The Long View

I cannot ease your pain

Include suffering in your expectations

Conscious existence in full contains

Elated joys and sorrowful lamentations

Gene G. McLaughlin 2017

A Poem That Makes Me Think of the 20th Century

 

Sirens and Bird Calls

The sirens and bird calls

Merge in the distance

Becoming one to my ears

Both are alerts of an oncoming storm

I can see the shadow of what approaches

It’s outline partitioned by the bright sun

No storm ever comes as one

It comes in parts

What you choose to brace for

Wind

or

Water

or

Lightning

or

Mud

Depends on where you’re standing

Gene G. McLaughlin 2017

MLK Day 2017

Beyond the tight binary loops

That bind and divide simultaneously

Beyond the preselected groups

Driving us toward homogeneity

Beyond the demarcation which dilutes

The resilient strengths of humanity

Lie the path to love’s roots

The beginnings of equanimity

Out of which shoots

New growths of solidarity

Gene G. McLaughlin 2017

First Line To A Poem-

Everything I Love Is True . . .

Feel free to complete the poem in comments, I would love to hear what people have to say.

 

 

Stories All the Way Down

There is an idea called binary opposition that comes out of structuralism.  I don’t know that anybody studies structuralism anymore, but in 2016 after 10 years of social media it seems relevant.  Social media is narrative building on a global scale that has never been seen before.  Humans build narratives constantly and on Facebook or Twitter we can build them together 24×7.  Binary Opposition says that two theoretical opposites are strictly defined and set off against one another.  It is what we see on social media every day in the arguments that go on and on and on.  Every post and argument extends the narrative which sadly is extremely boring and disheartening to most of us.  If one side doesn’t have enough people to tell their side of the narrative it can be easily accounted for and efforts can be ramped up by bots.  An equal measured binary response.  In the digital age there are no lulls in the narrative or no intermissions. At this point I don’t think we are defining what each side of the narrative stands for.  The structure of the narrative is more important than the content.  The structure defines the elements of the narrative itself based on the corridors of human cognition that we can’t even see.  We can’t seem to stop the narrative. The momentum is too great. Maybe someone can tell me how this ends or gets reset?  I am not sure we know.  This is new territory.  Maybe I’m telling myself a narrative and none of this true at all? Maybe, but I don’t think so.  I don’t think it’s turtles all the way down, for humans I think it’s stories all the way down.  Personally I am going to do what I always do when I am clueless about the world or depressed.  Pull out some old world narratives and read them for a few years.  Books.  At least most of those narratives have beginnings middles and ends.

The Other Guy’s Version of Empathy

The subject was pain

Not related to you

Only what me

And mine

Have been through

Empathy is

My needs met

With little

Or no

To do

From you

Gene G. McLaughlin 2016

A Day in Autumn

A poem that feels like fall to me.
A Day in Autumn-
After the summer’s yield, Lord, it is time
to let your shadow lengthen on the sundials
and in the pastures let the rough winds fly.
 
As for the final fruits, coax them to roundness.
Direct on them two days of warmer light
to hale them golden toward their term, and harry
the last few drops of sweetness through the wine.
 
Whoever’s homeless now, will build no shelter;
who lives alone will live indefinitely so,
waking up to read a little, draft long letters,
and, along the city’s avenues,
fitfully wander, when the wild leaves loosen.
 
-Rainer Maria Rilke

I Come To Take Your Hate

This I write

To make true

Decency is not lost

Love is not diminished

Grace is not absent

I come to take your hate

I will turn the hot stone

Into a cool wind

Fire only consumes

Remakes the world

In its own image

Of ash and ember

This I do

So that you may know your own sound

Breathe

Hear your heart

The beating

Of the engine

Hear the blood

How it flows

With quiet force

The sound

Of your fingers

As you gently

Rub their tips

Together

This is the sound of time

Without the weight of years

This I give to you

Gene G. McLaughlin 2016

 

 

When I Was A Ghost

When I was a ghost

Songs sounded like sorrow

The aural recognition

Of time fading away

But

When love shaped my form

I knew the song was melody

The joyous exclamation

That then is always now

Gene G. McLaughlin 2016