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Tag: delusion

No Substitute for Progress: qasida

Published on June 22, 2025

Salutations and our greeting.
Welcome to this special meeting.
As you know, our time is fleeting,
so please take your assigned seating.

We control a heart that’s beating.
Ever forward, no retreating.
Never mind the lambs, their bleating
will grow softer. They’re just tweeting.

Taste the fatted calf we’re eating,
as this project nears completing,
raised free-range, on grain, no cheating,
farm-to-table, heart still beating.

All the numbers say we’re beating
anyone who tried competing.
We’re as sound as central heating.
Our position is concreting.

Still, this message bears repeating:
going soft is self-defeating.
Never mind the weak entreating
you for mercy in defeating.

This concludes our special meeting.
Please return your hood and sheeting.
The exit survey you’re completing
keeps our cause from obsoleting.

22 Jun 2025

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Good Morning: gloss (glosa)

Published on June 2, 2025

In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning – Carl Sandburg

You say you’re woke because your eyes
are open and you’re out of bed,
and yet describing what you see, you fail
to see yourself and choose instead
to catalog the failings of the world
that won’t conform to how you feel
and what you really want to see,
since reality has no appeal.

Your eyes are open, but you’re blind;
the world is what it’s always been.
It spins around each morning
and repeats itself, again.

You wonder why so few around
seem to believe your point of view,
without the benefit of your insight
or the mirror looking back at you.

You say, “Wake up!” to those who sleep,
“and smell the coffee’s sweet perfume,”
but disregard the fact that some
see more than just your tiny room
where stranger creatures come and go
to satisfy your cravings,
and make the world a better place
and something good worth saving.

02 JUN 2025

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Idiocracy

Published on February 19, 2025

In a post-truth world
the art of lying is lost;
no one’s good at it.
It takes imagination
and some creativity.

In a post truth world,
there’s no need for flattery;
why bother with it?
You can simply fake the facts
and seem like a real genius.

In a post truth world
no news isn’t just good news,
but it’s not real news.
What difference can it make
when no one is listening?

19 FEB 2025

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Single digit blues

Published on September 30, 2014

I hope that I shall never see
the poor in our democracy
convinced to vote Republican
believing they’ll become the one
percent. I hope, but feel, alas,
that both the elephant and ass
are run by callous millionaires
who each say they’re the ones who care.

I hope before that tragic day
the poor man’s eye scales fall away
and see that God is nowhere in it.
We all lose the very minute
we stop doing our own thinking,
and pretend our Kool-Aid drinking
is the cure for our malaise
and will return the good old days.

I hope that I shall never see
the end to our democracy:
when in the din, all reason’s lost,
and none speak out against the cost
of trusting those with profit shares
from selling guns and signal flares,
who win no matter who will lose
and dance while poor men sing the blues.

30 SEP 2014

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