Tuesday, June 30, 2015

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.

Saturday, June 27, 2015

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.

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

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.

Monday, June 22, 2015

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.