Chicken Noodle Soup

I just now made
My first batch of
Chicken noodle soup.

Total Hell

If you likened our world now
Not even the "West"
But basically the whole world
Except the Insurgent Spaces
As Rome...

Sometimes I feel

Sometimes I feel
I do my best work
Just inside
The veil
Of the Abyss.

--- 13 Sept 2011

Human Slavery In Our Time

He can take your image for all time,
Your very face,
And cover it with his sperm,
And you will know that he put this
On the Internet,
Where it will live forever.

And then you will agree to this,
As documented by the
"Custodian of Records"
(Whatever that is)...

And that you do,
And that you know you must act well-
So that you really truly do
At least seem to
Agree to your own public defacement-
That you need to put on a good performance
Even there
Shows how deep his tentacles have reached
Into you.

And then,
To this he adds
That he seeks to make money
From those legion
Out there,
That he seeks to charge money
To his own compatriots
In this
Shows how far,
How deep the rot has gone.

I come from the game industry.
Do you know that the game industry
Used to be about making games.
Now it is about the wholesale
Enslavement of human attention...

The total pursuit for
Total control
Of every person's every waking moment.

--- 16 April 2013

My Functional Self

My Functional Self
Is a valued servant,
A special ops lieutenant, actually.
And has even saved my life on occasion,
But he's kind of overstepped his grounds.

I just have this feeling that
I'm about to reveal myself...

My Self Self.

--- 1 May 2013

Funny as this may sound

Funny as this may sound
I had my first online date today.

(I guess I had just done all my
Dating the old fashioned way before...
Plus on hiatus during my ten-year marriage...)

But what I am struggling with
Is the notion that
You can unmeet someone
After you've met them.

She told me she'd decline to see me,
I was okay with that.
Then when she left
She walked to the lobby (of the hotel)
And I instinctively followed.

You see, early in our meeting
(In the bar of the Gladstone)
I had talked shop
And went on on ideas,
And she talked about her business.
Then she declined me.
THEN we started to click...
When I showed her my Police hoodie,
From a concert I saw of them.
She started talking about Sting,
And then the ice melted.

But she had declined,
So she left,
And I instinctively followed,
As if she were a friend.

Because I felt she was.

But there was obviously something
I didn't get.
She started to look scared,
Quickly,
Then suggested I go to the washroom.
Well I had to anyway...
So I shook her hand and we parted.

But only then did I realize I must've scared her.
And it was depressing for hours afterward.

But what I wondered now is
How do we make sense of this?
Human relatedness
And community
Is built on meetings with others
And that relationship.
If we begin to see that relatedness
As mechanical and modular -
Thanks to this Internet age of ours -
If we begin to believe that
We can control relatedness like that -
Then we start to engage in a kind of
Strange insanity.
An idea that we can "unmeet" others.
We start to see humans through a
Very functional lense,
But in a stranger way:
No longer just functional as in
Doctor, baker, lawyer, soldier, what have you,
But functional now in
This closer sense.

You can't unmeet someone.
Once you've met them,
You have a relationship.
You have a community of some sort.
You might see them only months later,
But there it is.

Why fear it?

Ah... Maybe this is just
Sour grapes...

But I am still troubled though
By this mechanical vision...
This reduction of human beings
In relatedness
To mechanical parts we attach
Or detached
To or from ourselves
At whim.

--- 18 May 2013

Some Civilizations

Some civilizations
Were toppled by outside forces,
At the mercy of tyrannical men.
Some starved into the dust,
At the mercy of despairing men.
Still others were taken by the jungle,
Being "steered" by optimists waving
Happy pieces of paper,
As a defence
Against the impending.

--- 18 May 2013

What happens to a society

What happens to a society
That drifts at the mercy of
Its moods and desires?

Like a rudderless ship...

Sooner or later
A storm finds it,
And smashes it against
A craggy shoreline.

--- 17 May 2013

Beginning This

The masthead, above, contains a composite of two photographs. Both of High Park, both in the same area. The left was photographed during a forest fire - actually, a controlled burn being done in High Park, Toronto, across the street from where I lived at the time. To the right is the same area, later that summer: lush and green.

Fire belongs in nature.

Something that has taken us time to learn, and we've paid a price for pushing it away.

The idea that fire belongs here runs counter to our instincts. We immediately put out fire when we see it. Over the years, we've gotten quite expert in doing that, with armies of firefighters and equipment dedicated to putting fire out as quickly as possible wherever it crops up.

What we've learned about our natural ecosystems, however, is that they need fire. Some species of trees, for example, require fire to break open their seeds.

Without fire, not only do some plants have difficulty reproducing, but deadwood builds up. So much deadwood that when a fire does happen it can now destroy a forest - whereas if we had left the fire alone in the first place, it would basically burn low, to the ground, taking only the dry brush.

Indeed, the controlled burn above was being done to assist in the black oak stands in High Park, which are struggling.

Anyway, Fire Belongs is the name I've taken for this, my poetry and fiction blog.

My work, my writing, my personality, is like fire. Frightening to some. But, I feel at least, it belongs here. For a reason.