The art of the spider is patience
Its poison is held in reserve
For when the web breaks unbidden
Or if the prey works up the nerve
To resist that which nature intended
To swerve from the course of its fate
The spider’s unseen strength
Is the will to sit and silently wait
Gene G. McLaughlin 2021
In an empty arcade there is still activity
But none arising from life
Sounds of machines humming and beeping
Their existences clear and free of strife
Bells ring to alert no one of nothing
Digital voices entice the absent to play
They can’t distract their intended targets
To take time to chase their worries away
Oh the pop-a-shot lights
Are ever oh so bright
Offering buttons to press
Promising prizes and tickets to win
As the cabinets all bathe in fluoresce
Waiting for the day’s simulations to begin
Gene G. McLaughlin 2021
Let us look at how we value violence
As a path to behavioral societal corrections
As part of necessary sacrifices
Let us assess our own silence
By measuring the connections
Between our comfort and its ever-raising prices
The costs stem from the choice
To view violence as a problem’s viable solution
Without acknowledging to the maimed and the buried
There is never restitution
We make the pivot to violence causally
We put it into games and entertainments
We view it as a path to power and strength
Instead of as one the souls most damaging contaminants
Sometimes judgement is the mirror
The sentence a song you hear in your head
Now the singer’s voice is growing clearer
Lilting the names of the dead
Maybe you know one among them
From Fallujah or Ferguson
From Aleppo to Attica
Maybe your fist is clenched
As you look upon the protests
Maybe your heart is wrenched
Seeing the agony and the tears of the oppressed
Maybe we start today
Acknowledging a scale that weighs our choices
And that the price we might pay
Is our loved one’s silenced voices?
Gene G. McLaughlin 2020
Click
Ted Knight stares at me
Through the late night TV flicker
His hair is white and bright
It hurts my eyes in the darkness
I am sad to see him on the screen
He exists in some alternate universe
The 1970’s that did not exist
But he no longer exists here
Click
Norman Fell stares back on another channel
He is having trouble
With those cohabiting youths again
His career has not yet faded from one bad choice
At the same time
John Ritter’s face is young
His heart is still strong
This will be the greatest moment for both of them
Their faces show they do not know this fact
I do not know what the moments that flash through the
Viewfinder of my life mean
It is unclear until long after the point
And then it is fogged by judgments of episodes
Click
Andy Kaufman is on
Wild, crazed, and manic
Diamond in the rough never cut to a beautiful gem
His pain on display for posterity
Click
McLean Stevenson is
Forever dying on a plane
Shown endlessly
Once dead in life
Doomed to repeat forever
Across the mindscape they are thrown
Living in a syndicated trans-cosmic-loop
They know nothing of the present
It does not exist
The past doesn’t either
It is
Only an alternative reproduction
Dead sitcoms stars cluttering the psyche
Adrift and floating like out of orbit meteors
Digitally represented
Haunting and false
Gene G. McLaughlin 2020
Dead languages in an encrypted world
Floating on currents of textual seas
New syntax and context unfurled
Ideas carried by the digital breeze
Mass less 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 or who does it benefit
If anything or anyone at all
Are the data’s flows sinister or beneficent
Are its actions fair of foul
– Gene G. McLaughlin 2020
She wore a bonnet of significant bees
A fleece of fantastic fleas
She knew black beans and pintos
From her lentils and her peas
She didn’t walk on water
But she glided over nails
Which were strewn across the floor
From rusty timeworn pails
She loved the smell of smoke
But disdained the smell of cinder
She met your father Satan
On the devil’d own site Tinder
You told her happy mother’s day
She said son I am fictional and abstract
You infer you own responsivities
From how you think I act
So hold tight to your nostalgia
Or quietly feed your rage
I am not your icon or advisor
I am never your blueprint or cage.
Gene G. McLaughlin 2020
Jump cuts
Like Godard
On the evening news
Your attention is
The one thing
They can’t afford to lose
Stories like Hitchcock
Winding up and down
Twisted stairs
People searching
For secrets and motives
That aren’t really there
Sounds like Altman
Bleeding one into another
Cutting in and out
People trying to discern
Truths they whisper
From lies they shout
Faith like Scorsese
Still present, but
Beaten and torn
Hoping between
All the death and privation
Something better is born
Reality like Lanzmann
Laying bare plagues foul effects
On me and you
Not metaphors
No soft lenses
Just a truth hard to view
Gene G. McLaughlin 2020
The monkey sees God in bananas
The tiger sees the divine in his claws
The crow sees God in the worms of the morning
As he cackles, preens, and craws
Man sees God in the unseen
The preacher sees the divine in his words
The zealot sees it in the crowds that gather before him
As he guides them like an unthinking herd
Let your eyes be your faith and your heart
Let your ears hear the sounds of the divine
Let your own steps guide you to your version of God
As I shall let my feet lead me to mine
Gene G. McLaughlin 2020
