Erasable Pen

I'm out of erasable pens.
and I miss them.
Why do I love them so much?
With regular pens -
Ballpoint, roller-ball, gel -
You mess up,
The mistake stays.
Indelible.
You cross out.
You scribble over.
At best you use correction fluid or tape.
But it's like covering up a crime.
Correction tape hangs over an error
Like crime-scene tape over a crime.
Look here!
Something happened.
It leaves a tell-tale difference.
But an erasable pen?
You can pretend the mistake never happened.
And go on with your
Life.
No cross-outs,
No scribbles,
No tell-tale off-shade white .
Only the smooth tint of the paper itself,
And the self assured hand
That - apparently -
Never makes mistakes.

Bring Back Idolotry

The time has come.
Bring back idolatry.
Well, not the thing itself,
But the idea.
We don't necessarily
Need to worship deities
To know that any one thing
Made the center of our lives
Will lead us to ruin.
Sports teams, political parties,
Or money, or popularity,
Or Likes, or fame,
Or competition,
Or a person -
Either one we see every day
Or one we worship from afar -
Or even a religion
We've created in our own image
To confirm our own biases,
Any one thing that we set up
At our center
Becomes the thing we are
Willing to sacrifice everything else to.
We drag our children,
Our spouses,
Our friends,
Our democracy,
Our humanity,
And throw it down
Before our idols,
Willing to cut them open
And bleed them dry
To the one thing
We've made everything.

It's hard, because if you're not
Into the whole theism thing,
What do you put the center?
Principles?
Less than inspiring.
A single point on which you balance
All possible idols against each other?
But what is the point itself?
Nothing.
Less than less than inspiring.
But if you are into the god thing,
How do you know your god
Isn't just your own personality
Blown up to the size of the universe
And then blown up some more?

But just being aware
You're capable of idolatry
Is the first step toward
Stopping it.

Gray Couple

The Denny's, which has since been torn down
And turned into a  car wash,
Had florescent light
That managed to be too harsh
Yet too dim at once.
The four of us sat in a booth:
Mom, Dad, brother, sister.
And in the booth next to ours,
A couple, facing in our direction.
They sat on the same side of the table,
Side by side, as couples sometimes do,
But never looking up or at each other,
Each had a laptop open wide,
Casting an intense gray light,
Under-lighting their faces
In horror-movie shadow
As they sat, their unblinking eyes
Moving across their screens
In sync with their hands,
Each manipulating a mouse that manipulated
The images on the screens that manipulated
Their eyes.
Their non-mouse hands
Reached in slow-motion to grab
A fry or a cheese stick or an onion ring
And raise it to their silent gray mouths.
Our booth chattered and laughed in defiance,
Perhaps to form a shield around us,
Protecting us from the zombie virus next-door.
They never spoke. They moved like automatons.
Mouse. Hand. Screen. Eyes. Food.
As we left, I wonder if we had stayed long enough,
We might see them get sucked in to those open screens,
Which would snap closed,
Singularity achieved.

Books

I have a problem with

Books.

No - not a problem 

where I want to complain about them

Like some of my students do. 

No. I just keep

Getting more of them

And keeping them.

And I usually have several going at once,

Like the Vaudeville guy 

With the table full of poles 

Who keeps a plat spinning 

Atop each of them.

A novel.

Or two.

A nonfiction book of useful information,

And a nonfiction book of supposedly useless

Yes fascinating information.

A science book.

A philosophical or theological book.

A book about teaching

(Aren’t they all).

All spinning.

And stacks and stacks more

Waiting

For when I finish one of the others,

Ready to fly into my hands

In front of my eyes.

And what exactly am I looking for?

Mere entertainment?

And why do I take some books out for another

Spin?

What am I looking for

In all those endless pages?

Well, a lot of things.

Fun and escape

And comfort and solace

And challenge and questioning

And shaking myself up

And inspiration

And grounding.

Because I have always found life

Or reality

Or whatever I’m living in

A little overwhelming,

A lot baffling.

My own small lens can’t take it all in,

To make sense out of it.

But books aren’t really spinning plates.

They are lenses.

And every book

Is another person’s attempt

To make a lens

And see some aspect of life

Clearly.

And if I have a enough lenses

Piled up and overlapping

And I keep looking through them

Maybe I can make some kind of sense of things

Instead of standing like the blind men in the poem

(In a book)

Saying the elephant is a

Tree or a rope or a snake

Because they have only touched one part

Of the whole

And assume they have experienced it all.

The books I’ve taken in

And digested

And the ones I’m still chewing on

And the ones still warming on the shelf

All hold this promise.

We can make sense of this mess.

Really.

If you look through enough people’s

Eyes and ears and minds,

One book at a time,

One page at a time,

One word at a time,

I keep hoping that

The plot of the world

Will come into focus.

Books keep me from being trapped in me,

From shrinking the world around me

To fit my own little point of view.

But they enlarge me, too, 

Giving me a wider set of lenses 

To view the world. 

Court Date - on visiting the Supreme Court, June 2018

I walked up Second Street to First.
The court in session, I stood in line -
A twenty minute wait at worst,
To get a glimpse of the famous Nine,
To hear debate or decisions read.
What would be struck or be upheld?
Who can enter? Who gets expelled?
But too many others stood ahead,
Of me, so I was turned away.
To try again some other day.
While up above they upheld "Don't Enter,"
I toured the exhibit in the Visitor's Center.
While up above, they closed a door.
I browsed the Supreme Souvenir Store.








1 The line outside the court dispersed,
2 While inside others would be expelled
3 When earlier rulings were reversed -
4 And shutting out would be upheld.
5 We single out with "Do not enter."
6
7 visitor's center
8 shop

Good Deeds?

They hold up their cardboard signs
Asking for help 
But I seldom give it. 
And I feel guilty. 
But not enough to roll down my window 
And hand them anything
Because of the sneaking suspicion 
They might not be spending my charity
Wisely.  

And last week I saw a man 
Along the main drag in Daytona
With a sign said,
"Why lie? I need beer."
Honest, I suppose, 
But not the honesty that inspired me 
To heights of charity. 
Nobody needs beer. 
I have seen the effects 
Of needing beer up close and personal 
And the smell alone, 
Much less the behavior that goes with it,
Are enough to make me
Back out of a room
Holding my nose. 

But yesterday, we saw him again, 
With his sign that said, 
"Why lie? I need beer." 
Still honest. Still uninspiring. 
But then, his face brightened.
Looking past my car 
Toward the second lane. 
I looked over to see a passenger side window 
On the SUV next to mine
Rolling down, and a a tattooed arm 
Extend out, a hand holding 
A dewy-cold bottle of Corona Ultra. 

And the sign holder took it gratefully. 
As we waited at the light, 
I watched
As he put the beer away for later
In a gunny sack
And hold up his sign again - 
"Why lie? I need beer." -
Because apparently one beer was not enough. 
He still needed more. 

Was that an act of kindness,
A shining example of generosity,
Or charity, 
Or doing unto others as we would have done unto us? 
Or was the man with the tattooed arm
Helping the the man with the cardboard sign
Down a path to self-destruction?
I don't know. 
But I laughed at the absurdity of it,
Even as the questions hung in the air
And followed me home. 

A Room We All Spend Time In

The room is very large.
Big enough for however many friends we have.
50 or 300 or 500 or 1,000.
Plus a little extra space for followers
And some private rooms off to the side
For slightly less public conversations.
The room is inhabited by people
From every era of my life,
From elementary school through college
And beyond,
To first jobs
And second and third and current.
Plus people I've volunteered with,
People I've gone to summer camp with,
And some people I'd never actually met before
Who just happened to also be in the room
Who I know through other friends.
The room is large,
As I said,
But divided by partitions
That make it hard to tell who's currently in the room
Or who's out, or who's paying attention or not.

The strange thing is
The way conversations get started.
The room is full of tall platforms,
And every so often someone -
Sometime me, sometimes someone else -
Stands on a platform
And shouts something to the room at large
Or maybe holds up a gigantic sign or video player.
We shout about what we just ate
Or watched
Or experienced
Or how we're feeling.
We shout about the things that happen to us:
Funny
Frustrating
Tragic
Inspiring.
We shout political statements
And scream our opinions -
Never to a particular person -
But to anyone in the room who happens to be listening.
We just shoot our ideas into the air
With a flare gun that spells out words.

If I did this sort of thing at the grocery store
Or coffee shop
Or post office or public library,
People would think I was insane.
"Everyone!
Watch this video in which
A kitten falls off a window sill!
"Everyone!
I had waffles this morning!
Here's a picture!"
"Everyone!
Here's a political idea I just found somewhere
That I didn't check on to see if it was true!
I agreed with it - and so should you!"

But in this room, no one finds these declarations odd,
Because we all make them.
We all stand on our platforms and shout,
And after we shout,
We wait.
Because then a lot of other people in the room
Start shouting back.
They shout:
"Like!" "Like!" "Like!"
Or "Love!"
Or "Angry!" or "Sad!" or "Haha!" or "Wow!"
Can you picture this happening in a room
Full of real people?
Crazy!
Oh, wait, that's not an option. You only have six -
Unless you comment.
So in addition to shouting single-word responses,
People can stand around the base of your platform
And talk back to you
As well as start to talk to each other
And sometimes argue about how right you are -
Or wrong.
They relate their own experience to this topic,
The commiserate.
They comfort.
They clamor.
They hold up TV screens with little moving images.
They make faces at you and at each other.

Or rather -
They hold up masks that make faces.
Masks - because no one in this room
Is completely real. 
We are all personas
Constructed for this space -
Carefully curated versions of ourselves
Created for the benefit of everyone else
Who's in this room.

So when the comments start
And I feel like
People from different parts of my life
Are communicating with each other -
A kid from my second grade class
And co-worker from the newspaper
Interact with a teacher I had in high school -
Is it really those people talking,
Or just their masks?

I look down from my platform and see them talking
And jump down to join them.
And there's something intriguing but jarring
About finding
Fifteen people from my life
Who have never met each other before -
Or even met the other versions of me
They each know -
All chatting together.
And sometimes it's good fun
Having all these people together
In this vast, vast room.
Gathered cozily at the base of my platform.

That is, until someone says something rude,
Or at least in disagreement,
Which in this room is the same as rude.
And sometimes people leave the room for a while.
Or things escalate and get tense -
And I have to leave the room for a while.

Because here is the other thing with this room:
It has areas.
Areas for people with different views of things.
And some people tend to cluster all the way to the right
Or all the way to the left
And everywhere in between
Or sometimes they're hanging from the chandelier
And you'd don't know where they stand because they aren't actually standing at all.

People tend to cluster
At their end of the room
Where the people on their platforms
All agree with them,
And the Likes are all alike
And the comments all agree.
And the more time you spend
At your end of the room,
The more you know
That you're RIGHT,
And everybody else is WRONG.

And when you do run into people from the other side of the room,
You Like them less and less,
And like them less and less, too.
And if you dislike them enough,
You can simply pull down a lever
To remove them as a friend
And a trap door opens beneath their feet
And they are GONE
From your room for good,
And you can go back to your friends
Who tell you what you want to hear.

Of course, you don't notice him,
Because he's so ubiquitous,
Yet also invisible,
But there's this guy -
We can call him Al -
Who guides you around the room
Gently.
He doesn't tell you,
"Listen to them!" or "Ignore them!"
He simply guides you around in such a way
That you seldom see the people
Or hear the voices
That might make you uncomfortable.
Al takes you along the well-worn carpet
To visit the places you like to go
Full of friendly faces and familiar ideas.
It's almost as if, when you're with Al,
The room grows smaller,
Cozier.
More intimate.
But you are never really aware of Al.
Because he doesn't want you to be.

And when I'm in this room
I can feel liked
and I can try to share my
Best self with the world,
Because these rooms are big enough
To hold the whole world,
And being here makes me feel like I am
Doing things,
And affecting change,
and improving the world outside,
But without every having to leave this room.

But this room,
Which stands before us
Like a land of dreams,
Full of platforms and signs and flashing screens
And trap doors
And well-worn carpet
And people yelling out their emotions
From underneath their masks,
Is not the world.
It feels like my world
This room.
 But everyone else here
Thinks
It is their world too.

If it existed as a real place,
We would run out,
Revulsed by the cartoonish
Madness of it.
But instead,
We sit and click and type,
And think, because this room's vastness
Is confined to a few inches by a few inches of rectangle
That we are in control of it.

Game Show

Game shows -
That most trivial of pursuits,
On at seven and seven-thirty -
Allow us to invite a host
And his guests into our living rooms
To spin wheels
To question answers
(which is something more of us should do, really)
To find fortunes
Or at least a year's supply of Advil
Or Rice-a-Roni
The San Francisco treat.

We watch and it's always
Exactly
The
Same
Exactly
The
Same
Exactly
But just
The
A little
Same
Different.

It's a ritual
Minus the religion
(Unless that happens to be as category
You can take for four-hundred).

And yet...
And yet...
this year
I have found it
Oddly affirming that when we are in such
Jeopardy
Of losing sight of what
Is fact
Or false
Or real
Or alternative -
Every night
There is this shining reminder
That some questions
Get the affirmative beep
And some get buzzed
And there is no talk of
Politics
(Unless that happens
To be a category you take
For six-hundred)
Or perspectives.
Some things are facts.
Some responses are incorrect.
Reality is actually something we can agree on.
There's just an occasional
Glitch,
And the judges correcting
An incorrect question
And adding or subtracting
Dollar amounts
That leave no doubt
That the truth has real value
That can't be argued with
And that it can even
Determine if you end up with a cash prize
Or Advil.

To a Friend, Upon the Posting of Your Meme

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been online at all.

What good can come of it?

But I was, and I stumbled across your meme.

A pair of stacked photos

With words in Calibri

Plastered across them

A political message

A social message

A stand

A stance

A point of view

On display, presented in clarity and simplicity.

But I have a few questions.

What exactly did you hope to accomplish?

Did you hope to get like-minded people to

Agree with you?

They already do.

But I guess that affirmation feels good.

A beautiful feedback loop is fulfilled.

You post.

You get beautiful comments full of jingoistic agreement

And you can feel affirmed in the righteousness of your cause.

Except when you don’t.

Because there were those negative comments as well.

Which raises again the question –

What exactly did you hope to accomplish?

Because if you were hoping to persuade anybody

To change their thinking,

The negative comments show that you are – perhaps –

A little mistaken.

Because if you were hoping your meme

Would make someone from the enemy side

Suddenly see the light

Understand your truth

Have your insight and understanding

Flutter down from heaven like a dove

And light upon their minds

Like divine revelation,

I think that perhaps the opposite happened.

If the comments are any indication

Your disagreeable friends

(Are they really friends?)

Have become even more disagreeable.

They have dug in,

Made their trenches deeper,

Put up more barbed wire,

And come up with more weapons to defend their position,

Aimed at the sky to shoot your dove of revelation

Into bloody feathery oblivion.

Probably with a meme of their own.

So you aren’t persuading anyone, I suspect.

But I wonder if this was really the point.

Maybe you didn’t want to change anyone’s mind

But to differentiate yours from theirs.

To drive the Others further away

To define the lines of us versus them

My tribe against their tribe.

Aren’t we great aren’t they awful?

You wouldn’t use the word tribe,

Of course.

That sounds awfully primitive

And this is a high-tech forum.

Stories. Narratives.

If tribes is too primitive a term,

Maybe we should talk about our narratives.

We all buy into narratives.

Our narrative makes sense to us,

Makes us feel certain

About what life is about,

What we are about,

Who we are,

Why we are

Who we are against

Why we are against them.

We commit to our narratives:

Anything that contradicts it must be false

No matter how factual or truthful it appears.

Anything that confirms it must be true

No matter how flawed, poorly reasoned,

Ridiculously ironically nonsensical it is

If you actually think about it.

To question your narrative

Is to question your very sense of self.

It feels like killing yourself.

Not questioning your narrative, though,

Is intellectual suicide.

But questioning ruins the fun

Of knowing you’re right.

Questioning your own narrative

Means risking disagreement

With people who make you feel good about yourself.

Questioning your own narrative

Will rock your world.

At this point you are probably agreeing with me:

Those Others need to question their narratives

Because They are obviously deluded

In their narrative.

And They are obviously wrong and need to  

Rethink their narratives.

And well they may need to.

But from the inside,

A false narrative looks awfully similar to a true one.

But tends to be more fiercely defended.

Do you know where the term meme comes from?

It’s from a militant atheist.

Does that bother you?

What is your narrative of atheists?

Does knowing one invented the concept of memes

Change your impression of them?

And do you ever stop to think about

The effect memes have on our society?

Our world?

Complex ideas that are matters of life and death

Are matters of personal and national identity

Of scientific and philosophic truth

Are reduced to a picture and a few words

Devoid of nuance, reflection, or subtlety.

All so we can get a few Likes and comments

From people who already agree with us.

All so we can create division and polarization

Instead of understanding. 

In a way, your meme

Is dehumanizing.

You make the people who don’t share your narrative

Into the enemy

The Other

Things to be conquered

Or even eradicated.

You even dehumanize yourself.

You are no longer a person,

But one of Those People

Who post that kind of meme.

And all of this commentary

Doesn’t even begin to address

The fact that your meme

Makes absolutely no sense

If you actually think about it.

But I guess thinking

Was never the point,

Was it?

Maybe you should start thinking about the things you post.

Because I’ve been thinking about them way too much.