The Case Against Color [Today's News Poem, July 2, 2010]

The Case Against Color [Today's News Poem, July 2, 2010]

The rainbow's expensive and nature's a thief:
We've waited too long, for these colors—too brief.
And afterward, simply another life-score.
And framing these moments, a nightmare of bores:
Mosaics of stone—a whole mountain of rock
They've blasted and mixed and then poured into blocks.
And even the lights are ephemeral hues.
The march of the crowd with their clown-colored shoes,
And billboards—and pigeons; a yellow balloon...
And pace! And the next one—the next one is soon!
And mixed-up together, the concrete cements
The elements tightly, to single intent.

“Although private hiring was well below levels needed to bring down unemployment on a sustained basis, analysts said the report from the Labor Department on Friday was not consistent with an economy on the brink of another recession.”
– Lucia Mutikani, Reuters, July 2, 2010
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65M2WK20100702

“All that the world most needs to-day, is combined in the most seductive manner
in his art,—the three great stimulants of exhausted people: _brutality_,
_artificiality_ and _innocence_ (idiocy).”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, Page 16
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=746821&pageno=16

Return to Toylit
Subscribe in a reader

The New Hydrologic Cycle [Today's News Poem, June 24, 2010]

The New Hydrologic Cycle [Today's News Poem, June 24, 2010]

The shells of the animals covered with scabs;
We baited them, hoisted from muck—from the depths
Of brine—from the bay; and we threw all those crabs
In emptied out buckets of litter for cats.
And yet I can't help but consider the drugs
My system absorbed: all that coke in the air,
The smoke from those pipes. Am I high as this bug
That lived in a bay of prescriptions we flushed
Down toilets with feces? Our message from land:
Become us. Our claret converges and soon
Digestion, excretion will crawl in the sand
Of bays, as our organs, our bones—and our teeth.
From water, to oceans of urine and blood
As cannibals fishing our young from the mud.

“Fearing that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will deal a severe blow to the bluefin tuna, an environmental group is demanding that the government declare the fish an endangered species, setting off extensive new protections under federal law. ”
– Andrew W. Lehren and Justin Gillis, The New York Times, June 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/24/us/24fish.html?hpw

“The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, one of only two known Atlantic bluefin spawning grounds, has only intensified the crisis. By some estimates, there may be only 9,000 of the most ecologically vital megabreeders left in the fish’s North American stock, enough for the entire population of New York to have a final bite (or two) of high-grade otoro sushi.”
– Paul Greenberg, The New York Times, June 21, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/magazine/27Tuna-t.html

“The Superior Council of Scientific Investigations found the air in those cities to be laced with at least five drugs: amphetamines, opiates, cannabinoids, lysergic acid and most prominently cocaine. Researchers found cocaine in concentrations between 29 and 850 picogram per cubic meter of air.”
– samzenpus, Slashdot, May 14, 2009
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/14/1556244

Return to Toylit
Subscribe in a reader