
I want a world more Pissarro than Picasso
More the sum than a piece
More the glory of all of it
Then cubes of us at our least
Gene G. McLaughlin 2022

American dogs
French frogs
The world is going to war
Angry Continentals
Middle East fundamentals
The war is going to war
In the Arab lands
Among the sands
We all are going to war
Let it ignite
And burn all night
The world is going to war
Can you slow it down
When the oil’s underground
The world is going to war
The people forgot
The lessons taught
In 1944
No time to stop and think
When you’re on the brink
The world is going to war
I only take the side
Of those that have died
In the never-ending glory of war
Gene G. McLaughlin 2022

Dead languages in an encrypted world
Floating on currents of textual seas
New syntax and context unfurled
Ideas carried by the digital breeze
Massless data of New Babylon
Still growing ziggurat of a modern age
Non-physical ideas carry on
With or without the page
Language united with math
Following the binary path
What or who does it benefit
If anything or anyone at all
Are the data’s flows sinister or beneficent
Are its actions fair or foul
– Gene G. McLaughlin 2022

Gatsby develops Android apps
In the modern day
Daisy has a reality show
That’s a career in a way
Tom is the son of patent lawyer
Who went to Duke to play lacrosse
Nick is still choking on whiskey and words
As his body pays the cost
The world still glitters in the distance
The LED screen cuts down on the glare
It all seems so charmed
Until you finally make your way there
Nostalgia fills the empty
Where music fills the night
I’d say I saw them dancing
But the word fleeing seems more right
Gene G. McLaughlin 2022

Staring at machinescapes
Fractal music in my head
The inflammation of my spine
Confirms for me I am not dead
A priori me
In the wind, dust, and shadows
A posteriori me
Weighing and measuring my battles
Knowing what I know
Without knowing the reason
The eerie absent answers
Feel like my mind committing treason
I accept the betrayal
My cognizance shoulders on
Knowing some framework exists
Both before and after I am gone
Gene G. McLaughlin 2022

The wolf sees the man as meat
A means to hunger’s end
The x-ray sees the man as bone
What he is, but does not comprehend
The fly sees the man as stone
Ancient beyond the fly’s years
The worm waits for the man to be soil
Oblivious to any and all of his fears
The soil is a measure of time
Under the gaze of a blazing unforgiving sun
The worms live in the layers of history
Where everything silently dreams as one
Gene G. McLaughlin 2022