2 Poems:

Mitla

Cortes’ nightmare and the Moorish dome 

stained cochineal: drunken duende-like 

fallen fruit, underworld gatekeepers

a church alongside a site named Mitla;

I came to see what Spain brought the New World

when it brought the pomegranate and the horse.

I came to explore its primacy

its flourish and fragrant past. Looking

upon a pomegranate beneath its tree

I saw a drunken man passed out at my feet

who muttered hola! as if I were a portent

I made my way around him, as if he were  

a portent, and walked past him onto that 

not too busy street on that July day

which was warmth mingled with dry breeze.

I’d crossed along a cactus fence

and cinder huts and loom filled halls

and a pomegranate tree, my

rucksack and lonely planet guide,

to ticket taker and temple ruins

to a site Zapotecs call place of death

where walls spread lines in geometric 

intricacy a variegate frieze

interlocking patterns of hewn stone

underworld duende-like.

Passed on empty streets a drunken man.

Town on blocks of tapestry wove 

Arabesque.  Sunlight willing it to speak.  

Abalone

It sits like an elephant’s ear

eavesdrops on everything my roll-top says

feels like the backside of a Grey Whale

embossed inside a batter of magic

its inner-sheen like oil-slicked 

bay-water that laps seawall stone.

It sits on my desk to remind me

an emblem of life.  

Crazy  saltwater sea-shell holding sweet grass– 

grey Mono sage– a planetary ridge 

the mottled care of rock-strewn ages.

Abalone button, abalone earring, 

trinket coin that travelled 

from Puget Sound to Eire Lake, 

down the Huron trail, up that Great Divide, 

carried by Aboriginal-Americans 

on Missouri River trade routes 

connecting culture: Crow, Shoshone, 

Assiniboine, Plains Apache, Lakota Sioux, 

Arapaho and Pawnee.

Abalone.  The ear shell, sea ear, muttonfish,

mutton-shell, ormen, sea snail.  

All of the mollusk family

an image of androgyny.

It’s iridescent inside surface 

bears a mantle cleft

impresses a groove, as in the red abalone, 

where a row of respiratory apertures for venting water 

also release egg and sperm.

Two poems, both published:

 

My Thoughts on the Vaccinated, and some comments on Books.

The other night at dinner a French-Canadian couple celebrating their 47th wedding anniversary informed me that they had each taken both shots of the vaccine. We had introduced ourselves and were chatting. I found the man to be a bore. He bragged about his discipline during the ‘pandemic’: “I went six months without playing golf!” His wife was borderline self-righteous. At one point, apropos of I have no idea what, she asked (directly to my face): “you aren’t one of those Trump supporters are you?”  

Alex's Pasta Bar, Ajijic

The more people pretend they are civilized the more the cracks begin to show. Trump is a symptom of this very thing. But it only occurred to me later that these two had bought into the Covid hysteria hook line and sinker and believe themselves to be superior to people (like the ones who voted Trump) who do not. Is that not a boring and unimaginative way to perceive reality? 

These types of conversations all feel about the same: we locate each other geographically, sexually, politically; we share relationship, work and or pension status; and we share our views on local culture and Mexican politics. Inevitably Trump comes up and sometimes, though I try hard to skirt the issue (mainly because it should never have been an issue to begin with), we discuss Covid-19. 

I have read a lot of stuff online and the more I read the more I am convinced that fear and panic caused a lot of the excess deaths last year. People placed on ventilators were also given fentanyl. The percent in NYC placed on ventilators who died? 90% is a conservative estimate. Remember how many people all around the planet were placed on ventilators in March and April of last year? Experts hold lockdowns responsible for one third of excess deaths (deaths not related to a respiratory virus...those that would not have happened had society remained open). 94% of Covid deaths had an average of 2.3 comorbidities. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say the Government's response, at least in California, has made matters worse.

The people who needed protection: those over sixty or seventy, and those with compromised immune systems, were hung out to dry. While young professionals in their thirties and forties stayed home working online and ordering their groceries delivered, my local CVS Pharmacy kept at least two employees over seventy on staff and these two worked throughout the year, interacting with the public. I won't get into the crime of keeping children (who are at greater risk from influenza than Covid) at home.  Priorities, at least where I live, were ass-backwards. It makes me think there has been an agenda afoot that has something to do with maneuvering life online. Why else would elementary school children be forced to sit in front of a screen for twelve months?

A brief comment about the mRNA vaccines: The vaccines could not legally have received Emergency Use Authorization if a treatment existed for the virus. But, we have known for over a year that both hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin work in treating the virus. Fauci nixed those treatments. We also know that, as of May 18, "mRNA vaccines now account for more side effect reports to VAERS since December than EVERY OTHER VACCINE COMBINED in the last year" (Alex Berenson). 1 in 6000 men aged sixteen to thirty vaccinated in Israel have experienced myocarditis. Because of potential blood clots the vaccinated may not donate blood plasma. Airlines have even discussed banning the recently vaccinated from flying (for fear of deep vein thrombosis).

I think middle-class folk, like the couple next to me at dinner the other night—they were mostly polite and excited to talk—wear their masks and advertise the fact that they have taken the vaccine primarily as a means to assuage their guilt at not needing to get out of the comfort of their home to work, or deal with raising an income, during such trying times. 

While the poor suffer and as more and more work goes online or automates, we have groomed children for the restrictions on human liberty in the face of viruses, climate change and food shortages that will proliferate in the future; it will be those who can live comfortably working online or collecting a pension who will be in charge of keeping up the image that all the economic and cultural destruction wrought by the likes of Anthony Fauci (cut from the same cloth as Trump) necessitates such (cult like) behavior—Covidians behave the way they do out of guilt. 

Meanwhile, the human community seems threadbare. Things are fraying at the edges and threatening to fall apart; we are ready to break off into minor cults and warring tribes. I consider myself politically homeless. What on earth am I missing? It can feel so lonely at times. 

I began reading, for the first time, Peter Duesberg’s Inventing the AIDS Virus earlier this afternoon. It is such a dangerous book it sells for almost $700 at amazon.com. In other words, it is not in print and therefore not easy to find and those copies that exist sell for a high price. (I am reading it as a PDF, online).  

Duesberg’s research led him to conclude that the virus HIV has no connection to AIDS. I tend to find his research compelling. As in, hard to dispute. Instead of countering his claims, he has been entirely censored by the academic community. The same thing happened to David Irving, the one-time-heralded-historian of 20th century Germany who could not find evidence that Auschwitz was used primarily as an extermination camp and made the (absurd) claim that because Hitler is not on record as ordering what became known as the final solution to the Jewish question (i.e. transporting Jews to die or be killed in concentration camps) it should not be assumed he knew what happened. Irving is a Hitler apologist. What if, Irving hypothesizes, Churchill was to blame for WWII? Churchill, after all, was a racist and an anti-Semite. Churchill sought adoration, celebrity, and attention throughout the war. He was an all-day drinker and a Machiavellian grandstander. 

I am reading another book, which I am nearly finished with, called Fatherland, by Robert Harris, a writer of historical thrillers who Irving calls a friend and who calls Roman Polanski a friend (Harris has called David Irving a dangerous writer, and it is fact that Harris based his thriller, Pompeii, on Polanski’s “Chinatown.” Harris claims Irving gave him the idea for Fatherland.)

Fatherland imagines a victorious Germany in the year 1964. Germany has won WWII, the British Royal family—and even Winston Churchill—are in exile in Canada. Joseph Kennedy is President of the United States. Hitler is seventy-five. And the Ural Mountains (in Russia) are the location of ongoing guerrilla warfare between Russia and Germany. Ufa, near Siberia, is the capitol of Russia. I do not think Harris mentions Stalin.

Germany has taken a heavy beating fighting Russia. Berlin, where the story takes place, is a bit like East Germany before the fall of Communism except even worse because Nazi SS patrol the city and everyone lives in fear of being sent off to serve in the fight against the Russians. It is sort of an ingenious book, the crux of which relates to hidden evidence of "the Final Solution."

In Fatherland, German leadership has kept a lid on what happened in the concentration camps during the war and thirteen of fourteen high level officials in-the-know have been assassinated. The remaining one possesses documentation and wants to use it in exchange for his escape from the country. Since no one in Germany knows the truth—people have been told Jews were resettled in Eastern Europe—the discovery of “the final solution to the Jewish question in Europe” makes the novel one about a man (the investigator Xavier March) coming to a level of awareness that greatly outpaces his previous intuition. Truth is worse than fiction. 

Maybe, and this is my hope, someday my niece Elsa will read the truth about the Covid debacle. And hopefully my daughter will too. They need access to the truth. They need to be strong enough to question the lies. To stand for truth and justice. Fear is a flimsy way to mitigate human behavior. I write this for their generation.