StarPoet Newsletter Vol. XII, No. III

Goes to show you never can tell
Who may be out there waiting for ya,
Even lyric poets have been known
To be  stalked; You just never know
Which corner, a gun may be lurking
With a bullet aimed at your head; 
Blink, and your eyes never open
As you lie there dying on the street.

There are crazies walking among us,
Quiet boys with quite good mothers,
Who suddenly leap off the deep end
And take a dozen others with them,
Including those of us who find ourselves
Sharing the wrong place and wrong time
With a nine millimeter or a machete,
At best life's a crap shoot you can't avoid.

Nonsense, she said,
A poem must be, not mean,
All this crappola about metaphor and imagery
Is some academic professor's wet dream.

A poem becomes then is,
The poet is only the conduit,
Some are worse, some are better conductors,
That places the words on the screen.

All else is but an elaborate illusion
Added after the poem's creation
By scholars and post grads needing papers
To discuss over beer after class.

Secrets of the confessional leak out across the internet,
Statues of weeping Jesus fill the evening news;
The Family would handle this with cold practicalilty
And a minimum of introspection and whining.

We live in an age of clamorous media complicity,
Our unwillingness to distinguish wrong from right;
When all sins are equal, good acts cannot exist,
Our soul is lost in a sea of relative mediocrity.

Unrelated to anything in our world,
Disconnected from our shared reality:
You know how it is when you talk to someone
who's mentally ill -- they're just not there
-- The unnerving, long stupors of silence
While staring fixedly at friends and buddies,
Confused, incoherent, private numerology
And inscrutable taxonomy, brainwashing,
Thought control, obsessive conscious dreaming,
Incoherent, detached, and fucking crazy.

It is difficult for me to identify
The lines I'm not coloring inside,
The fault may lie within my synapses
But from where I'm standing, I'm standing still;

Normal is the hardest position I play,
One I admit I possess little talent;
I would if I could but I haven't a clue
How I should act to act like you.

I try and I try and I fail and I try,
Then the poet intrudes and the writer observes,
The tangents come flying in multiple directions,
Drawing me away from our central premise
Until the wormhole opens and I'm out of here.

This is my church, these Sunday newsletters,
This is my scripture, these words and verses,
This is my life, each syllable and sentence,
These are the thoughts of a soul taking flight
In search of her path to immortality.

A visitor from another planet,
Unfamiliar with the quaint and curious customs
Of the human species, would be unable
To discern any major differences
Among the Peoples of The Book,
One god, one religion, one human genotype,
With a small handful of minor discrepancies
In the incidentals and heavenly promises;
They would view our sectarian violence
As ample evidence of a species still struggling
To raise itself above its too recent jungle
And make note to check back in on the planet,
Come a few thousand years or more, to see
If we had finally succeeded in growing up
Or had ceased to exist like so many
Of God's creatures gone dead before us

Wonton four season crispy beef,
Tso's jumbo shredded string bean,
Hot and sour and spicy and sweet,
Szechuan, Hunan, Cantonese, and Mandarin.
Please chose a number, white rice or fried?
Two egg rolls with purchase, moo shi foo young.
Visa, Mastercard, American Express,
Sorry but no personal checks,
Eat in, call ahead, your order will be ready,
Chicken with broccoli, shrimp with hot garlic.

Where were you when the bullets flew,
Kennedy, Wallace, King, and Kennedy?
Jump two decades, Reagan fights for life
After a gunman tries to impress Jodie Foster.
John Lennon was not as lucky as Ronnie,
Bleeding out on his doorstep outside Central Park.
Leap to the present, how much we've grown,
A congresswoman lies struggling to survive,
A federal judge is dead, a nine year old killed,
Too many crazies out working the streets,
Too many punks with their hand on a Glock.
Shoot an elected official, fry you son of a bitch,
Disrupt the rule of Democracy, imposing your will
Upon the nation, the electric chair is too quick,
An Iron Maiden would suit you better,
A proper assassin's death.

Half-baked explanations,
Self-serving political opportunism,
Provoked, triggered, unhinged by
Rhetoric, vitriol, and extremism:
The anger of the gods once banished
The true random inexplicable,
Social science and charlatans
Replace stories of Mount Olympus.

A quite modern superstition that
All behavior can be traced to some
Analytical diagnosis of a specific
Frame of mind prompted by the
Society and the environment:
Given clever social engineering
Both the world and the individual
Can easily be perfected.

The path to universal progress
Is strewn with professorial
Good intentions and when they fail
The blame, of course, is always placed
Elsewhere: the pure of intention,
Those knights of woeful intellect,
Cannot not be the cause of failure,
The world conspires against them.

John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald,
Sirhan Sirhan, a continuum of rampages,
Garfield survives Shiloh and Chickamauga
Then shot in a Washington train station
By a disappointed Stalwart job seeker;
McKinley. who fought at bloody Antietem,
Shakes hands at a Buffalo exposition,
Greets an anarchist, gun at the ready.

Our problem is with rampant national immaturity,
Not our pugnacious, loudly democratic climate;
We have too many explainers searching for
Glib, easily published answers while ignoring
The individual fingers that have pulled the trigger;
The last gasp of the disconnected university caste
Expresses limitless contempt for the American People,
Targeting everyone but their own intellectual failures.