The hiking poem

We reach the hemlock mast of the mountain peak,

to peer out our two seperate windows. Faced with space

we all wish to transform: him to something huge to

fill up the distance. Me to something small, to get lost in it.

We dont get our wishes. Instead we remain in human-scale,

to spiral up Mt. Lacount like heavy smoke,

like big dried out salamanders, like walking trunks of ivy,

like flightless hawks, like people.

The trail cuts back and forth.

On the heads below, we drop

boulders.

Shakespeare and... Science Fiction?

I was looking at my friend's book, and just really fell in love with the cover design. It was a sketch of a circular building. The view was from an overhead angle, so you could really see the curved shape supported by cross-hatched rafters-- it looked like a giant wheel, or some whimsical wind mill, or best yet-- a flying saucer. A week later I realized the illustration was of Shakespeare's Globe Theater.

If we let ourselves imagine Shakespeare staging plays inside a UFO, what other other-worldly correlatives can we find in The Bard's text? Themes of isolation, alienation, loss of identity, the uncanny... all themes of Shakespeare, all themes of Sci-fi. It is worth noting that (who we think of as "timeless") Shakespeare was socio-politically lodged in a important notch in history: the Protestant Reformation. It was this event that set the stage for our present industrial, globalized, postmodern circumstances. This event was the birth of the new world and the new human. Shakespeare wrote science fiction.

song

There was this man. Who owned a zoo. He did not know. What to do. He let them out. Of all their pens. The animals are out. As if free men. And once let loose. Into the streets. They were killed. And shot and beat. And tribunals went. To get this man. They found him home. Dead in his chair. I heard this story. Yesterday. Stupid man. I heard them say. Stupid man. I heard them say.

Spending so much time showing I use my brain instead of using my brain.

a vehical of language

-The rhetoric one uses is like chain links of armor that bolster the speaker.

-Yet I'd much rather take my links and make scales. Words that, lattice-like, shimmer as a quick and fit fish.