The 2018 Nobel Prize in Medicine
by Dr. Weslie Ubeca
The 2018 Nobel Prize in Medicine has gone
to Allison and Honjo for their landmark work upon
immunotherapies for cancer patients that are known
by the immune checkpoint blockade, attacking cancer’s zone.
The use of proteins for this work, like CTLA-4:
if blocked, a brake released attacks the cancer cells with force.
A second protein PD-1, likewise a system brake,
released, attacks the cancer cells with zest, for goodness sake.
Now melanomas, lung and bladder cancers, once diffused,
can be reduced, defused, by medicines that are infused.
Dr. Weslie Ubeca is a poet of the medical arts. Though many excoriate Big Pharma for some of its practices, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, Merck, Roche, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and Sanofi have all brought forth new drugs, as options for cancer patients, utilizing the work of scientists, like James Allison in the USA and Tasuku Honjo in Japan.
_________________________________________________________________
No Matter
by Bic Uwel, “Erased”
“Right on, Jas!”
—”Weird” Ace Blues
No matter when you feel like you’ve got no where else to go,
knocked down, flat in the ring, upon your back, and feeling low,
remember there are those who will appreciate you for
all of the good things you possess, pressed hard on to the floor.
Remember there are those who will still love you very much,
those who can lift you up a bit, if only but a touch,
those who will be inspired by the things that you have done,
enamoured by the parts of you, o, unlike anyone.
Take heart, when you are at the bottom of humanity,
though you may never know them, some may hold you perfectly.
Bic Uwel, “Erased,” is a poet of the common and the unknown, the uncommon and the known.
_________________________________________________________________
The Punching Spar
by Rudi E. Welec, “Abs”
I saw him training for a match; he stood inside the ring.
Upon the bright blue floor he stood, there doing his own thing.
His sparring partner entered through the taut gray, ring-side ropes,
each fighter longing to subdue the other fighter’s hopes.
They battled hard, their muscles taut, they hit, they pushed, they shoved.
This was a sport they both enjoyed. This was a sport they loved.
They fought, they wrought, they got quite hot, such anguish in each face;
but still they kept it up at one invigourating pace.
They hit the floor, but there was not a referee in sight,
and so they fought with all they had, o, every bit of might.
But at the end they paused, they stopped, they did not go too far;
they let up their brutality and stopped the punching spar.
Rudi E. Welec, “Abs”, is a poet of sport.
_________________________________________________________________
The Golden Footbridge
by Lê Dức Bẚệ “Wires”
The visitors to Ba Na Hills in Central Vietnam
can cross the golden footbridge near Da Nang, that’s called Cau Vang.
It is 500 feet long and above 3,000 feet,
but what is most amazing are the giant conrete hands,
that hold it up, out from the rocky hills and from the trees,
like some great god within the lands of the Vietnamese.
He puts his hands forth, this stone titan, out into the air,
to hold the golden path away from off his mountain lair,
connecting cable cars with gardens from too steep declines;
the TA Landscpae Architecture group made the designs.
Lê Dức Bẚệ “Wires” is a poet of Vietnam.
_________________________________________________________________
A Soldier on the War in Vietnam
by War di Belecuse
The War in Vietnam was messy. Nothing worked
the way it was supposed to. Everything
went south that didn’t go wrong. We were jerked
around all so much it changed our breathing.
It irked the hell out of so many souls,
we didn’t know if we were coming or
going, stuck in those damn muddy fox holes,
there fighting, shooting up—that horrid horde.
It was a moral jungle filled with death.
We marched through piles of shit with no escape.
The only thing we had left was our breath.
We sighed, but all was gone—or had been raped.
And in that snafu, communists triumphed;
Yep, situation normal—all fucked up.
At Boot Camp
by War di Belecuse
At boot camp it was time; he had to face the obstacles;
the wall of hanging ropes was next; it was his job to scale.
He grabbed the hanging ropes securely in each of his hands;
he only had to wait for his drill sergeant’s firm commands.
He tensed his body’s length in prepping for his high ascent,
his boots securely on the ground, his body, ready, bent.
His gruff drill sergeant yelled his orders; it was time to climb;
he leapt up to a wooden beam and sprang forth from the grime.
He scrambled up with speed, with agony upon his face,
but, o, he made it, panting, and he reached the top with grace.
War di Belecuse is a poet of all aspects of the military.
_________________________________________________________________
Up Near Dilwara
by Abu Dilwere Sec
“Ah, to flex like Tiger Shroff”
—Rudi E. Welec, “Abs”
I saw him meditating in the stretched-out lotus pose.
His legs were folded, hips were open, up his head arose.
He tried to concentrate on tolerance, compassion too.
He tried to clear his mind of thoughts that were not pure or true.
His arms hung at his sides for balance, ballast to the call
of all that was so beautiful on this rotating ball.
He felt like he was leaning back upon a sofa’s arm,
and raised his head up to his god; he felt secure and warm.
His life was like a lovely festival of rules outdoors,
o, high up near Dilwara standing on the rocky tors.
He felt as if he did the splits; his legs flew out, like birds.
He closed his eyes; the gray drapes left; he had no room for words.
Abu Dilwere Sec is a poet of Indian depths.
_________________________________________________________________
On Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
by Basil Drew Eceu
His vigour, not his rigour, is what most impresses me,
not esoteric exigencies into poesy.
And though he was not limited to balladry and such;
it is his verse I like the most, if maybe not that much.
I also liked that he would write on topical events.
His novels and short stories filled my mind with thoughtful sense.
His jungle jingles, epigrams and hymns were stirring stuff,
stiff upper lip and all that rot, be off, be damned—enough.
It seems such bliss to have been born and lived in India,
as Joseph Rudyard Kipling did, our English Gunga Din.
Basil Drew Eceu is a poet of Romantic and Victorian outlooks.
_________________________________________________________________
Besides the Maldive Shark
by W. S. “Eel” Bericuda
“They dump their trash on Thilafushi.”
—Seaweed Lubric
The lowest country in the World, just feet above the sea,
there’s much besides phlegmatic sharks, in Maldives coral reefs.
There’s myriads of fish, crustaceans, and echinoderms,
there’s snappers, puffers, lobsters, wrasses, rays and fusiliers,
there’s groupers, nudibranches, barracudas, eels, shrimp,
there’s dolphins, whales, turtles, sponges, crabs and angelfish.
And also there amidst the oceanic passing arks,
one finds the pilot fish accompanying whitetip sharks,
as Herman Melville pointed out, so many years ago,
striped black and bright blue, aye, they’ve one, with whom they’d like to go.
W. S. “Eel” Bericuda is a poet of the sea and gorgeous beaches. The Coralarium, an environmental sea gallery off the Maldives, was recently destroyed by police with pick axes. Jason deCaires Taylor was crushed by the destruction of his art.
_________________________________________________________________
A Sleek Gazelle
by Badrue Ecsweli
I saw a sleek gazelle leap up, a startled antelope,
small hope to flee its predator, but still prepared to cope.
I saw its curving back go past the cheetah on the grass—
lickety-split kilometers, it was amazing fast.
I saw its stretching legs go by, extended out and far,
this African savannah was its chance to arch and soar.
I saw it turn its head back just to check where was the threat;
it sped ahead maniac’lly so to escape the dread.
I saw this in some pictures; I was not there at the time;
but it impressed me with its graceful energy and might.
Badrue Ecsweli is a poet of southern Africa.
_________________________________________________________________
Dmitri Prigov (1940-2007)
by Rus Ciel Badeew
He was a literator in the Cafe of the Mad,
a cross between a Samisdat Catullus and King Cad.
He wrote one thousand poems for each view of Hokusai,
but all he had to sculpt was steely, vast, gray Russian sky.
He made his installations of conceptual bed-pans
and wrote Warholic verses on the sides of real tin cans.
In ’86 he had a run-in with the KGB
for daring to hand out to passersby his poetry.
He was sent to a psychiatric institution, till
protests by poets, such as Bella Akmadulina.
Together with philosopher Mikail Epstein, he
fought off the old absurdity with new sincerity.
Rus Ciel Badeew is a poet of the vast Russian landscape.
_________________________________________________________________
Peter Pome at the Clavier
by Ewald E. Eisbruc
He sat at the piano playing Schumann’s Opus 1,
the Abegg Variations, an eight minute loping run.
His fingers moved as quickly as some furtive animals
that ran away the moment that some hunter shot his gun.
He sat erect and played correctly at his task, his post,
producing scintillating, scattered, patterned strings of notes.
There was no pausing as he went through all Herr Schumann’s themes,
with energy, enunciating streams of loving dreams.
He paced himself, embracing, racing, where appropriate,
and then he quit, got up and left piano, piece, and pit.
The Man With the Red Piano
by Ewald E. Eisbruc
There were no gentle pleasantries, when he sat at the keys;
Acwiles could be very rude, when he would play a piece.
The keys bright white, piano scarlet, red seat circular;
he flexed his muscles, sat erect; he was right-angular.
He forced his way into the piece and played with slight ado;
the long legato shook the audience that was in view.
The double octaves at the start of the sonata were
tumultuous, too much to suss, in th’ air-raw stratosphere.
How could he take the music in; it was too hard to hold;
and yet he played—Magnificent! both beautiful and bold.
Ewald E. Eisbruc, known as EEE, or “Triple E”, is a poet of music.
_________________________________________________________________
Jacques Salomon Hadamard (1865-1963)
by Euclidrew Base
I never saw him in between complex analysis
and analytic number theory, golden palaces.
I never saw him in the chaos, falling matrices,
and partial differentials, in symbolic atrias.
I never saw him all wrapped up in marked off chains or primes,
about n over log n less than n, those vile times.
I never saw he had a marred life…but then who does not?
beyond the differential geometric of his thought.
I never saw his conquests of the intuition that
left ever at the edges of his life…left ever flat.
Euclidrew Base is a poet of mathematics. “n over log n less than n,” that is, n/log n < n.
_________________________________________________________________
On the Davenport
by Cu Ebide Aswerl
He sat back on the davenport; the news was on the screen.
The talk was on Brett Kavanaugh; it came from the machine.
He stretched his legs out far and wide, o, he was quite relaxed;
the news report was tense, the pundit outraged to the max.
Apparently there were teenage shenanigans afoot;
or were there? can one tell? and was there evidence to boot?
He tried to concentrate on tolerance, compassion too;
he longed to come up to the beautiful, the pure, and true.
Was someone lying? someone standing up for their beliefs?
Had some been drinking, tossing ice, or nurturing their griefs?
He closed his eyes and sighed. Was not one innocent until
one had been proven guilty of the living he had spilled?
Cu Ebide Aswerl is a poet of leisure and inactivity. He likes nothing better than lying around and doing nothing. One of his favourite characters of literature is Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov.
