Tag: Poetry
The Scale
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

Merchants of Anger
Merchants of anger
See no color
Hear no melody
Offering immediacy
Gritted teeth
Clenched fists
Ease of blame
Vague contours of control
Outlines of outrage
A road of broken concrete
Leading to a tire fire
In their statements
Evidence a faraway promise
If even thought of at all
Profit and power
Wash over them
When they steal your joy
Hollowness aches inside them
Disdain burns in them
For signs of growth or hope
In any of you
I will let you name them
You don’t need me to
Perhaps you scoff at me
Turn to them and indulge
What they offer for a while
To feel something
To fill yourself with
To provide meaning
Despite its acrid foul flavor
I know though
If you pause
You will realize
You are crying
For what you have lost
It is yours to take back
Your mind is forever changing
But that mind is forever yours
Gene G. McLaughlin 2020
Seussian Panglossian
The best of all possible worlds
Weighed among a universe of many
A world of harsh scarcity
In galaxies of both emptiness and plenty
I will take this
It is all I’ve got
We will create this
From something it is not
My optimistic friend
That’s just
Foolish magical thinking
Caused by too many fairy tales
And excessive drinking
My negative compadre
That’s just
An invasive thought
We can make this world better
If we give it all we got
Oh your dreamy wishes
The tools we have are many
Limited by the willingness to work of few
But a garden never tended
Come spring will not renew
Such fearful attitude
That’s just
Plain wrongheaded
It’s the world we’ve got
Why dread it?
Always over reaching
That just too much positivity
The world is clay and layers
Not just what you can see
So it goes with me
Candide and Pangloss
Fates tied together
Realizing there are more
Storms still to weather
Gene G. McLaughlin 2020

Sometimes/Today
Sometimes I feel that I’m failing
From the weather or a smell in the air
Sometimes I feel that I’m winning
Despite the score showing I’m far from there
Sometimes I grow stronger
From something I decided not to eat
Sometimes a rock in my shoe
Slows the pace of my gate
Sometimes life seems like a deep woe
That I carry upon my soul
Sometimes I’m light as the wind
Endless days with no tire or toll
Today’s maybe somewhere in the middle
Some coffee and rain and some hope
Success and failure are not for this moment
Both lie out of the present’s scope
Gene G. McLaughlin 2020
More Pissarro Than Picasso
I want a world more Pissarro than Picasso
More the sum than a piece
More the glory of all of it
Than cubes of us at our least
Gene G. McLaughlin 2020
Dead Sitcoms Stars Cluttering the Psyche
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
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
Mom
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
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