prose poem

Freedom’s Just Another Word

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(a polemic prose poem)

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Seems to me that if you’ve read somewhere that a Covid vaccine reshuffles your DNA or magnetizes your epidermis or implants monitoring devices into your metabolism so that Satanic pedophiles can keep tabs on your comings and goings, that you’d want to wear a mask to avoid contracting a disease so mighty that it actually hospitalized superhuman Donald J Trump, who boasts an immune system so powerful your everyday microorganisms spontaneously combust if they dare enter the inner sanctum of his imperial badassness. 

But, hell no, your garden variety anti-vaxxer is also an anti-masker. I saw a video today that captured a Tennessee school board meeting where health professionals arguing that masks help to stem infection were verbally ambushed by a pack of sign-bearing parents fearful that requiring their children to wear masks during a virulent resurgence of a pandemic would be the first step down a slippery slope of freedom-confiscation that eventually would lead to the United States becoming a country where citizens receive affordable healthcare.

Roaring Twenties Redux

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Photoshopped by I-and-I

Roaring Twenties Redux

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—

It’s so elegant

So intelligent

TS Eliot, “The Waste Land”

One-two-three, one-two-three, ow, uh, alright, uh!

Wilson Pickett, “Land of a Thousand Dances”

Once this pandemic is done, y’all, people gonna be hollering siss-boom-bah, packing the tattoo parlors, barbershops and bars, macro-dosing, doing the Hedonism like it’s wa-wa-tusi, dancing on tables, dancing in the streets, there’ll be swingin’ and swayin’ and records playin’, live bands blasting covers past curfew, PO-lice sirens wailing and blue lights swirling, sweatpants discarded, shimmering gowns flowin’, flasks flashin’ in the comet light of the apocalyptic party, alack and alas and all that jazz!

Perhaps There Is Reason for Optimism

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Galaxies, constellations, solar systems, stars, and planets go round and round and round in their gravitational grooves. Days are born to die, to dawn, to die, to dawn, time and time, again and again.

Yang 陽: Tribalism is brain stem stuff: Tar Heel, Blue Devil, Tyger, Tyger[1] A twig snaps; adrenalin pumps. My Territory. My Toy. My Girl.[2]   My Generation.[3] Godzilla demands that parking space. Brainstem stuff.

Life yearns to be. The lowly weed cracks through concrete in the dying strip shopping center off Folly Road. That weed feeds on the CO2 of the homeless man who instinctively dodges it with his shopping cart. Yin 陰

Ayahuasca Shaman by Paul Heussenstamm

Ayahuasca Shaman by Paul Heussenstamm

A millennium from now, in the Amazon, ringed round a fire, Sons of the Wind tell of a time when the jungle was dying and silver birds were flying overhead buzzing with water rising and the white ghosts sighing into tiny blinking talk boxes but how Tucano chased them away with the sun itself . . .

Again and again, time and time, dawn to die, gravitational grooves, round and round, planets and stars and solar systems and galaxies.

[1] Burning bright in the darkness of the night . . .

[2] Talking ‘bout my girl, my girl.

[3] P-p-p-people try to put us down.