesh
Wraps in a blanket,
Whips to an omelet,
Stares out the window.

Springtime: a woodpecker sleeps in the branches;
White and black beak—its redness its life.
Summer: the woodchuck devours the garden—
Poison its lair and pitchfork its torso.
Autumn: the crows stand on the pikes—call them cornstalks.
Winter: the straggler is freezing,
She shatters the ice on the window
And batters stalactites—
Calling for springtime you flushed after dinner.

"Karen Cooke Phillip keeps the basement freezer of her new Anchorage house stocked with food to ward off homesickness. There is a whole king eider sea duck, including feathers and head. And she has three plastic bottles filled with seal oil: liquid gold to a Yupik Eskimo like Mrs. Cooke Phillip."
—KIM SEVERSON, The New York Times, Published: April 7, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/08/us/08alaska.html

Return to Toylit
Subscribe to Toylit

Nineveh [Today's News Poem, April 6, 2011]

Nineveh [Today's News Poem, April 6, 2011]

Shame there's no limit
To depths in the soil.
Rootlets had branched
Nodules like tumors, potatoes;
While the snout with an eyeball
Roots for excitement then lays it in sunlight
To wither or blossom—Nineveh kikayon,
Lot's wife of salt.

"Officer Trey Economidy of the Albuquerque police now realizes that he should have thought harder before listing his occupation on his Facebook profile as “human waste disposal.” After he was involved in a fatal on-duty shooting in February, a local television station dug up the Facebook page. Officer Economidy was placed on desk duty, and last month the Albuquerque Police Department announced a new policy to govern officers’ use of social networking sites. Social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter can be valuable assets for law enforcement agencies, helping them alert the public, seek information about crimes and gather evidence about the backgrounds of criminal suspects."
—ERICA GOODE, The New York Times, Published: April 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/07/us/07police.html

Return to Toylit
Subscribe to Toylit

Innocence Attritted [Today's News Poem, April 4, 2011]

Innocence Attritted [Today's News Poem, April 4, 2011]

There's so much freshness, so much more innocence to shed.
The tide for example withdraws all the sand,
Draws all the hermit crabs, basks in the droppings of pelicans.
Fish fake the song at the crest of the swell—
Throbbing; a heart that pumps gills and ocean.
Welcome the edges of food-chain and welcome the
song of ablation,
the pockmarks of moon;
welcome births with one's mouth
and silvery slivers from eggs in the moonlight—
innocent still, for a moment at least.

"The federal government's chief climate adviser Professor Ross Garnaut believes nuclear power still has a vital role to play in global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, despite the crisis at Japan's Fukushima plant."
—Evan Schwarten, Sydney Morning Herald, April 5, 2011 - 2:54PM
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/nuclear-power-still-important-garnaut-20110405-1d1wh.html

Return to Toylit
Subscribe to Toylit

Declining Momentum [Today's News Poem, April 3, 2011]

Declining Momentum [Today's News Poem, April 3, 2011]

The concrete is cracking and punctures your tires,
Yet celebrate roots pushing pavement apart.
The birds are returning, they nest in the alder,
And shit on the sidewalk you hate—do not hate;
It's time for renewal—the wheels must stop spinning.

"Tokyo Electric Power is struggling to block a crack discovered in a pit that is leaking highly radioactive water into the ocean at its Fukushima Daiichi plant, and said it had discovered the bodies of its two missing employees at the stricken plant. "
—Lindsay Whipp in Tokyo, The Financial Times, Published: April 2 2011 17:09 | Last updated: April 3 2011 08:34
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9d7b6070-5d40-11e0-a008-00144feab49a.html

"As Southwest Airlines canceled 300 flights throughout the country after one of its jets developed a hole in its roof during a flight, Bay Area travelers Saturday had hit-or-miss experiences getting to and from their destinations."
—Lisa Fernandez and Doug Jastrow, Bay Area News Group, Posted: 04/02/2011 09:37:19 PM PDT, Updated: 04/02/2011 10:20:22 PM PDT

Return to Toylit
Subscribe to Toylit

The New Normal [Today's News Poem, April 2, 2011]

The New Normal [Today's News Poem, April 2, 2011]

I thought that the average was something like grasping,
Something like murder and incest; torture and me.
I thought that because I could break, I was broken;
Born to a luck that I spurned because it's not fair.
And life is for idiots, error, repentance.
Life is not fair, so go quickly, even it out.
I've tried to exhaustion the rage and it failed me
Anger's the doorway to patience, love, compassion.
And normal's not average, it's more aspiration,
Noble and lie it's the mother goddess of hearth.
The lies do not bind us and babies aren't silenced
Shouting them down, nor by reason, terror—just love.

"there are many reasons to believe that measuring and reporting metrics of social mobility will be a meaningless task. Complete measures of social mobility, such as looking at the link between parental and children's incomes or parents' and children's education, take a lifetime to evaluate."
—Imran Hussain, Letters, The Guardian, Saturday 2 April 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/apr/02/income-inequality-social-mobility

"A host of Asian performing artists have staged a three-hour charity concert in Hong Kong to raise funds for victims of Japan's earthquake and tsunami. "
—Xinhuanet, 2011-04-02 11:13:09
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/video/2011-04/02/c_13810387.htm

Return to Toylit
Subscribe to Toylit

Gaol For Agoraphobics [Today's News Poem, April 1, 2011]

Gaol For Agoraphobics [Today's News Poem, April 1, 2011]

Leap from the floor to the counter.
Knock off the dishes, then land on the floor.

The labors of cat: in the sunbeam;

Gnaw on arachnids in paw,
Open the window—the garden awaits.

The rosemary blossomed this month.

Look at the world. It is freedom,
Smells like a spice on the currents of clouds.

The fences are flimsy, yet bind.

Pick a known path in the tangle.
Slink in the bushes then lay on cement.

The warden of prison appears

Reckless; he staggers down stairwell
Speaks in his language, contains the escape

With some tuna, a scratch for the ears
And a view from the window of mazes—
Abstractions gone monsters in lettuce—
Lock, latch and door.

"The Labor Department will release its monthly snapshot of the job market on Friday, and economists expect it to show that the nation’s employers added about 190,000 jobs in March. With an unemployment rate that has been stubbornly stuck near 9 percent, those workers could be considered lucky. But many of the jobs being added in retail, hospitality and home health care, to name a few categories, are unlikely to pay enough for workers to cover the cost of fundamentals like housing, utilities, food, health care, transportation and, in the case of working parents, child care. "
—MOTOKO RICH, The New York Times, Published: March 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/business/economy/01jobs.html

Return to Toylit
Subscribe to Toylit

Life Preserver [Today's News Poem, March 31, 2011]

Life Preserver [Today's News Poem, March 31, 2011]

Nothing is certain.
What will save us?
Do not say it's love, for you can't eat love.
Do not say it's food, for you can't love food.
Superlatives skew our desires,
Sense of self; flatten the surfaces.
If everything's loved then nothing is loved.
I'll give you examples:
I was tremendously fat as a child.
My teacher had nightmares I'd burst in the classroom
And shatter her leg and she'd die in our papers.
We paid her no mind in her dream.
She was helpless, alone with us savages
And died from her blood-clot.
It wasn't me I said.
I'd never leave her there to die
And she laughed when I said this;
But why would I do that?
I loved her. She taught me to count on my words
And conjugate numbers—I'd never allow her to die
Somewhere awful like school.
I'd apologize softly. A chant of "I'm sorry, I'm sorry,"
While dialing emergency services.
And I wondered, "is she right? Is this me?"
I could fit a whole flock in my stomach,
And plantations of sugar—and how many gallons of milk
Did I churn into tallow?
So I lost all that weight,
Stopped the sugar and bicycled.
Weaved through the buses on Haight Street, on Market.
And every collision was miracle,
I tore off my knees and my elbows and laughed in the blood.
And I laughed with the love of my life
In the rain—nearly midnight on Sixth street.
The boarded up windows, the shopping cart specters
And needles for blades of grass, sodded on sidewalk.
We passed it, en route to our shower, bed above closet;
A cage for us lovebirds—
We had no idea.

"For a quarter marked by successive bouts of panic — over Mideast oil supplies, Japanese radiation leaks and European debt crises — safe-haven investments turned out to a pretty uneven showing."
—Marketwatch, March 31, 2011, 3:47 PM ET
http://blogs.marketwatch.com/marketjunkie/2011/03/31/so-much-for-uncertainty-stocks-turn-out-winners-gold-lags/

Return to Toylit
Subscribe to Toylit

Butterfly Karma [Today's News Poem, March 30, 2011]

Butterfly Karma [Today's News Poem, March 30, 2011]

Every time you call your luck your karma,
Somewhere a yogi renounces his teachings
And snips off his beard.

You confuse the question with the answer.
Stomp on a butterfly, magnify anthills,
And curse your adulthood.

Simple cause, effect, informed by action
Can't be extended to cover our destinies.
We still overlap

As do shamrocks and leprechauns,
Dogs and yellow spots on lawns—
Today, tomorrow, yesterday:
A meadow in spring.

"The single largest winning lottery ticket ever sold in New York's Mega Millions drawing has been claimed, a lottery spokeswoman said Tuesday. The winners of the $319 million lottery are rumored to be seven IT specialists from New York state's Division of Housing and Community Renewal, said Emanuel Biondi, a public employees federation council leader for the agency."
—By the CNN Wire Staff, CNN, March 29, 2011
http://articles.cnn.com/2011-03-29/us/new.york.mega.millions_1_mega-ball-number-lottery-ticket-million-lottery?_s=PM:US

Return to Toylit
Subscribe to Toylit

Visions of Smothering [Today's News Poem, March 29, 2011]

Visions of Smothering [Today's News Poem, March 29, 2011]

When the world is too much for me,
The pigeons too ugly;
And the roof of humanity—
That marble monstrosity—
Buried with dust on antennae,
Grit in the fingernails,
Water for boundary,
Air for a temple,
Vista for idol;
I think of the time I had slipped
In the snow, so I fell at angle.
I could have slept away the years
And wrote a novel in my mind
With a feeding tube my bistro.
I could have fallen off a cliff,
I could have fallen on the knife,
I could have dared the man to shoot me,
I could have slept a dozen years.
Sleep is just the death I call the center of my life.
The rest that eludes me awake
Evades me in dreams, so I grind to the finish
Of sweat in the night and swallow enamel.
I awaken exhausted, in search of that rest of a child;
Where's the rest of that child
Who had names for inanimate objects
And déjà vu moments,
Where sleep and alertness combined in the memory?
Who notices sleep 'till it's lost?
Then we seek it, apostate in prayer to the wrathful.
I would cover my eyes if I could
To destroy what offends me—to cover the dust with more dust,
Raise all the oceans to bury it,
Leaving the people intact but their madness asleep
In a slurry of dust, sand and water.

"A new Swedish study shows an increased risk of developing the sleeping disease narcolepsy for children vaccinated with swine flu vaccine Pandemrix, a drug manufactured by pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. "
—The Local, 29 Mar 11 09:49 CET
http://www.thelocal.se/32878/20110329/

Return to Toylit
Subscribe to Toylit

Radioactive Utopia [Today's News Poem, March 28, 2011]

Radioactive Utopia [Today's News Poem, March 28, 2011]

Nuclear age monsters despise the reactor
That granted them powers.
Even Kaczynski would target professors
For like goes to likeness,
Wasting competitors, trashing the sources
Of powers, mutations.

I swear when Japan hits, I'll grow to a tower
Of iron, emitting my wavelengths of gamma.
I swear when the riots have burnt down the city
I'll rule from my palace of Twinkies and cistern
And start it all over again, this time better—
But first the explosions must shatter the windows
And shadow the basketball players at hoop-time,
And sprout from the concrete, a mushroom of promises;
And shrivel humanity: slugs must be salted.

"At least 15 states have found trace amounts of radiation from the crippled nuclear plant in Japan, but officials say the levels of radioactivity are much too low to prompt health concerns."
—Judy Keen, USA TODAY, Updated 9h 43m ago as of 7:34pm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/environment/2011-03-28-radiation-usa_N.htm

Return to Toylit
Subscribe to Toylit

Billionaire Miasma [Today's News Poem, March 27, 2011]

Billionaire Miasma [Today's News Poem, March 27, 2011]

I don't care if you're famous, a billionaire Jesus;
Don't care if you think you deserve it—
You cannot convert this to adjective.
The language resists all your money.
True poets will carry the noun—
A whole fountain of language
Entombed in a mountain of ink;
While your currency blows with the wind
From your stomach, intestines and anus.
You are swollen with farts, you are floating on gas
And you circle the peak, but can never corrupt it.

"The signs of the coming apocalypse are many, but none are starker than this Web headline in the April issue of O: The Oprah Magazine: “Spring Fashion Modeled by Rising Young Poets.” Yes. Spring fashion. Modeled. By rising young poets. There follows a photomontage of attractive younger women — some of whom are rising poets mostly in the “I get up in the morning” sense, but all of whom certainly look poetic — in outfits costing from $472 to $5,003."
—DAVID ORR, The New York Times, Published: March 25, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/books/review/oprah-magazines-adventures-in-poetry.html

Return to Toylit
Subscribe to Toylit

Rat-A-Tat Tah-Tahs [Today's News Poem, March 26, 2011]

Rat-A-Tat Tah-Tahs [Today's News Poem, March 26, 2011]

The sexy empowered with fuck imagination
Powered the office, and powered the celibate marriages.
The daughter of catsuits and hooker boots boxed after college,
Discovered her mother's vagina; her daddy's revolver.
Her Lexus swerves, ricochets off of the panels of cars, off lanes.
And if credit cards bounce, then just launch off a penis
A pogo; then dress in a suit. Go sell houses, insurance;
Your body's a weapon to copy by internet; to copy and
Touch with our eyes. While we handle our organs
You handle a pistol and load it and fire—it's cute so it's safe—
It is pink, therefore gentle. Oh you siren, you call us by testes,
We call back by phone then we enter your lair where you crash us on bullets.
You'll get on a show, you'll be famous and author some books
And appear at the rallies, the NRA rallies, to vanquish the losers of Onan
You fine fucking thing, with your tatas, dentatas,
A rat-a-tat-tah-tah; don't give me sons, give me daughters!

"Meghan Brown, a former Florida pageant queen, shot and killed 42-year-old Albert Franklin Hill during a home invasion March 12 at the 2,732-square-foot house she shares with her fiance in Tierra Verde, Fla."
—Cristina Corbin, FoxNews.com, Published March 22, 2011
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/03/22/armed-beauty-queen-fatally-shoots-intruder-florida-home-invasion/



Return to Toylit
Subscribe to Toylit

Vespers and Vapors [Today's News Poem, March 25, 2011]

Vespers and Vapors [Today's News Poem, March 25, 2011]

When I breathe, I smell the lozenge you;
The winter, springtime pollen you.
Our sighs are breezes that blow us closer;
Somewhere near the source of salt and
How can hypothermia smell this delicious?
Why does it smell like the beginning of things?
And when I feel your final stillness,
How can I flow with such zeal for the chill of vespers
Of vapor that soon will seem warm to us both?
I still do not think it lost.

"A Joyce man died Wednesday evening while apparently trying to save his wife’s life with CPR after she collapsed, the Clallam County Sheriff’s Office said Thursday."
—Tom Callis, The Peninsula Daily News, March 24. 2011 11:57PM
http://www.peninsuladailynews.com/article/20110325/news/303259977/man-dies-while-trying-to-revive-dead-wife

Return to Toylit
Subscribe to Toylit

Divine Qubit [Today's News Poem, March 24, 2011]

Divine Qubit [Today's News Poem, March 24, 2011]

If you can imagine it, then somewhere it's real
In the possible universe, possible worlds.
For I have converted your whim to a poem:
A possible verse for a plausible outcome.
You are looking for God, or you wouldn't read poems;
I looked for it too, then I lost and recovered my faith
In the faithless.

                      The opposites reconcile.
God must exist, so you claim—I've destroyed it.
God is forever you claim—time's illusion.
God is a feeling of faith—what then is faithlessness?
I have combined them together and claim I'm Creator,
Who will stop me? An explosion? An earthquake?
A pack of dogs, swarm of bees or mob of men?
Priests who've embalmed all the possible life
In their certainly death? Or a hymn?
Will the chorus protect you when magma erupts?

The two halves are the whole; God is dead,
You revived it. I freeze time; you have moved it.
I lose faith; you possess it.
The qubits of heaven exist,
It surrounds this intelligent structure—it must,
Yet it's elsewhere. You say I'm a deist, I'm not;
For I'm certain that everything-possible-everywhere God
Is the set that subsumes both existence and non;
Has a planet called Heaven, another called Earth—
And all of them happier, all of them worse
Than this jaw of expansion;
The universe opens its maw—it's a smile.

"When Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara called the massive earthquake and tsunami in Japan tembatsu -- or "divine judgment" -- he expressed a kind of theological cause and effect shared by nearly 40 percent of Americans."
—Lauren Green, FoxNews.com, Published March 24, 2011
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/03/24/poll-nearly-4-10-americans-say-natural-disasters-sign-god/



Return to Toylit
Subscribe to Toylit

Taking You With Me [Today's News Poem, March 23, 2011]

Taking You With Me [Today's News Poem, March 23, 2011]

Think of all those dollars saved,
While coasting on an outbound wave:
Farallon Islands your grave,

The seagulls laugh and pitch their wings
Over smoke the city sings.
Release the cremains in charred strings.

Smoking dollar, hear me holler.
Prise my coffin, drop the money
Off; I'll take it with me
Leaving ash behind.

"San Francisco firefighters are paid 18.3 percent above market compared to other fire departments in the region. And when you break it down by hourly pay, they're paid 34 percent over market."
—Heather Knight, City Insider, San Francisco Chronicle, March 23, 2011
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/cityinsider/detail?entry_id=85641&tsp=1


Return to Toylit
Subscribe to Toylit

Dormant Code [Today's News Poem, March 22, 2011]

Dormant Code [Today's News Poem, March 22, 2011]

If blossoms admit it; if jackhammers mutter,
Jackasses sputter it—spring is erection
And promises doused at the summer's discretion.
Spring is the architect, spring is the beauty;
And spring is the whimsy that animates flirting,
Coffee then sex, then placenta in garbage.
The blossoms are falling—they're purple-white falling—
Corpses of salmon are caught in the gravel,
The mushrooms consume what remains of a redwood,
Why won't you bury the afterbirth stillborn
And plant on the grave—if not pear, plant a plum tree?
Look at the city, it's rising; it's falling,
It's built on the efforts of ultimate knowledge.
Calculate will to the decimal spirit,
The programs will find you and activate software
Fucking you, fighting you, flighting and feeding
Your face—you're a robot. My face—I'm a robot.

"The psychologists also measured other factors, including the workers’ general satisfaction with their lives, how energetic they felt, how strongly they endorsed an ethic of hard work. None of these factors was a reliable predictor of their actual performance on the job, as rated by their supervisors. But the higher the workers scored on the scale of belief in free will, the better their ratings on the job."
—JOHN TIERNEY, The New York Times, Published: March 21, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/science/22tier.html



Return to Toylit
Subscribe to Toylit

Fission Metaphor [Today's News Poem, March 21, 2011]

Fission Metaphor [Today's News Poem, March 21, 2011]

Grasp ever tighter and lose the whole thing.
Springs, sprockets, circuitry slip from the hand.
Squeeze harder, diamonds are possible sand.
Fists fit the world in the palm of one's rage.

"When radiation is released with gas, as it was at the Japanese reactors, the particles are carried by prevailing winds, and some will settle on the earth. Rain will knock more of the suspended particles to the ground. “There is an extremely complex interaction between the type of radionuclide and the weather and the type of vegetation,” Dr. Whicker said. “There can be hot spots far away from an accident, and places in between that are fine.”"
—ELISABETH ROSENTHAL, The New York Times, Published: March 21, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/science/earth/22food.html

Return to Toylit
Subscribe to Toylit

Elbow Room [Today's News Poem, March 20, 2011]

Elbow Room [Today's News Poem, March 20, 2011]

My grandmother's sister would elbow the crowds
Towing her comical entourage—preteen
Befuddled with glasses—through Union Square faces.

Untense for an instant and everything's lost.
Plot by the footstep through Jimmy Choo mazes
Like Tao of the paces; expand through obstructions.

By graphing location in city, one sees
Stages of rage and aggression, discomfort;
The crowd will converse it, will ramble and shout it.

If death is a billboard of home in a condo
Tiny, but private, with views of an island
And bridge that connects it to privacy towers

Ensconced in a crowd with bare feet
And ensconced by the ocean,
Gilded with spotlights in fog,
Where breakers erode
All the edges
Of crowds—

"A rate of 45 percent would apply to taxable income starting at $1 million and rates would increase up to 49 percent for taxable incomes over $1 billion. Citizens for Tax Justice found that the bill would raise at least $78.9 billion if enacted for 2011. This is a little more than the $61 billion that Republicans would like to cut for the rest of this fiscal year from Pell Grants, nutrition, housing and other programs that struggling families rely on, particularly during this recession."
—Citizens For Tax Justice, March 18, 2011 2:50 PM
http://www.ctj.org/taxjusticedigest/archive/2011/03/congresswoman_schakowsky_propo.php

Return to Toylit
Subscribe to Toylit

Kirilian Epiphany [Today's News Poem, March 19, 2011]

Kirilian Epiphany [Today's News Poem, March 19, 2011]

Perception inverted, the light seemed excessive,
Radioactive, relentless,
Its ambiance entered my brain through eye-sockets.
Typing a memo forgotten
To someone forgotten, displaced in a panic.
Plumes fell to thunderstorm raincloud
And smothered my eyes with a radiance leaking,
Blurred with appliances shedding
Electrons: a negative image of dreamscape—
Nothing implied with a halo,
Kirilian opposite, darkness corona.
Microwaved steak made of prion,
A medicine tainted with HeLa immortal,
Particles scintillate, shimmer,
Contaminate; pierce through denial: awaken!

"As Japan struggles to contain radiation leaking from crippled nuclear reactors, many countries, including China, Indonesia, South Korea and Thailand have already started to test food imported from Japan for radiation, and the European Union has recommended that member countries do so. "
—ANDREW POLLACK, The New York Times, Published: March 18, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/19/business/global/19radiate.html

Return to Toylit
Subscribe to Toylit