Dear Harry the Human Readers,
I am the unofficial editor of Harry's writings. He sends them to me (as he did last week from South Korea) and I post them. As you'll see (or have seen) in chapters 6 and 7, Harry and his new partners Anthony Roberts and Gregory (whose ideas run the world in 2044) were undergoing severe mental stress from the bombardment of their psyches by telepathic waves from secret government agencies discovered by Harry to be developing telepathy as a weapon. Harry has been leading the way for the small movement towards a rational humanity with invaluable intel concerning the global war we're being talked into, maintaining, in brief, that the manipulators' goal is that people think the war is their idea. Now, however, the perpetrators have picked up Harry & Co.'s mental signatures and have taken counter-measures: testing out a new weapon they call a "hallucitropic missile" (or "hassle") fired right out of people's heads, that can implant entire fictive scenarios in its victims. The hassle attack on our three heroes was a partial success, causing them to believe for a time that what the world thinks is the country of North Korea is in fact a secret lab for the relatively small group of technocrats and billionaires who are plotting World War III, and Harry actually traveled to South Korea to follow what he thought was a hot tip. The goal of the hassle attack, Harry says, was twofold: to shame him and his friends by publicly associating them with a crackpot idea (after which none of their non-crackpot ideas would get a hearing) as well as to, as much as possible, destroy their souls with sensations of failure and futility, stimulated by attendant frequencies in the hassle attack. That last part worked pretty well in the case of Harry, who became disoriented and delusional in South Korea and needed assistance from his crew. Harry is back on his feet now (he's a resilient character) and is in an airplane as I write, heading to a destination which it would be wise not to reveal. I will say that Harry is following a trail left by the hassle attack.
With Harry's permission I decided to fill in Harry's report today with selections of his poetry. We hope you enjoy it.
Doug Lasken
Poetry by Harry the Human
When last I looked....
When last I looked....
Said the captain to first mate,
"It must be something that I ate,
for when I look across the sea
and think of what it all could be-
I feel that with my senses sate
I’ve found the will to recreate
that empty canvas I did see
when last I looked across the sea."
What did Jacob say to God?
Tell me about the last vision,
After the last
Reductio ad absurdum
-before the animal sleep sets in-
When the eye
Expanding beyond light
Sees its own context,
Just for a moment.
I want to see it now!
so that
I do not need death
to be alive.
One sin too many
One sin too many
tipped the scales,
mortality, not life
prevails.
For Eve, you know
just couldn't wait,
the female hunger
hard to sate.
The serpent eyed her
thinking how
he'd transfer all his
weakness now:
The weakness of not
wanting much
the weakness of
his cold dark touch.
Take this, he hissed,
God won't be pissed;
the obedient creature
is seldom missed.
Eve was not sure
and for a while
thought this is
naughty,
not my style.
But then she thought
our life is hard in
this infernally
pleasant
garden;
God must know
that stories need
a conflict
for the mind to heed.
Thus did the serpent
choose most fit
she who knew
before she bit
The fleshy fruit
raised to her jaw,
the story is our
god's,
she saw.
And Adam
more prone to be led
saw the truth of what
she said.
Swallowing hard
he looked about
in mortal fear
he turned to shout:
"Oh no! We're in
the story line,
we'll have to be
interesting,
not devine!"
Creation's ratings,
now assured,
though we'd rather
not have any,
We wonder, should we
have demurred
before one sin too
many?
Extreme Friendliness Disorder
Sitting with Snaffles in the vet's waiting room
I read Bark magazine
and wonder should
we call
New Yorker magazine Speak?
And it seems the domestic dog originated
in the Middle East, not Asia,
but Williams Syndrome, bringing the curse of
Extreme Friendliness Disorder
is traceable, can be seen in dog genes.
Bark does not deal, I think, in irony,
in sadness.
Domestication a syndrome
Civilization a disorder
Friendliness a...oh God no-
My tail is wagging!
Ukraine
I.
My grandfather left
you after you cut his father down
What do you want now,
why have you come
around?
II.
He came to New York
then Bismarck and sold liquor.
The Sioux and Germans
came to buy in World War II
but World War II was
quicker.
My dad quit the town-
the city slicker!
And then I came, I
saw, I begged to differ,
Los Angeles!
III.
What a haven from
Ukraine you’ve been,
You let everybody
float, we think we win!
Oh Ukraine, they even
let us sin!
There's a Bard in my Yard
What if, though all we teach our young
Be naught but dreams
we teach ourselves,
We- in the throes of
later-aged ambition
To be more upon the
stage
Than aged babes,
Suckling, passive,
small accounted in the public eye,
Or domestic ciphers
Sweeping dust to dust
And daily circling
mile on mile
In quiet
contemplation
-hidden watched the
generations flow,
While all around the
greatest triumphs
From young minds
Did cause calamitous clash
And magnificent
ornament of the soul?
But children too,
Uprooted on life’s
playground,
Who face the rousing
slap
And challenge of the
intellect’s
swampy doubt,
Think not of quiet
corners
But of noisy triumph
on the field
Demanding that we set
aside
The limits of our
scope
And take them on a
joyous ride
Of certitude and
hope.
Poem on demand
I told my writing group
I average three poems per year
because of inspiration
or lack of it
Or lack of perspiration?
Doesn't a poem need to be written
Right here? Right now?
Of course it does-
It always does
when the heart asks
“Where is my universe?
Does it come after this one?”
A poem will know
how to riddle us.
Ask the slime
Part I. The problem
In the mirror it is trapped-
the solitary soul not easily unwrapped,
its universal juice reluctant to be
sapped,
contaminated, begging you to tap
some poetry to prove that it's not full
of crap.
Part II. The crime!
I thought it best, as if you need but
rhyme
to indicate the truth, to tell about
the time
humanity emerged out of the slime
and saw the upward path it thought to
climb
and found too late its orphaned soul-
the crime!
Part III. What now?
Whom to punish? Who deserves the
dreadful blame?
Do we need a gun? At whom to aim?
Or rather ask again the slime, our
single seed-
What did we leave in you? What do
we need?
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