London

.
a flame to bring to light
the discontent
behind smooth propaganda and
protesters' rants
"the Olympic flame
en route to the 2008 Beijing games"
ignites a pyre

of zero
tolerance
"a fixed point
of
reference for the geometry
of the surrounding space."

Londons around the world are burning.

"China is determined to hold
a successful Olympic Games" really,
just how seriosly? will
any more get killed
for their symbolic sport?
"The Olympic torch
is a symbol
of peace, and given what has happened
in
the last few weeks
they should be
challenged." Matt Whitticase, of
the Free Tibet Campaign, said. Others
merely feel "uneasy"

in these darkening days
of jittery spring.

***

"and one of Hungary's wealthiest
people, Széles Gábor
has publicly defended journalist Bayer Zsolt"
Bayer who wrote last Wednesday “they are our
reason-Jews, meaning their bare existence is a reason
for anti-semitism”. Magyar Hírlap lost a lot of face
on that one, and some subscribers too.

these intolerance-sparked sad debates
could bring to light the ethical way to burn
the generous sponsors of our discontent.

Williamsburg

.
"Our rock stars are ricotta
makers"
lucid righteous Greenhorn hippies say,
they seem to lack
reluctance, resignation and
dismay.
The journalist is tactful, almost
respectful. To leave behind whatever,
is all our dream, till the day
without escape arrives
to our arrest.

As protesters throw biofarmed potato
salad at the Gene Bank labcoats who
posess "the power to take DNA samples from anyone
over the age of 10 who is
arrested," seeking out
those who are preprogrammed,
potentially paranoid, "We have to find
who are possibly going to be
the biggest threat to society,"

weeding out the antisocial rabble
from this our Garden, "to thy fair
flower add the rank
smell of weeds" before its blossom, for Control
over all of creation, from procreation
to recreation, prescribing
appropriate content for an already
discontentfully entangled nightmare
of stigma. Targeting young people, top priority.

Censorship, prohibition, the usual sterile shit
For our children's developmental benefit.

***

So you want to be a farmer? Leave behind
the game of game certificates, just go
and till unmonitored soil? Is that so
fine?
Cultivating sandpit oases
to feed the spinning windmills of your mind
in half forgotten dream far out beyond
the confused politics of food,
following studied roots
down, diving
into attitude,
into good
living.

D.C.

.
so let this be a lesson from out the Smith&Wesson
school of death in self defense & goin on to plead the Second,
semi-automatic culture plucking legal offal like a vulture,
those individual rights are up for a constitutional rupture

1968 40 years on it's still going strong set out to prolong
as more doomed generations are told nothing's even wrong
so lax the gun control laws, support your local warlords
self-righteous men setting precedent, forget about "never again"
this killing in self defence is a menacing pestilence
backed up by dense sentiments from that dunce of a president

world policing militants disregarding all the evidence
murdering masses from Black Panthers to Kenya's last elephants
in Congo, the Sudan and Chad, the heads are to be had,
it's an attitude fad, never mind looking far away as Baghdad
"You want heroin there's tons of that, guns and crack
but who's got the funds and cash
the same people who supply guns to Iraq"

upholding old corrupt ways bringing on the next phase,
with pretense and lies like firearms weren't threatening innocent lives,
schoolkids ganging up into killing tribes to the hardest vibes
acting out console shooter games for fame in the latest craze
while deadly media feed us bodycounts like it was trivia
our daily tragedies a disease nobody foresees,
you didn't did ya?

Maplewood

.

"it's turned into the
most fun thing,"
all the world a pub-
crawl
and all the men and
women
merely players

performing rites
for their slowly
melting
dissolving rights
in a festival of farewell, one last
stand,
get up,
stand up,

light up
and smoke
pours through a loop-
hole in legal Minnesota
"The law was
enacted to protect Minnesotans from
the serious
health
effects of secondhand smoke,"
what a
joke

turning the ban
into stageplay
parody.

and you
who live by the
book, surely you
don't want to
end
up in a morgue, deceased, the
lung
a gray smoke riddled
sponge
as contracted in
bars. never
a drink, officers
the smoke it
was
the sole
cause of death.

fight till your last
bland
breath
against the bar
bum crowd
close down these
underground
covert theatres
and fine them. they
have no moral
fibre.
make them pay!

***

imagine what
would happen if these
people
started enjoying
their resistance, with
nobody to tell them
what to do
without looking
completely ridiculous.

if health officials
acquired
a sense of humor.

Whitehall

.
as you soared over the
babassu trees in the
747
publicity stunt flight,
strapped in the pilot seat, did you
squeal into your
headset Winnie?

like
- "things don't change
we'll see a lot of farmers going out
of business" - and
- bring me some feed,
Winnie to Whitehall
this is Winnie to Whitehall
over
over -

alone up there, on the
biofuel Ark,
- Richard B? Dr Parr?
hello, my Bacon MP? -
everybody on board the big
pig
industry spiraling, downspiraling
a vapor trail over
rising food prices,
over
and far
away

British Pig Executive
laments the price of pork while
"those hit hardest by
the soaring" are left
in the pouring grain
and yet more meat gets butchered on demand
in Mexico City, Argentina, Malaysia,
China
on tight supplies, the
mechanical grindstone millstones
roar out billions of gallons to biofuel that
ethanol choir of angels,

or is it Engels
as cited in USA
Today?
over -

"a mandate that
would make Stalin blush," Scott Faber, vice
president of federal affairs for the
Grocery Manufacturers Association,
commenting the
energy bill

***

the babassu tree yields cosmetic
products for pigskincare,
glistening where
never a wrinkle cut
angelic pilot hog
on your unblushing
pink Winnie trotters
pulling the yoke as
you march us toward
this brave new March
when pigs
fly

Dongjing

.
writing from down
the sink,

where "elevated
levels of ammonia,
nitrogen, and permanganate, a
chemical
used in metal cleaning,
tanning
and bleaching"

has the waterworks churning red
the flowing foamy
Han tributary
turning to ruby
ink

industrial wasteland
pumping the bloodflow
into the Dongjing
like Sanzu, like the Styx

200,000
in Hubei province
fallen short with
nothing
left
to
drink

***

writing from up
the waterworks

where Emerald City's
Department of Water
municipal water
is prize winning water
water to grace your tap
in L.A.

"Take Back the Tap" they say,
less plastic waste that way,

call a green rainbow so
rivers could all go
recover their old
transparent non-
colors

Pristina

.

in

interesting times

that „for

reasons

of culture,

geography

and history,”

we must all

live

in,

an emerging

state

from a

state

of emergency

declared itself

instantly

pristinely clean

in these

interesting

and

otherwise blood-

stained

times.

out here,

the anglosphere

echoes

a lot

with all

the reports

you

hear,

like

the BBC

on how Belgrade

belligerently

"did fairly represent

the

feelings

of the vast

majority

of the Serb

people",

specifically

a thousand

or so

rock-flinging

and sign-

wrenching

rioteers,

"football

hooligans."

now,

having seen our

share

of local

hooligans,

we

must say

today:

a big

F

U

to that

"majority",

we know

who

and what

you be,

independence

will have

its

own

extatic

way,

„committed

to confront

the pain-

ful legacy

of

the recent

past

in a spirit of

re-

conciliation and

forgiveness,”

the

independent

declarators

say,

„Dedicated to

protecting, promoting and

honouring

the diversity

of our

people,”

a new

beginning

and

hope.

frustrating?

yes,

no doubt

„to channel

unrest

and anger”

at

Ahtisaari and

his Ahtisaari

plan

is what some

other

democratic

European

leaders do

at best.

for

reasons of poetry

we

will have none of

Kostunica

pledging tyranny

against

the people,

or

the orthodox

bishop

Artemije

denouncing the army

for doing

nothing

and

saying Serbia

should buy arms

from Russia

to fight.

F

U

to his

holiness

and

his own

mad

majority,

and to all

those murderous

carreer

diplomats

the world

over,

most dis-

respec-

tively.

Kosovo

is born

again

pristine

again

and

free.


***

is that

not

the way

we all

want to

become,

remain,

to

be

?

Okinawa

.

sweet in black and white the oriental

chocolate nation butterfly battalions

ten million strong the honmei choco amorous

wingbeating powdertinted pant progressing

to view the cherry blossom front

survey sakura zensen all

along the parks the shrines and temples

parading as the flowerstalks stalk and stall

stealing guerilla garden pots into this lovers’ paradise

where every day is Valentine’s

concrete

wrapped carefully in silk

the paper birds

crackle in the wind

the women creaseless suppin

look on them look

hanami look into

the flower: cherry, lotus, plum.

a spring onslaught of Eastern flowers, each

chocolate-scented blossom torn between

the giri and the honmei, the form

and emotion,

from Valentine’s Yin Cycle

1958

till White Day and Yang

counter-confectionary

1973

***

they would by Mao’s State of Grace

have kissed Kissinger crumbling

into invading feminine flood disaster

„giving birth to too many

children,” giving and giving

all living „blossoming places in this

most densely populated area.”

Pacific Garbage Sprawl

.
"My poor old island's still un-rediscovered",
poor old Crusoe's lament! Not even you
would ever survive being shipwrecked here,
washed up on this sterile folly continent
with no life-support, just syringes,
cigarette lighters, toothbrushes. Marooned,
no genius might civilize such a profuse
gyrating vortex, mostly plastic refuse,
nurdles and whatnot, hurled off ships and land.

Step on shore sailor, try imagining the tree,
or through those narrowed pupils, just a shade of green
shadowing the hueless epicenter. Could you squeeze
a few weak baby-steps against the hundreds of
nautical miles past Hawaii, almost to Japan,
trudging these final, fatal seconds, as the folds
of bin-liners, footballs, credit-cards drag you down
like quicksand? Try to breathe.

The Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage
Patches are two linked continents of swirling junk
translucently submerged, a hemisphere's leftover gunk
joined in a sloshing soup. "Every little piece
of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years
that made it to the ocean is still out there
somewhere," says Tony Andrady, a chemist.

***

Nothing, or a little malice? Death
of a million seabirds, a hundred thousand marine mammals
every year. Plastic Atlantis rising
becomes a predatory animal itself. Crusoe's reduced
to scavenge from the heartless, inorganic, barren sprawl.
And Man Friday? Perhaps a mangled Ken-doll.

Moscow

.
"She suffered serious injuries and died
at the scene," said a police spokesman,
quotes the Daily Mail. Anna Loginova
would just not let go, let go
of the Porsche Cheyenne or Cayenne that probably
goes with the job, the handgun, the jiu-jitsu, the
KGB training, that's ex-

goes with the job? that rage
against the mashina, or is it just
before, against the carjacker, the thief?

ex-KGB, and not "just a weapon", but a
woman, a woman
who won't let go her car
door handle, not just
a weapon, a woman
torn to shreds at high speed.

who could ask you now, nobody-
guard?

***

ask you to praise "the mortal error
Of birth and death, the two sad knaves of thieves,
And the hunger's emperor;
He pulls the chain," it is that moment
to let it go, or die
trying.

Sopianae

.
The renaissance of trees welcomes the Raven,

a year of re-enacted memory. Today an old

light of bygone Spring has been awakened,

forgotten voices croak, then speak and sing. The gold

redusted "On a Trans-Danubian Almond Tree

***

Heracles saw not its likeness at the Hesperides’ grove, nor

Had King Alcinous shown such to Ulysses the great.

Miracle even for happy isles with plentiful pastures,

More so among chill clods, northern Pannonia lands.

See how the almond tree blooms bravely into the winter,

Though all its splendid buds shall be smothered by the frost!

Almond tree, little Phyllis, swallows are nowhere near yet,

Or has it been so hard, waiting for youthful Spring?"

(J.P.)

Reykjavik

.
a chessboard at the Tranzit Art Café, on
the arm of a red sofa, opened up to me
like the crypt. figures inside revealing at a quick
glance, what years and years had tried to hide: reflected triangles
of the upper windowpanes mirrored on
the backgammon board that Burzoe
had unleashed in Persia, where the Raja played
against him, lost, then taught him chess, then won,

great iconic defeats and victories in
one set, one twofold interchangeable frame
of mind: 32 pieces black and white, or the two kings
playing their 30 subjects at a game of nard.

the great Sun Mithra, past its peak
hides in the winter mist of moist, soft light, and cloudy street
lighting yellows softly over faint gray hues
of looming project blocks subdued, as the dice choose
which game it is to be then: that of order
or of random chance. the mind of ivory
or teak.

a pine paints
a faint shadow on the windowglass.

***

the crypt receives a master, a great Sun, one
returning home at 64 as old as sum
all figures on both sides, and then times two: too young.
(parallels to Pound: both exiles, and
both ranting scourges of the U.S. and the Jews
on radio broadcast backwaters of European news.)

Chomolungma

.

holy mountain

plagued by humanoids of all forms, moving mountains

of people, mountain yeti people

ascending from the deepest

the darkest Africas of prehistory, the origin

to where James Watson relapses 16%

skidiving down his own unfortunately worded system of intelligence

breathing thin air up on the cold peak where,

beyond the slippery slopes to eugenics, pseudoscience

and cryptozoology

an advanced lifeform will bear to progress

the torch to light

where no olympicon has tread,

a brilliant beam, where white pack snowcap stands luminous

for pilgrims, a beacon

where shining snow and holy inspiration

are close to both earth and sky,

where signal strength was weak, but now

the highest transmitting station’s tuned in

for mobile operations,

and where only twice Rod Barber said, You won’t believe

where I’m calling from

***

mankind evolves to bear technology

the crown of all creation in ascent

by opposable rule of thumb, and mobile phones

follow right on to wherever people had went

Seveso

.

fragile why-chromosomes still have a hard

time deciding to turn out a man rolling

a mortal stone coil uphill body burdened

to top the food chain feeling the heat

sizzle from womb to tomb becoming what

you eat in the eye of a saline chemical storm

pushing artifice to fertilize the lush Vietnamese

jungles and manufacture alkaline maternal stress

like imagine Italy ABR or RGB zoning out on

burgers and fries ingested round nineteen-seventynine

would that parental action of substance be how

your red meat conceives by retcon design and

environmental circumstance combined,

now alien substance breeds in my tooth,

as death does inside my heart – beating

quickened tetrachlorodibenzoparadioxin

circulating a steady Agent Orange flow

navigating a hostile acidic Love Canal

to masculinize in face of chemical onslaught

ogle future exes dressed in sexy protectives

weasel a way through industrial safety regulations

set „to increase the number of females and to eliminate

the weakest males” the déja vu directive won't digest

en route to Lombardy déja revisité.

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.