Dear Google

Dear Google,

Please don’t steal my stuff.  I know you have to feed your infinite

hunger for information, your insatiable appetite for every scrap of

data about my friends, family, shopping habits, intestinal cycles,

sexual desires, political ideologies, coupon clipping appointments,

and kodiak moments.  You have mouths to feed, Google, blind,

gaping, yawning chasms to fill with all the knowledge of the

universe that you can identify, sort, catalogue, categorize, classify,

index, and sell.  The highest bidders are forever gasping, grasping,

clasping, clawing for eyeballs, ever open, unblinking, to beam

banners and blocks of advertisements that beg, demand, command

clicks, taps, and swipes.  We together, Google, are on the Brin of an

abyss and all you want to do is dump page after Page of every book,

screen after scene of every video, and note after note of every sound

into your rumbling, tumbling, churning, yearning stomach

for consumption, digestion, and regurgitation.

My poems, small though they may be, are mine, and mine alone, to

share with the brave and kindhearted readers who have found a few

extra moments in their busy days for a small spark to ignite an ember

in the back right corner of their brains wedged in between that

delightfully funny scene from last night’s very special episode and

that snippet of song you don’t want to get out of your head.

So don’t steal my stuff, Google, or you’ll be in deep Schmidt.

Love and doodles,

Jason

On Opening a magazine

I like the perfume
Inserts in magazines. They
Make the trash smell great

Thoughts on Twitter

Like the first zombie
Out of the ground, all I need
Is some followers

Autumn Ocean

Steely gray waves crash
Cold sharp sand streaks through the air
Salt crusts on my coat

Wake up call

Through my bedroom door
The laughter of children rings
In the new morning

Variations on Ginsberg's "America"

There is a lot to be

angry about with

America now, but it is not America

herself.  She has a

disease, a

cancer inside her.  It is the

mutated remains of

dead cells that is

killing her.  A

bee sting

poison from her birth has

festered into an old wound

infected with dry cracked

fingernails clasping onto the last

wrinkled dollars drinking the

life blood that feeds the

healthy pink and green

growth of the next generation.

Dead skin should

slough off to let the

new growth rise

fresh and clean.  But this

disease collect itself in the

decayed detritus of old skin.

Absorbs its own breath and

caked white blood cells

depleted of nutritive value so it can

dig deep to the bowels of the

power plant at the

heart and soul of

America where it will

inbreed gray-suited

Don Draper drinking

paramecium, all

brylcreem sheen and big teeth smiles,

pumping clots into the

blood stream of America, blocking

glass ceiling shatterers and

lightning bolt pen wielders.

How many nines does it take to

see that the medicine

that has been prescribed by the

tea-stained hand is poison,

more poison for the

papery fleshed billionaire zombies to

drink like so much champagne at a

Hampton’s dinner party.

Even underneath the grime of a

thousand factories pumping

climate change into her lungs,

American is beautiful.

America is good.

I stood still for a

heartbeat moment and

saw the wind through the grass

in the front yards of

ten thousand New England colonials.

I saw the gentle lap lap of the tide

on a rocky beach beside a

windswept lighthouse.

I saw the ghostly spires of a metropolis

hovering on the horizon through the

golden stalks of wheat in the city limits.

I saw a city in the trees on a mountaintop.

I see the purposeful, honest

ebb and flow of humanity

carefully picking a path along

the edge of the platform in a

renovated subway station.

I see the people.  Eyes sharp, searching,

lips pursed in worry, ears pricked to

hear the news of an 

America growing healthy.

They’re waiting.

America is waiting.

From poetry class

My thoughts on freewrites:
Be a stenographer for
Your mind wandering

In the woods near home

Storm ripped roots splintered
Horizontal trunk tilted
Skyward in pleading

Impressions on Occupy Boston

On Tuesday, October 25, 2011, I went to Dewey Square in Boston, just across the street from the Boston Federal Reserve Bank, to attend the OccuPoetry event at Occupy Boston.  All this week poets will be speaking between 2pm and 3pm as part of a series of scheduled events.  I was invited by well-known Boston poet Peter Desmond to read my poem Occupy Wall Street along with several other poets, including Ginsberg Award-winning poet Richard Cambridge.  The readings will continue through Friday if you are interested in attending, as well as interested in seeing exactly what it happening in the protest.  I had no clue what might be going on down there, and was very hesitant to put any stock in a news report that I had heard about from Fox 25 news.  Here are my impressions.

It’s a Hooverville for the 21^st Century.  A tent camp full of the unemployed and recently homeless.  They are mostly in their 20s, but there are several in the 30s and older.  Most of the 20-somethings have cell phones.  Adjacent to the tent camp is a garden which they work on together to grow food.  Closer to South Station is what would  normally be described as vendor tents, like what you might see at a craft fair.  Let’s call it Bushville.  These are the “beneficiaries” of the Bush Economic Policy™ and the two, count ‘em, two recessions caused by Republican Supply Side Economics.

These people are jobless, homeless, but not quite hopeless.  They like President Obama; they respect and still believe in him, but they want more of the campaign Obama than the compromise Obama.  They are sick and tired of the obstructionist Republicans and the lie factory that is Fox “News”.  They’re smart and aware of their rights.  They’re political without being ideological.  They’re peaceful, but on edge.  They are expressing themselves through music and poetry, and by growing food in the park.  These are not hippies.  Most of them weren’t even born yet when there were still hippies.  Sure, some of them grew up poor, but most of the people I met have some college education, if not a degree.  They are the displaced middle class.

Everything Limbaugh, Beck, the RNC, the Republican presidential hopefuls, the info-zombies of Faux News, etc., says about them is wrong.  They have clear needs and goals.  Make the bailout babies of Wall Street, the whining millionaires & billionaires, and the corporate overlords pay their fair share for a change.  Reinstate oversight and regulation of banks, Wall Street, and corporations because those jerks can’t be trusted.  Stop wasting money on useless wars, and spend the money instead on important things like education, health care reform, feeding the poor, taking care of vets, and job creation.  Read the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and you’ll clearly see that this county belongs to the people, not soulless corporations.  While I am paraphrasing, that seems like a clear and concise “mission statement” to me.

This is not and anti-government protest.  It is anti-corporate, anti-lobbyist, anti-hypocrisy, and anti-obstructionist.  These people want their government back from those who have taken it hostage and used it against the people it was designed to protect.  This movement is pro-people, pro-poor, pro-middle class, and pro-democracy.  It is respectful of our country and its traditions, and therefore as patriotic as any battle ever fought on this soil.  It is organic, leaderless, and real.  In other words, everything the Tea Party protests never were, which were clearly run by a lobbyist, Dick Armey, and the HMO/health insurance industry.  This movement is non-violent, again, unlike the Tea Party protests, which was as gun-toting as a Sylvester Stallone movie.

The guiding spirits of the Occupy Wall Street movement are Gandhi, Chavez, and King.  It is color-blind and inclusive.  It is not racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, or homophobic, despite articles in the conservative-leaning big media to paint it as such.  These are nameless, faceless American heroes who just want our nation to fulfill its promise unburdened by the clasping, grasping greed of a few who see life as a zero-sum game.  These people know that a rising tide lifts all ships.  I know this because I saw it in their kindness and generosity towards each other and towards me.

This little Bushville, and the Occupy movement as a whole, are also incredibly sad.  It should be absolutely unnecessary in a country as powerful, advanced, and wealthy as ours for a place like Bushville to exist.  Everywhere I looked there were words of hope and encouragement for the pro-democracy citizen revolts throughout the Middle East that made up the Arab Spring.  Here is Boston, and in New York and elsewhere, we now have an American Autumn to follow the Arab Spring.

The last lavender

The last lavender
Shivers in the cool autumn
Breeze. The bee moves on.

I am not a Communist

I am not a Communist.

I am not a Socialist.

I don’t want the government to own

everything.  I don’t want your stuff.  I’m poor and

I’ve got enough stuff of my own already.  So much

stuff that I need to sell my stuff or donate my stuff or

get rid of my stuff just to have space for more stuff.

I believe in making a buck and having a

place of my own, and I want you to

make a living and have a place of your

own.  All I want is for you to keep your

hands out of my pockets and stop

pretending that that my wallet is an

ounce and a half lighter because of

government taxes. 

The government is not out to get you.

I do not want your guns.

I don’t want any guns.

I don’t need a gun to speak my

mind or make myself heard.  If

the pen if mightier than the sword, then

my keyboard is mightier than your gun.

All the time you’ve spent afraid that the

government would try to take your guns,

did you never stop to think how

afraid I am that you would come with

your guns and try to take my life?

Did you never stop to think that maybe

it is not the government that is the

threat to you, but you the threat to us?

You say that the power to tax is the

power to destroy, and I say, so?

When have you ever seen a tax destroy

anything?  I haven’t, but I have seen

poverty and hunger march across the

land with a scythe leaving a trail of

toxic floodwaters.  You say that

taxation without representation

is wrong, and I agree, but

stop to think.  If only

one percent of all

Americans are millionaires, yet

fifty percent of

Congress are millionaires, don’t you

think that it is us, the

rest of America which is

underrepresented?

You can try to bullshit me all you

like, but I’m not stupid and neither is

the rest of us.  Working together

doesn’t make us Communists, it

doesn’t make us Socialists, it

makes us Americans.

We, the people,

are the government, no matter

how much you try to buy it.

When you’re ready to grow up,

man up, and

put up or shut up,

we’ll be out here.

I’ve read the

First Amendment.

Have you?

The smallest pine tree

The smallest pine tree
I have ever seen is no
Taller than my girl

Park St. Station

Hot dry solid air
Distant clattery rumbling
Is this one my train?

In the stacks at the library

Kinetic stillness
Patiently waiting knowledge
Silently calls out

The girl at the Tannery

Whining endlessly
The teenager on the floor
Blocks the whole hallway

Revitalive Cafe, NBPT, MA

Usually bland,
Vegan desserts from this place
Are shockingly good

Occupy Wall Street

A holiday chug chug march of blue uniforms

crisp and clean and silver wings gleaming

in the bright dawn of a true blue, white, and red

revolution leads teachers and toilers, the down-

trodden and uplifted, the wise and the foolish, the

best and the brightest of the ninety nine percenters to

take back the street from the ravenous, howling,

slavering, slobbering, sleek headed, greed drunk,

thousand dollar suit wearing bailout whores who

cracked our nest egg to make caviar omelets from

sub prime junk sauce.  College coed sisters with their

coupon clipping mothers and daughters against

dangerous drooling nightcrawlers took back the night from the

overreaching slime under the workboots of society, but

no murder rapist mugger thug hurt as many as the

smiling, shark toothed madoffs of canyon towers of MBA

clown car firms.  Too big to merely fail, they imploded in a

nuclear reaction of greed and stupidity, and like the

childish churlish whining brats who want what they want

when they want it and don’t look at me that way

I’m going to my corner office in the clouds, door slam.

They need discipline.  They need the firm hand wielded by the

red hot red blooded red white and blue.  The princess of

cornpone homily distracting dissemblence harkens for

the real America, but one only has to look at the

teeming mass of honest yearning to find the real

America, the teachers, tailors, and toilers, the

unemployed, the underemployed, and the disenfranchised.

The first steps are the hardest and the first barricade the most

vulnerable to the pepper spray violence of the mindless

automatons of fear.  Hold hands, link arms, replace violence with

love and fear with hope, and we can take back the street and

secure the day.

Self-critique

Alliteration
Exposes every urge
To sound so clever

Lynch Park, Beverly, MA

Hidden rose garden
Arranged in perfect balance
Bumblebees buzz by

Driving North on I95

Autumn leaves revealed
Shocking golds, sharp oranges,
And seductive reds

The Haiku-a-day challenge

The Haiku-a-day challenge

I love to write, but I find that I don’t always have the time to do as much as I would like.  Life gets in the way, especially small, cute, and young life, also known as my daughters, who require a great deal of attention.  Who knew that parenting was so much work?  Well, other than everyone, that is.  This led me to follow in the footsteps of several of my friends on Facebook, who have posting updates on various 30 or 60 day challenges in which they are engaged, whether spiritual or health/fitness related.

I chose to make this a 30 day haiku challenge for two reasons: 30 days seems reasonable, and I love haiku.  I love the surprising depth and simplicity of the form.  Traditionally, a haiku is a nature poem consisting of 17 sounds in the Japanese language, arranged in three lines of five, seven, and five sounds, respectively.  The concept of 17 sounds has been mistranslated as meaning 17 syllables in western languages.  Haiku written in English do not strictly need 17 syllables, however, I prefer to follow this rule, as it forces me to carefully consider each and every word, which I believe makes for better poems.

Haiku are written about topics in nature, however, there is a parallel and identical form known as senryu, which can cover almost any topic, usually with a more humorous tone than the more serious haiku.  The only thing that differentiates a haiku and a senryu is the subject matter.  I tend to write haiku and senryu in equal amounts.

For me, haiku and senryu can contain a kernel of beauty and wisdom that allows them to be as meaningful as any longer poetic form.  I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I have and will enjoy writing them.

North Station

Welcome to North Station, my new writer's blog.  I will be posting poetry, short stories, and the odd essay.  I am a writer, actor, director, filmmaker, and educator from the northeast of the United States.  North Station represents a hub for exchanging stories and ideas and sharing them with the world.  It is my goal that having this platform will inspire me to create and share more than I have before.  Please feel free to leave constructive feedback.  Thanks!