Crisis in the Ukraine

After the world warmed

After Soviets faded into history

The Great White Bear of the North

Settled to her slumber.

The cubs left the den

Only one cub looked back.

Torn between its mother and new friends in the West

It growled and whimpered.

A Victor perched upon its head

Through deceitful means

Sparking the revolution of Orange.

When things settled the Victor urged the bear on.

“Go back,” the Victor said, “Mother’s calling.”

“Go back,” The Victor’s friends told him.

“Father Vlad is waiting.”

A Maidan sang her great distaste for the mother bear

Pulling the young cub Westward.

“We must move forward,” she said.

“To the West.”

The Victor did not like this.

Gathering the Easterners of the mother tongue

They pulled the cub by the fur

While the Maidan kicked and screamed

Into civil unrest

She occupied buildings

She rioted

She called for the Victor’s resignation.

When the Victor lost control

He fell from his lofty perch.

Hearing commotions next door

Mother Bear awoke.

She saw her cub being pulled East and West

Then she took away a toe

Then old Vlad sent her to cross her son's borders

To help the Victor’s side.

Opening the Gates of Hell

Four blood moons

A solar eclipse

Siri opens the gates of Hell

Iran enriches its uranium

Building plants

To use for power

Claiming it’s for peaceful purposes

The man who broke the racial boundaries

Suspects they are growing mushrooms

Talks commence

ISIS spreads its rhizomatic roots of radicalism

Out of Syria

Into Iraq

Burning the ancient books

Taking control of ancient buildings

Calling across the globe

To millions of disenfranchised youth;

Europe,

Africa,

America.

Young people swayed by pleasant propaganda

Answering the call to radicalism.

Ebola

From the deepest, poorest parts of Africa

The creature emerges.

Causing bloody welts

Causing contagious cough.

Spreading fast

Through villages and cities

Spreading unexpectedly

Killing all who come near.

Fear,

Panic,

Mistrust

Destroys hospitals

Driving those who wish to help away.

New tests

Create new weapons against the monster

Used by those who brought it home.

Tsunami 2011

Silently

Rolling out,

building up

Bunching up,

Growing in power,

Growing in energy.

Slowly, it rolled

Toward the violently shaken land.

The wave came rushing inward

Swiftly breaking against mountains,

Destroying property,

People swept away,

Lives lost

Chaos taken

Silently.

Injustice and Upheaval

A man was shot

Opening old racial wounds.

Vultures circled

Around the still drying blood.

Setting the internet ablaze

With their preaching agendas

Driving the media into a frenzy.

Like magma bursting to the surface

Anger flowed.

Anger for injustices

Brought on by the overzealous police.

Black lives matter

Raise your arms

Don’t shoot

As outrage yelled and looted

A church burned

Under the unrelenting mob.

A few tried to calm the flames

They tried to be the quenching rain

To quell the fiery anger.

An old soldier stood on the front lines

Speaking reasonably

Telling them to go home.

Saying it isn’t worth the anger

Mothers grabbed their children

Curfews were placed

At first there was little effect

Slowly it began to build.

Cooler voices grew louder

The fires died

Cooling the outrage

Into peaceful protest.

Superstorm Sandy

Over warm Caribbean Shallows

A hot breeze lifts skyward.

Taking the ocean’s breath

Depositing it into ever expanding mountainous clouds.

Growing

Stretching

Expanding across the sea.

The wind begins to blow.

Rain falls

The beast begins to turn.

An eye opens

The beast awakens.

Pushing northward

Riding the winds

Ever strengthening

Ever expanding in the early Autumn air.

It eats another beast

Rolling from the west.

Atmospheric steering systems fail to turn the beast away.

Becoming one

They bring their wrath to eastern shores.

Snow inland

Waves and walls of water

Drive up the shores

Taking away the people’s power

Wreaking pain and destruction

Over the never sleeping cities.

Lives were lost

Heroes born

Things will never be the same.

The Social Crusades

For generations

They marched in the streets.

They cried black ink onto their pages.

Calling for change,

Calling for equality,

Washing away injustice with their inky black tears.

For too long they fought.

The salt from their sweat and blood ran from their brow

A testament to the old generation’s hard work.

They fought hard

Protecting the crusader castle of liberty from the monsters and dragons.

Like the warriors of old they lost their way.

Their black tears became more and more brackish.

Salt encrusted their ducts

No longer crying tears

Their spit became poisonous

With the fiery, mad rhetoric of the internet

They forged their pseudo intellectual weapons

Becoming the enemies their forefathers fought so hard against.

With dragon’s blood soiling their bodies from the past wars

They rose up as berserkers and amazons

In the senseless culture wars.

What once were tears of pain

What once were tears of agony

What once were tears of empathy, sympathy and triumph

Became acid and vitriol

Spat at passerby.

Donning their armor of hypocrisy,

Armed with spears of falsehoods and half-truths

Hiding behind shields of victimhood

They stormed the castle they once protected.

Gamers built their gates and the puppies cried.

Berserkers and amazons rallied the social justice troops

Who, in turn, rallied their white knights.

Then turned journalism yellow with propaganda

Hiding the truth of the other side.

Those that tired of being spoken for

Threw down their weapons

Rejected their shields

To turn against them

Defending the gates instead.

Announcements more or less

Hello everyone. Its been a while since I've posted. To my three followers here I thank you for staying. You may or may not have read any of my poems but that's okay. They are here for your enjoyment. I may take the blog down but not in the foreseeable future.  I'm actually here to start posting new poems again. In the past couple of years since I stopped posting there have been a few developments I feel are important historically, culturally and for other reasons.

If you have a Tumblr page or are on Twitter I'm sure you are already familliar with the term "Social Justice Warrior" or SJW for short. While I disagree with their politics, and it will  show up in the first new poem I put up, I still am going to put it up. I have my reasons for putting this up. I feel, as a writer, that it is my duty to explore the issues of the day. I hope the poem isn't too preachy but it is to demonstrate my own opinions on the subject. I also feel that, since this has blown up into a HUGE thing on the internet and has ingrained itself into our cultural history, I feel that it is also my personal duty to myself and this series of poems to be placed along with the rest of them. I know what you who have read the poems I've put up before are probably going to say, I glanced over a lot of history. That's true. If I were to record every single event in poetic form, this entire work would become WAY WAY too long. The last reason I'm putting the poem is for simple freedom of speech. This is how I choose to express my opinions of the happening addressed.

On this post and the next post I ask that you be as respectful as possible if you comment. You could be against #gamergate or you could be for #gamergate. You could be a SJW yourself. I'm open to discourse and all of that. I'm not going to ban or delete opinions. If you don't like it, you don't like it. Whatever. I feel that most "trigger warnings", especially the Tumblr type of trigger warnings are stupid. Just because someone disagrees with you, it shouldn't cause you to go into convulsions. There are people out there with REAL PTSD  and I feel that these types of things diminish the importance of those victims. Yes, you're going to find people with differing opinions from you. You'll disagree with them and everything but think of it this way: that's how we grow. Being exposed to different ideas and opinions is how we grow as people and become well rounded citizens of the world.

That being said, the first poem following this one will have content people will disagree with and it might be controversial to some people. Pleas understand this and respect other people's opinions and my own.

For the second announcement. The poems after this post won't be published in the order they appear whenever I get around to publishing the entire work. Thank you.