M.I.A.

Spatter, splatter, 

Bloody froth o’er mud

Covers the slain

Of our campaign.

This killing zone,

Forever home.

A Strange Man in a Strange Land

(We begin with a description of how to correctly pronounce the name of my assigned social worker and medical liaison, Tiina.)

Btw, since, in Finnish, the pronunciation of vowels never changes; all vowels are pronounced like the short vowel sounds in English; there are no silent letters; the primary stess in a word is on the first syllable (whereas in English it is on the second, which explains most of the mispronunciations of my name); because of all the foregoing, the pronunciation of Tiina’s name is close to the following: TII-na. The capital letters are the stress on “Tii,” which rhymes with the English “Tea,” because a double vowel only lengthens the sound. One “i” would be like the “i” in “single” or “little;” the sound is longer in “tea.”

The second/final syllable has the “a” sounding like the “a” in the English word “target,” or the “u” in “up.” So it is no surprise that English is difficult for people, born into another tongue, to learn, since it is very random and demands so much plain memory work. An American professor who got a position at the University of Helsinki and learned Finnish, contrasted the two languages like this: “English is a language with few rules but a thousand exceptions. The Finnish language has a thousand rules and very few exceptions.” I think he puts it well. He wrote a book about the experience of moving with his family to Finland, learning the language and adapting to the culture (while pointing out the cultural differences between Finland and the USA). That book is where the quotation is from. I read the book in my high school library during grade 10 and have remembered it ever since (although the wording may not be exactly as written, its content and meaning are accurate). It’s too bad that I don’t remember the author’s name and that I can only take a stab at his book’s title, which I recall as being something like “The Lion And The Rose” (a reference to Finland’s coat of arms, I believe). It would be a pleasure to reread since I’ve been here for over 20yrs and have yet to blend into the culture. I think the reason for not melting in is that I don’t want to, although I can move around in it and not offend the natives.

Beat

One, two, three, triplet

One, two, three, triplet

One, two, three, triplet 

One, two, three, triplet 

One, two, three, triplet 

One, two, three, triplet 

One, two, three…

One, two…

One.…

A Routine Doom

I awake each morn’

My task the same:

By powder and elixir

Proceed to scramble 

Mine brain. 

Haiku #366

The hatchet hangs slack

His limb’s need to hack is filled 

Taboos have been killed

Facing Ageing

Standing here, so much closer to the end of my life than to its beginning, I have no doubts about my store of knowledge but, admittedly, remembering it all is becoming problematic. 

Haiku #365

Razorblade romance

Seen in a poem of mine?

Such a clear ripoff!

Snippet

“Shit, man! I thought you said he was a ‘desk pot’!! Christ! You got some serious WTF’s going there. I thought I was going to have to Black Flag you!”

Haiku #364

The Moon first was made

I think it was a Friday 

Earth was a rush job 

Two Subjects Do Not An Object Make

“Rest in peace” strikes curious harmonics when it’s directed at the living. Dunno why.

While one persistent characteristic of my mind is that as far as I am aware, I do not believe IN or have “faith” IN anything, it is possible that there might be something to this sympathetic magic business. I am not jumping whole hog into the manifestation of the will thing, the “strange attractor” idea (the nomenclature having been “borrowed” from the physicists) may well have its counterpart in existential reality. I usually have two or three books on the go at the same time, the books having been chosen at random from a selection of possibly diverting reads. As I have gone from one to another among my present choices, I have come across variations of one phrase in all three tomes: “peacefully sleeping,” or words to that effect. Here comes the attractor. I have very recently either wished a peaceful sleep to someone else while simultaneously desiring it for myself. It is a small thing, a trifling oddity, but an oddity that is highlighted by the drab quotidian sameness in which it is set.

Election Reform

Voting seems beset with woes, difficulties and inconveniences. Let’s do away with it. Let the chosen candidates of every party in the running fight to the death in a cage match. Survivor takes all.

The Present Is Illusion

I chanced a thought at the past and recalled one of my few notably successful tweets. A single line: “You can be undone by a memory.” The more poignant the memory, the more damage it can do, especially if you have experienced the very structure of Time, which I have. My experience of Time was in the form of a vision and, in this vision I saw that time is not linear, although that is how we experience it using our quotidian senses. If you can arrive at a view of what lies behind the scrim of our mundane image of what is “real,” this is what you’ll see: an infinite 3-D space that contains the 4th dimension. Imagine being in the midst of multi-coloured globes that shimmer like the fragile glass ornaments of a living X-mas tree. Each globe is a discrete moment of your lifetime, the past and the future all co-existing, mixed together in an unlimited whole. Having brought your consciousness to this state, you can view all of the Time that constitutes your life simultaneously. Because you are then in a state outside of the usual mortal and mundane understanding of Time, you can see that “time travel” is simply a matter of the will, the will to finely focus one’s attention. Being amidst all of the moments of your life, past and future (meaningless terms, actually, but ironically useful in this description), you’ve but to focus upon a particular moment of your choosing, imagine it clearly within your mind and then you can will yourself to manifest in that moment. As has been implied above, the scope of one’s ability to travel in time is limited to that span of time encompassed by your mortal existence. There is a slightly uncomfortable suggestion of solipsism here, though the degree of discomfort is directly related to how attached you are to the people and things that you appear to coexist with. In the absence of immortality, what might occur after you die does not seem to be something that is worth worrying about. After all, only fun should be mandatory. 

Chronic Illustration

I’ve found a new illustration of the meaning of the term “chronic.” A container of tablets upon which a label instructs, “one tablet, twice daily,” but lacks any indication of why they should be taken. Medication for no apparent reason. The level of trust that people used to reserve for their gods.

Haiku #363

Did it rain last night?

Asked the sky of the oil slick.

I wouldn’t know, Wood Eye.

Con Sequences

Catalogue your terrors:

Add up all your errors: 

Do they correlate?

What was your mistake?

Harken back,

Concentrate,

Who promised you 

They’d take the weight 

Of your weird from off

Your shoulders?

Did you seal the deal?

You hesitate.…

Fool, feel your Fate

Now growing colder

And colder.

Cold comfort, too, that

Frozen in Time 

At least you 

Won’t moulder.…

Worshiping One-Eye

Hail speckled wind that 

Wails and whistles ‘mongst

Pines rough to the touch,

Scented, straight, awaiting,

Prepares a mood of doom

For the party now 

Approaching, devout and 

Deadly, bearing flesh 

For the God of the 

Holy noose and spear.

The time for choosing 

Erupts afore thee, pray,

Ride this rite or thy

Eyes avert, never to know 

If sacrifice wins

Divine advice.

Brains On Rails…

People often ask, rhetorically, “where does the time go?” Fewer have been heard to ask, “where does the time come from?”

Why Is This Still Necessary?

Stand on the shore with a telescope & watch a sailing ship move out perpendicular to the shore. As the ship fades into the distance, you will see its waterline seem to rise until you can’t see the hull anymore but you WILL see the mast, until it sinks out of view. That observation cannot be made on a flat Earth. Ergo, the Earth is a sphere. The Ancient Greeks knew this. The Earth was a sphere during the Middle Ages. The Earth’s shape wasn’t an issue until some anti-science types in the 1800’s made it one. As they were developing science, parallel to it were pseudosciences, like mesmerism and phrenology, to name a couple. And idiocy is eternal.

Flat-Earthers would drive God crazy.

Red Reaver

Sailing with no port in sight 

O’er a restless sea of blood,

Its smell does in you instil

The scent of slaughter, 

Of gore and guts,

A harvest of flesh torn from 

Battles barbarous, cruel and vile.

Haiku #362

Pale she was, like ice 

Due to her milk-white disguise 

We didn’t suss she’d died