Author: luke

Born in Iowa City a few days after John Kennedy was shot and killed. Grew up in Minneapolis, on Lake Calhoun. Southwest High. University of MN. Lived in a two-room cabin in the woods on Lake Superior. Cabin on South Long Lake. There's a lake theme developing here.

04_22_12 – today

Jesus, The Buddha and Muhammad

Jesus, The Buddha and Muhammad all had brown skin.
Brown skin and brown eyes. Probably.
Jesus, The Buddha and Muhammad all had brown skin
and brown eyes – or, at least, we surmise.

Einstein and Psychology

You can’t see what you’ve done,
you can never see where you’ve been,
because you’d have to catch up to,
and then pass,
yourself
and look back.

I’m generally not one to be all political, but…

This really concerns me.

If Richard Lugar and I had a beer we could probably find a few things we agree on and a few we don’t. But he’s a rational, intelligent man. A very good man as far as I can tell. The fact that the Republican party – as it stands today – would toss a man like that really worries me. There’s no center to the party. It’s just angry folks unskilled in governing and especially the give and take of politics. They get the take, but have no idea of the give. Listen to this:

“’Richard Mourdock’s victory truly sends a message to the liberals in the Republican Party: voters are rejecting the policies that led to record debt and diminished economic freedom, and they will continue to be rejected in elections throughout America,’ said Chris Chocola, a former Indiana congressman who is now president of the Club for Growth.”

“The liberals in the Republican Party”? This guy’s got creeping paranoia all over his intellectual lawn. Rational Republicans are at a crossroads. Do they allow the tea party to drag them into that world or do they wrest it from them (can they wrest it from them?) and bring back the GOP that once – while had the disagreement of some liberals, at least garnered some respect for their abilities and willingness to compromise to make this country a better place. As soon as the party becomes more important than the country – which is the direction the Republicans have been charging in for a few years – the country is screwed. Welcome to screwed.

Mr. Lugar, your party, apparently, is over.

Dinner at the DeLillo’s

“Please pass the ketchup.”
“Please pass the ketchup.”
“The ketchup.”
“Catsup. Cat soup.”
“Feline sopa de plasticine.”
“Midwestern salsa picante.”
“Mediocre mastication ameliorator.”
“The soft blop of the hardy tomato.”
“The spurt. The splooge.”
“A condimental climax.”
“Yes. Yes. Yes!”
“Yes.”
“Pass the fucking ketchup.”
“Okay.”

Electric Strings

A balloon is mostly empty space
but then again so am I
gravitating toward the ground
yet she can float up to the sky.
I guess it’s her propensity,
and relative density
that leaves me here on terra firma.

But terra, too, is hardly firma.
The space between the particles
is vast as planets ’round the sun,
the distance of their orbitals;
and it’s not hard, it’s hardly there
just tiny specks, to say, is fair:
like grains of sand spread far apart
that hold up ox and man and cart.

Now let’s dig deeper, to the protons,
electrons, quarks and, now it’s, jeepers!
Electric strings that make us all,
harmonized, lest we fall
through the earth, like unballoons
thank God he plays the proper tunes.
Some dissonance, oh, lord, that harp!
We’re gonna die, He’s playing sharp!”

Imagine that. Imagine God.
We’re good at that. We wink and nod.
But others like to look much deeper
find their truths, each one a keeper.
String them together to fashion a rug
that holds us up so we can shrug,
ignore the beauty beneath our feet
and gasp at heaven’s phantasmal feat.