[Newspoetry] Futures Written in Star(e)s

[emerick at chorus.net]

Hijacking "Him'' for Empire
By Ray McGovern  t r u t h o u t | Commentary  Tuesday 30 December 2003

Put it on your shields or on your Christmas card,
as did Vice President Dick and Lynne Cheney: --
"And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice,
is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?"
This, of course, is not the first hijacking of "Him" for the needs of empire. ....

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I was to speak about Kal ve-Chomer logic
-- the logic of a proper aggrandizement --
the propositional form of which is this:
"if P happens, then how much more so is Q
(when (implicitly) Q has more merit than P),"
but I wrote some other lines instead.
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Whenever people go on talking about people,
they follow contoured gradients of difference,
along any factor's lines of dim remembrance --
lines of forgetfulness and blindness, too --
whose simplest binary form is an either-or,
an extremism that requires a firm decisiveness
in was/was not, is/is not, or to be/not to be.

Such determination is not wrong, nor right --
as simple judgments are what may be necessary,
and, being needed, must show their own proper,
how they have an Ethic under which to stand,
on which to rely: low earth and high sky unite,
in an enveloping universe of flattened horizons,
dually centered ellipsoid of a stretched sphere.

Religion is a dark matter force of the universe,
talking of dividers of darkness into crystal light,
retaining their oneness beyond all separation,
as evening and morning are yet another day,
the tension of calm opposition to day in night,
finding its release, its usefulness, unthought,
uncalled forth from tomb of potential memory.

To all this activity there is a pacing rhythm,
that finds a signing: alternating heartbeats
in an either/or procede from their own debris
to conceive spiraling worms of spinning logic,
as propositions about the unpropositioned:
talk about lonely people talking about people
who always have nothing better to talk about.

Their speech shall make them better speakers --
the least that we could hope for in their words --
or they learn to force us to speak of dark matters,
by pretending a preoccupation with preoccupation,
as if the vast emptiness of void's hollow ellipsoid
could fill in by reverbating echoes, every sound
reflects no loss of energy, nor merging cacophony.

The great white noise of everyone talking at once
forms a perfect background, a carrier wavefront,
for intermittent yet regular signals to pierce into,
a disparity in frequencies infrequently parodies
the harmonies of a furious universe's cold blazes,
phlegmatic stars drift ever further, apastronomy,
negentropy overshoots its marks, suicidally free.

Thanks for listening,
Donald L Emerick