goodnight
October 18, 2011
whenever i get bogged down in some reform project i wish would happen like an expanded metro or me winning the lottery or street lights on elmwood between bryant and north, i google ‘nuclear war,’ and just sort of let that go for awhile. i spend some time worrying about how close i am to the niagara fall power plant. and then i realize that there is a spectrum of futile activity and my end is better.
On (Myself, Listening to) Untitled 1
August 17, 2011
No one deserves this.
No matter your faults or strengths,
your side of the scale shoots north like heartburn.
Unsmotherable forces fired by some inner burn.
It wasn’t yours; none of them know where you live anyway.
No reason to feel for any of it.
Yet
Here we are.
Rolling like an unfit whale into spikes thrown without seeming end
a year of spikes to you but a Greenwich group of four minutes,
thrown continuously,
finding their first barbs at 0:23 and 0:44,
thrown from an unfit whale made of bone and earth
Familiar colors on the mast
Fortunes made from draining the oil of this unfamiliar whale
Out of his massive head and into his own fingers in defense of spikes
But light a light on your oil, dumb whale
Carry your spikes that you now own back down to the depths
Where your many battles scar the dark
And flee nothing but your own life,
which forces you up, often, against your will.
Untitled (for now)
July 20, 2011
A sweaty fevered boredom
Whispered prayers and mumbled songs
(Did I say that out loud? Is that okay?
No one cares.)
Through half-closed slats I see
the highway, almost,
and almost,
the water.
Warm summer Saturday night mischief
Novelty car horns and tricked-out bikes
Shouted taunts of fun and squeals of ecstasy
Silence here, almost
Just enough noise to bring out the silence:
A piece of sheet metal warps, bangs
Water thunders into nowhere
out of nowhere
Coughs and curses
The hum of some distant machinery
Muffled shouts through the vents or the windows–
Angry? Triumphant? Boasting? Defending?
Sweaty fever prayers
The need for a drug
The need to need the drug more than to have the drug
The need for sleep like the need for
a gun in a dark foxhole, surrounded
by unseen menace and whispered movement
Whispered prayer
The Lord’s and Hail Mary
“Our father who art in Heaven,
Hallowed be thy name…”
Fumbled words, out of order
Put the “evil” where the “temptation” belongs
Words that don’t matter
Memories
Unspecified, emotional
The nightly rituals of a child in darkness
The proclamations of a man in daylight
Repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat
Until the words are sleep
Sleeping, the words repeat themselves
Back to neon: “…pray for our
sinners, now and at the hour of our–”
–Sleep.
Neon again,
sweating like a wool blanket in July
Sweating like a 5-sided cube
atop a mound of seething flesh
Sweating like a light bulb that cannot dim
Out the window, through the slats
The highway roars on like sleepless America
Bright lights that cannot dim but only flash
intermittently
before they are– suddenly, it always seems –
empty and without purpose
Something to be put away or recycled
“…blessed is the fruit of thy womb…”
Words,
lacking meaning or substance
that isn’t gray and dark and veined with electricity
from nowhere
Into nowhere
“…deliver us from evil…”
The same sounds
Repeated and repeated and repeated
Emphasizing the same silence
The same sweaty boredom
Like bad attitudes and boring poems,
the tone never changes
Demands to be dealt with
with active verbs and passive stares
“…thy kingdom come, thy will be done,
on Earth, as it is in Heaven…”
In existence
someplace, always
the five-sided cube
All that is out must come in
To be digested, by force, if need be
Stare through the slats
at the life
at the night
at the life
at your walls
the walls behind you
Digest, in free will or forced
’til the fever takes hold of the words
in a sudden instant
“…now, and at the hour of our death. Amen.”
Amid all the awesome coverage today of Ian Murphy’s amazing prank call to the governor of Wisconsin, I found this on :
These “personas” were to have detailed, fictionalized backgrounds, to make them believable to outside observers, and a sophisticated identity protection service was to back them up, preventing suspicious readers from uncovering the real person behind the account. They even worked out ways to game geolocating services, so these “personas” could be virtually inserted anywhere in the world, providing ostensibly live commentary on real events, even while the operator was not really present.
When Raw Story first reported on the contract for this software, it was unclear what the Air Force wanted with it or even if it had been acquired. The potential for misuse, however, was abundantly clear.
A fake virtual army of people could be used to help create the impression of consensus opinion in online comment threads, or manipulate social media to the point where valuable stories are suppressed.
It’s kind of terrifying, as is the website for the company that created the software, Ntrepid. One page, nothing but an e-mail address. These kinds of corporations immediately strike me as dangerous and shady. Gonna keep searching for info…
Lots of great stuff on the front page of amphibi.us today
January 31, 2011
Particularly, this: http://amphibi.us/all/we-are-all-little-boys-and-little-girls/
