Earth Day, 2017
          by Bud “Weasel” Rice

I.
The seas are rising faster than they ever have before,
since shrewd Odysseus sailed wine-dark seas from shore to shore.
According to marine and coastal scientists, the seas
are rising at a present rate—one foot per century.
Extrapolating further to the future, they foresee
seas will rise even faster, if not exponentially.
Ben Horton, Robert Kopp, and others say the problems are
the oceans are expanding, glaciers melting, near and far,
as well as ice sheets over Greenland and Antarctica.
Poseidon, are we ready, o, for your cathartic thaw?

II.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a collection of
marine debris found in two spots. How much more can we dump?
Each swirls the ocean near Japan and North America,
the western litter vortex off the California coast.
This zone, subtropical, convergent, lies within a gyre,
like as a highway moving trash, and turning, like a tire,
accumulating plastics not biodegradable,
confetti soup with so much junk it’s not evadable.
Discovered by boat captain Charles Moore, when in a race,
in 1997, when he faced the massive waste.

III.
The exploration of the cosmos by humanity
has caused more than ten thousand bits of orbiting debris.
Collisions and explosions of the satellites once launched
make Earth in space appear as if it were a spreckled conch.
It’s thought one-hundred-million millimeter pieces soar
about our ever-orbiting, rotating, rolling orb.
Above one-thousand satellites are working presently
along with some two-thousand-plus no longer functioning.
What once was called a giant leap for all humanity
has now become a garbage dump; there is no planet B.

          

Bud “Weasel” Rice is a poet of nature.

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At the Speed of Greed
          by Brad Lee Suciew

At 19 he contacted MITS for a job;
although he lied, he was NOT there to copy NOR to rob.
At 20 he began a partnership called Micro-Soft,
attacking Altair’s hobbyists, but NOT to rip them off.
When IBM approached, he got an operating sys
he bought for 50,000, calling it his MS-DOS.
His company went on to license software services,
and MS-DOS solidified its office dominance.
When Steven Jobs showed him his graphic user interface,
he said that it was kinda neat, behind his fond embrace.

Then slithered out of Apple, took a bite out of his friend,
and turned his eden into needles, needlessly on end.
He strove to make a company to bust competitors,
and put toll gates up ev’rywhere to bill his customers.
A feudal digital behemoth making serfers cringe,
by crushing anybody’s freedom on his mammoth binge.
He made an ogre, making sure NO levies would be lost;
so money flowed right back to him NO matter what the cost.
Gargantuan and Santacruel in his greedy romp;
he gave his toys to myriads before he danced his stomp.

His company sold products that weren’t market-ready made,
and told its customers to network problems that they had.
His castle thralls installed its windows time and time again,
although there was no window 9 before a window 10,
for fear their window 8 would smear their venerated name,
and they’d be held accountable for shafting lord and dame.
So he went out to rehabilitate his image next,
disguising his forced bundles with a philanthropic text;
so NOT to worry he would help the macro-herd in need
the way he did his business practice at the speed of greed.

 

Brad Lee Suciew (pronounced “suck you”) is a poet intrigued by commerce, economics, accounting, business, and wealth. Among the people he most admires are Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Ingvar Kamprad.

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The Philosopher Learns to Fly
          by Erisbawdle Cue

While at the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg,
he studied engineering, aeronautics was his urge;
but Ludwig Wittgenstein became intrigued with logic’s path,
and went to Cambridge in pursuit of philosophic math.
He sought out Russell, then the leading European ace,
attempting to, with Whitehead, founding math on logic’s base;
and in Tractatus, he attempted picturing the World,
in facts, in truths, and in atomic sentences unfurled.
Yet he felt that aesthetic judgments of the beautiful,
or ethical beliefs on what is good were void and null.
Whereof one cannot speak, he mused, one should not say a thing,
and love and beauty, goodness, kindness, were but floundering.
No wonder the Vienna Circle took his thoughts to heart;
for that is where those science-worshipers preferred to start,
concluding there was no more for philosophers to do;
so Wittgenstein proceeded then to live his life anew.
But after living for a time, he questioned what he’d thought;
too much precision turned life’s richness into nearly naught;
he needed more than pictures to describe reality,
for him philosophy became a kind of therapy.
So ordinary language could deflate pretentious flight,
and with its rules, which he conceived were neither wrong nor right,
as long as life continued on, new questions could be spun,
games could be played, tools could be used, one could fly in the sun.

 

Erisbawdle Cue is a poet of philosophy. He has been influenced by philosophers from Plato to Peirce, from Aristotle to Augustine, and Aquinas to Ayer.

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In Mardan, Pakistan
          by Waseel Budecir
          “Hide history and hate Hindus. This is what we are taught in schools.
              —Marshal Khan

In Mardan, Pakistan, a mob beat Marshal Khan to death;
he was a journalism student at the college there.
Inquisitive and daring, he complained about his land,
its government, intolerance; and so he took a stand.
Last month, Prime Minister Sharif required “blasphemy”
be banned on social media, crushed im-med-i-ate-ly.
Defending rights for women, blacks, and gays, Khan went too far.
Ten students stripped him of his clothes, cried ‘Allahu Akbar’,
and then proceeded beating him until his skull caved in—
so luckily they saved their pure faith from the likes of him.

 

Waseel Budecir is a poet of South Central Asia.

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A ’50s Digression
          by Educable Wires

I heard him singing, long, long ago—
o, Ritchie Valens, singing so slow;
and his heart skipped a beat in his sweet melody;
and I thought when he died that his feel-ing was re-al.

It was a ’50s progression, I hear—
It was so simple, and soothing, and clear;
but it went far away, like the plane on that day,
when his music was gone, and his song went away.

 

Educable Wires is a certified moron and a bit of a live wire; hence some people like his work.