Acworth

.
Havelock Ellis
would have loved this
also Sigmund Freud
sordid dirty little boys grown into senile dirty old men

two muck-rakers of humankind’s murky oblivion
on the bottom of lake Allatoona
remember how desperately
risky crazy disastrous games could get

apparently adults go to great lengths just to forget
then feign a phoney dumb surprise
gagging self-mockery

sometimes I see
my own head as a Rubik’s Cube keeps twisting
and turning every which way
on occasion even
the right way round a perfect
combination

the cube, like a worm turns
those square graph-paper nets of merciless memory
against better judgement and facts and all

squares

Muhammad is an honorable teddy bear
toys and lives and twisted games
his serious paramount business

Control Room

.
- look, this one's a lion!
- what does it do?
- what do you mean? it's a lion!
- does it do tricks?
- yeah!
- well, make it do a trick.
- well, I... can't.
- you said it's your lion.
- I... it is my lion!
- make it do something cool. look, it's just sitting there.
- but it's a lion! my lion.
- big deal. you can't control it.
- well, you're not supposed to... I mean it's a lion, man!
- look, if I had a lion, I could make it do anything.
- you... instruct your lion?
- yeah. take electrodes, stick 'em to its toes,
- but...
- and one behind each ear,
- but but...
- listen: it's all wired in to this membrane.
- yeah well, that's kinda neat.
- when I talk, the signal stimulates my lion,
- so you shock it?
- just listen, it rears, and it roars, and swats at its nose,
- well it looks angry...
- I check its levels here, turn this dial, there, you see,
- how do you tell it to...
- so I can make it do stuff! I command it to do tricks.
- so... when do you just appreciate your lion?
- what? hey careful, that's a commutator switch!
- can't you just dig the lion, like love it?
- man, you still have a long way to go, y'know?

Gaia

.
my dear, your years have just started to show,
chemotherapy draws a heavy toll.
cancer devours your vitals, acute and to the quick,
but you'll survive and thrive,
if it takes all the time in the world.

***

they say the world is dying now, we'll see it die in our lifetime,
scholars and callers post the headline news,
and statesmen wait to see how they could use
their adversaries' weakness. all in all,
the media has a field day harvesting the fall,
a second nature to the times, ending of the world at nine.

more and more information surfaces from our acidizing ocean,
and for the most part, I feel like I've already seen most of these before:
greenhouse gas, plankton, desertification, drought, flood, famine, war,
starvation, poverty, in neatly researched notation. why even keep track
of numbers as they swirl and change, you never had to really rack
your brain to see where this is heading in a general kind of notion.

we're wiping the slate clean of ourselves, and
like insustainable LCD screen audiences, it will blank.
those who survive can live to change their ways.
the prophet says it's over in a helpless generation,
no revolution could match aquamarine revelation:
it's past the time to return to the roots, they've turned away.

Jerusalem

.
he watches over watches, clocks and
a warm yielding now, he nods
shaking off incessant surly ticking,
then silence seems alarming. in a flash come to again,
to find he cannot find the time.
progressing, it is 1982,

relapsing, 1793,
aging tuberculotic, a falling godess steps up
from Conciergerie, from Tribunal,
and from her mock trial to the scaffold, where
in vain, she tries to read the headman's watch,
he has none. hers was lost.

lurch forward to now, cold and autumnal.
insurance money down in the books, watchman fired, priceless
timepieces repurchased, cleaned, oiled, wound, and put back on
display. police still tracking thieves.
timeless, piercing laser gazes of
guards, alarms, museum visitors traverse the scene.

***

to date, perhaps one of the most
appalling gestures in the modern world,
the arrogant impatience displayed in
that quick cursory glance snuck at the wristwatch.

Xinhua

.
Chinese government suspended export, understandably,
though Bindeez was a raving party game.
officials on chemical quality control, officials on
date-rape party drug, officials
lab-coated in 1,4-butaneidol, officials are not available for comment
officials pretty blurred are not available for a total product recall
officials are presumably still testing the toy.

little toy factories line the coast
tiny conveyor belts powered by solar cells
executives try not to step on them
but one or some crunch under Gucci soles
- from Archipelago, home-grown long ago,
coinciding now with some reality
my own acid techno nightmare fantasy

metabolized as gamma hydroxy butyrate
Liquid Ex in Aqua Dots

Juice
G

anaesthetic beads of sweat for age four and above
with the most fucked up built-in obsolescence
in small parts, do not swallow.

***

a xenophobic element emerges:
Chinese product recalled in USA, Britain and Australia,
not that chemical substances could know any borders,
health care policies or industrial regulation standards:
drugs, they're just kids.

Tuusula

When I was in Sweden, and one of the dailies
carried a picture, front cover perhaps, of a stag
that died in an empty home's ground floor livingroom where it crashed
through the blind Arcadia door it shattered and bled
out final fatal hours rerendering interior design to raging red.

***

Today, a high school in Tuusula is ravaged by a young man with
a gun, age 18 with a bullet,
and as reports keep coming in, none of them seem quite certain
of how many are killed, shot, wounded, dead
or alive, police have the building surrounded, reportedly.
He took no hostages, kept on shooting, now at the cops, hundreds
are in there, though the exact count varies,
one dead on yahoo!, three hurt on BBC, three dead on CNN, and
one account at least of students jumping from the windows to escape,
sustaining minor injuries from shattered glass.

Kathimerini

Kathimerini English Edition,

Greece's International

English Language Newspaper online at

www.ekathimerini.com wrote about a tragic double suicide. two lovers

swallowed a lethal pesticide

called Lammate, the girl is seventeen

only, and still alive in critical condition,

so she wanted to marry this greek boy, oh

I wonder what his name is,

he is dead. she in a coma. Ierapetra saw this all in Crete,

comatose bride of the Lybian Sea perhaps still

breathing, as her beloved second cousin marks the death toll,

he was twentyfour, so they only needed permission

from the families,

to what tragic end were they denied?

***

I wrote an email to rectify the article as it appeared

online in Hungarian: Lammate

was referred to by index.hu as scene of this, their Romeo and Juliet attempt,

erroneously.

Shinju.