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Showing posts with label earthquake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label earthquake. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

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


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Monday, March 14, 2011

Psychicphrenic Sensitivities [Today's News Poem, March 14, 2011]

Psychicphrenic Sensitivities [Today's News Poem, March 14, 2011]

Every moon has its current.
Only the wisest of schizos acknowledge
It's nerve and it's nervousness.

Every action reacts to the first of all actions:
Explosion, orgasm, whatever you call it
Remember to whimper.

It's not wave, it's not current; it's possible
Is what it is—haecceity—
And nothing could be otherwise.

All the schizos could feel all the nerves
In the earth; they were twitching and bruising
Their knees on the hydrants.

My cat almost died for Japan—
He's connected as well by this feeling of nerves.
His organs unseized and he leaped to my lap

Knowing his death comes much later,
And watched as I watched the tsunami
On teevee, surprised I surprised myself.

I'm laughing. I died in Japan yet I'm typing
A poem. I died in a styrofoam avalanche,
Died in my cradle, died in the ocean;

I died, yet I'm here and the schizos declared it;
They gobbled tobacco and tuned for the station
That everyone hears—it's static: absolute static.

"Japan’s nuclear crisis verged toward catastrophe on Tuesday after an explosion damaged the vessel containing the nuclear core at one reactor and a fire at another spewed large amounts of radioactive material into the air, according to the statements of Japanese government and industry officials."
—HIROKO TABUCHI, KEITH BRADSHER and MATTHEW L. WALD, The New York Times, Published: March 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/world/asia/15nuclear.html

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Saturday, March 12, 2011

Debunking the Myths of Japan [Today's News Poem, March 12, 2011]

Debunking the Myths of Japan [Today's News Poem, March 12, 2011]

The dolphins are laughing, the bigot applauds;
Maguro, unagi salute in the ocean.
Even Poseidon must chuckle; Hephaestus
Wins far too often, inhales the emissions,
And must be extinguished and trade his position.
Japan had it coming: the oni predicted,
Fat Man predicted, Nanking predicted,
Wako, Yamato, Toyota, Pearl Harbor,
Godzilla, Naruto and Rapeman predicted
Japan as a story, as myth and Atlantis.

"A quake-hit Japanese nuclear plant reeling from an explosion at one of its reactors has also lost its emergency cooling system at another reactor, Japan's nuclear power safety agency said on Sunday. The emergency cooling system is no longer functioning at the No.3 reactor at Tokyo Electric Power Co's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility, requiring the facility to urgently secure a means to supply water to the reactor, an official of the Japan Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency told a news conference. On Saturday, an explosion blew off the roof and upper walls of the building housing the facility's No. 1 reactor, stirring alarm over a possible major radiation release, although the government later said the explosion had not affected the reactor's core vessel and that only a small amount of radiation had been released."
—Reuters, Sat Mar 12, 2011 4:17pm EST
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/12/us-japan-quake-nuclear-cooling-idUSTRE72B3GI20110312





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Monday, June 14, 2010

Origami Theremin vs Lady Luck's Maker [Twitter Found Poem, June 14, 2010]

Origami Theremin vs Lady Luck's Maker [Twitter Found Poem, June 14, 2010]
Tweets+Edits=#twitterfoundpoem

Lady Luck commands my eviction.
I expect Mt. Scott to erupt pretty soon.
I expect earthquakes, a blizzard, ice, tornado, hail and flooding.
I expect ENERGY !!!!!!!!!!!!

it was just the power. i was shaking.
nobody else joined my theremin quest!
Even though the theremin alarm Siren
Kills Over 9000 and looks cool.

There's no time to waste!
Point to the left and ride that wave
of ENERGY!!!!!!!!!!!!
to meet my maker...
I fold my eviction notice into an origami
theremin alarm Siren...
and yes, my shit started blinking...
and yes earthquakes, a blizzard, ice,
tornado, hail and flooding... ENERGY
powers my origami theremin alarm Siren...

my quest: going to meet Lady Lucks maker
going to Point my origami theremin alarm Siren
at Lady Lucks maker...
going to Point to the left and ride that wave!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Monday, March 01, 2010

Fraternizing With the Help [Today's News Poem, March 1, 2010]

Fraternizing With the Help [Today's News Poem, March 1, 2010]

“One man says that the real crisis is about to begin, with people out of work and hungry.”
http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/americas/Chile-Battles-Lawlessness-Desperation-After-Massive-Earthquake-85842342.html

“It was still unclear how many people died in Dichato, where distraught residents wandered the picturesque tourist town trying to salvage possessions and gazing at their ruined homes in scenes reminiscent of the Asian tsunami in 2004 that smashed into coastlines from Thailand to India.”
--Mario Naranjo, Mon Mar 1, 2010 2:25pm EST
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6204CB20100301

“Economists' confidence in Chile's ability to bounce back from the earthquake has been strengthened by the fact its copper mines suffered minimum damage, and soon resumed operations. ”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8543816.stm

A fool takes torch to that which nature yet abhors.
Why burn or blast a place that wilts by self's accord?
When quakes, tornadoes, floods ensure whatever shore
Or neighborhood the wealthy—who are simply bored—
Desire, they get, then who needs legal theft? The shock
Of quakes can do what we would have to pay, for free.
It's true the poor are drowned again—with ink—but stocks
Appreciate post-bounce. This rising tide—it frees
A market force. Renewed. The people are renewed
With fops who found their homes on graves and rubble-bones.
The highest use for anything is wealth. Denude
The land of serfs with surf, replaced with finer tones
Of speech and class—they've carried me on broken spines
Around the world: a working man will tend not whine.
Now carry me to bed anon—I'm drunk on wine.

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Saturday, February 27, 2010

Failure to Thrive [Today's News Sonnet, Feb 27, 2010]

Failure to Thrive [Today's News Sonnet, Feb 27, 2010]
“The 8.8 magnitude earthquake that struck off coastal Chile in the early hours of the morning is one of the biggest temblors anywhere in more than a century. ”
–Gautam Naik, Wall Street Journal, FEBRUARY 27, 2010, 3:44 P.M. ET
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704231304575091611248294970.html?mod=rss_Today%27s_Most_Popular

“"From our human perspective with our relatively short and incomplete memories and better and better communications around the world, we hear about more earthquakes and it seems like they are more frequent," Arrowsmith said. "But this is probably not any indication of a global change in earthquake rate of significance."... However, "relative to the 20-year period from the mid-1970s to the mid 1990s, the Earth has been more active over the past 15 or so years," said Stephen S. Gao, a geophysicist at Missouri University of Science and Technology. "We still do not know the reason for this yet. Could simply be the natural temporal variation of the stress field in the earth's lithosphere."”
--MSNBC, Feb 27, 2010
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35618526/ns/technology_and_science-science/

If even sun someday will serve as prey
To entropy, to holes so dense they're black
To us; then what has changed? The gods still fray
In all their forms; from Cronus, farther back
I'm sure, to Ancient Ones of Lovecraft fame,
To microscopes and telescopes that spot
Another entity usurping claims
Of ultimate hegemony. We thought
Our age of science granted might akin
To nebulae and yet the Earth's mishaps
Alone deny our transcendental win.
The paltry centuries disguise perhaps
Immense, perhaps impossible to grasp,
And mighty forces science—Gods can't clasp:
A death in eons, scoffed with dying rasps.

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Saturday, January 23, 2010

Haitian Fright Song [Today's News Poem]

Haitian Fright Song

By Khakjaan Wessington

The Haitian Fight Song
Is curious, because of whom they might fight.
The French,
The Americans,
But mostly themselves
And their denuded dirt.

They were liberated into poverty
As the White Man unburdened himself
Of the people,
While keeping the plantations
And conspiring against voodoo.

A man interviewed said that only the Haitians screamed
During the aftershocks. He said he wanted to emulate
The foreigners. It's not easy to divorce one's self from one's
Animal instincts. To be reptilian where others are mammalian.
To be pitiless in work and to pitilessly extract work.
To fight man and soil
And child and woman
And most of all to fight the self.
To be better than human
To be inhuman.
To dry the ducts of pity
So that when our turn comes
And we are smothered with rubble
And we are trapped beneath our own excrement
Nobody will save us.
Not even ourselves.
And nobody should save us.
I didn't save anyone.
They shouldn't save me.

--

The edit to this poem, in full metered verse, can only be read in the print edition, on sale here:

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