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September 2, 2016
Launching a poem
By Gary Lindorff
Here is a poem that will not blow up on launch. And, the aliens are among us; they are the left brain.
::::::::
Some of the smartest people in the world believe
there are aliens among us who are intent
on colonizing the planet, and they aren't far from wrong.
Some of the smartest people in the world
Are spending every waking moment
doing things that their over-heated brains tell them to do
for the benefit of no one in particular.
Some of the smartest people in the world
Are spending $100,000,000 on rockets and satellites
and (whoops) blowing them up on the launch-pad.
I can't make a satellite, much less a rocket
to get my would-be satellite into orbit
But I can use this computer
(invented by a team of lackeys of the smartest people in the world)
to write and launch this poem into the ether
to argue that this (writing poems)
Is a better use of time
than creating expensive satellites that blow up on launch-pads.
At least I'm not a flesh and blood robot-servant
of a super intelligence,
Called the left brain, that is, in fact,
the "alien" being that calls all the shots
in the filming of this class-B movie we are all subsidizing . . .
And, if those smartest people in the world have their way,
That alien power will colonize the planet.
So, in a token effort to stop them in their tracks
I am launching this poem into a very low orbit,
and it will not blow up, that I promise.
Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.
He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.