The advent of the Internet in general, and tools like Google search in particular, heralded an age in which instant access to all the world’s knowledge would enhance discourse, remove the traditional gatekeepers to information, and lead to greater human flourishing.
Somewhere over Tulsa the pilot warns
we’re passing through a storm. Experienced
in flight, trusting the engineers who designed
and built this plane, we pop headphones back
in our ears, turn to our movies and TV…
The alarm goes off at 4. I will myself to my
feet, not for a grand mission, but to catch
a flight. In the predawn darkness, driving the
101 to the 405, I recite Clifton, Keats, & Limón
In Guangdon Province a young father rises early
for work at Doubleeagle Industry Limited, where
he operates the plastic-injection molding machine.
It is rote, if loud and dangerous work…
I was seventeen when I read Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen
a couple pages at a time, putting down the book to observe
sunset drape itself over my mind, falling asleep thinking
of not thinking, hearing a flock of birds and imagining myself
The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act created unprecedented opportunities to reduce energy bills, improve air quality, and create good-paying jobs.
Leaves gather like un- sold goods. Need help, asks the rake. Just browsing, I say.
Both the atheist and the believer have it wrong.
We are not mere bodies, nor do we have souls.
Heaven would be a room strewn with books
and nary an errand to distract from reading;
“Children found ‘butchered’ in Israeli kibbutz…” – CNN
I dream a rocket’s aftermath smells of cracked pepper,
that it sprays not blood and shrapnel but mint leaves,
ice clinking in delicate hand-blown glass; that its
thunder is a hundred-thousand bumblebees come to
pollinate a black-and-white world, devoid of flowers…
Don’t shoot the rats pillaging dumpsters,
or the man with rat-like eyes and rumpled
suit, who orders they be set ablaze…