xperimentals

What's Your Number L. Edgar Otto 02-10-10

Our music together is not perfect
yet it is sweet, as long as our lyrics
Are taken lightly, the tones not too high or deep
words their own haunting mirror ghosts

This seems how it must be as we damper
pluck each others strings at places dissonant
So hard to learn to play the rhythm chords
between the bass and shrill, Love's middle way

Love is as much a cast of dice and divining cards
as focused measure made more real by what we ignore
Somewhere between the workhorse and the unicorns
we live the mystery that Love's numbers match the world

The jukebox in the clubs and honky tonk's move our feet
I miss her like a crackling song, AM radio, highway in the wind

* * *

THE PERSISTENCE OF VISION L. Edgar Otto 03-28-10

My freedom is your freedom
your freedom is not my slavery
My slavery is not your freedom
your slavery is my slavery

How persistent is our being
universal our struggle unto vision
The hour dealt anew, poker faced our God in all beginnings
half full or empty spring surrounds your heart
Into which I cannot see directly light and passion
save if I recall my own first awakenings and
Yet this too my struggle to see beyond my own heartbeats

I to you, also part vanished shell of shadows
our expectations frozen to melt too soon, short or long our time
May all your chocolate bunnies be not hollow, my child of Earth

* * *

Your calling is not my calling
my calling is not your failure
Your failure is not my calling
my failure is your failure

The spinning sea of many, lukewarm or as cultures clash
reduced to one flesh exercised unto God's face of nothingness
To enter the distant higher Kingdom, Heaven brought to Earth..
that we be born again, survive the baby killers

History's myths open or closed, the Mover sinks into sleep
or stumbles in stampede, relives one of His pillars
Crave you the raven safe in the arms of abandoned hope
on what branching tree of life hangs the endless rope?

The hares run by the hounds for fun and for the fox his fur
the nests of colored eggs their meadow children we infer.

* * * Conni Who Passed Through
by L. Edgar Otto on Saturday, May 22, 2010 at 3:42pm
Still they disagree what set you off
on your journey in innocence and frail mortality

You were old enough to make a choice but
young enough to have no voice

When you freaked out upon the morning light

Their twenty-one shot salute and your fake ID
seemed so sweet until he left you at my feet and

You cried on my shoulder, wondered why I did not drink of you
asked why I was not like the other guy's

When you gave it up to dreaming without a fight

Not that your lips weren't sweet and mine burned
But I called your daddy, you said not to but kissed my cheek

Later thanking me miss pass through my life, street actress
hippie, said keep my pet let won't let me have it

So I carried it to your daddy's car said
understand as he shook my hand, things will
go easier for you both if you let her take the puppy

When you woke up and found my morning's light
cried on my shoulder, forgot the myth of him and all your night

If we get lucky long enough and hurting learn not to hurt
yet all said and done it does not have to be that way

We each others cradle song made it through whistles in the dark to flirt
I hope it was enough one passed by your way awhile who loved you.

* * *
UMBRA
by L. Edgar Otto on Saturday, June 5, 2010 at 11:17am
Umbra


There are those who cannot see shadows
then there is he who confuse His shadow with the God and
God's shadow with his own

You, neither the water or the wave, drink of neither
the waters nor the waves yet you dance together dancing alone

Our shadows bundle in our dreams as we lovers
embrace, explore our weightless togetherness

Cling to eye tricks of firefly trail at night, the water's wake or
your life's skipping stone's circles, seed dust in the clouds

On these you make the first poetry made for God's hymns
to rhyme Him with the world so feel Him

You are my moon singing silently with your whisper drums of starlight
you do not eclipse Him, half shadow and half light, as you move further away

Your shadow reflecting shadows as you gaze into your dark and
empty mirror waging cream and wrinkles, scrying our earthly vanities

What can it mean to me if I cannot be a part of you or
your beauty to the world receptive to desires?

Our heartbeats enduring only fall apart within us and
between us in the shadows

My Godhood for a Little While L. Edgar Otto 06-15-10
by L. Edgar Otto on Tuesday, June 15, 2010 at 11:27am


We are victims of the weather more than
we are victims of each other in the long run
We herdsmen of flirtations to other species toward
the unity of life, share food with the wild young

The disc, equatorial clock of the sun in cycles churn the
ball of flame and frame within its snakeskin self and
Our stay here in the miracle as fleeting as new lovers
but just as precious in its reign and days

Is there time enough to reach for the stars that our
ashes contain our memory not just meaningless fires?
Or will we dwell in the mystery resolved to them,
false prophets and prophesy's and planets war?

Your granite marker, Mom and Dad, falling, sinking, fading to deeper sea
Only I, no god but from the fisher folk arise, recall

* * *Of Water and the Soul
by L. Edgar Otto on Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 8:56am
Of Water and the Soul by L. Edgar Otto

You who have defined yourself by work
have worked to define yourself

The nomad is at home in the desert sea
anywhere the Ley lines for his soul

He walks between minarets, Plato's oasis
raining dust and water down the babbling zigarettes

Although the book is sealed the mortals
have to make pilgrimage, climb the spiral

The racing camels have to hide themselves
against donkey herders under shrouds of cloth

For the first disembodied dream seeks the equator
to relieve cascading garden water on Pharoah's brain

Science cannot flourish in the next incarnation of Heaven
if our concrete deserts dry and fixed are bound by sands

* * *

After floods the moshies awaken damp seven year petulance
past the droughts ticks spread their West Nile fevers

The window to our soul only in spring and fall its basket of reeds
by the river lovers kissing grapes need only stars to shield them

Do not meditate upon yet face your depths of evils for only in
gentle rain, its spring and fall, can we learn we are immortal

In your heart you know it is not I who tell you this
but the broken gods who madden us will hold it against us.

* * * Making Sense of My Pattern Image Counting Crows
by L. Edgar Otto on Saturday, July 3, 2010 at 9:56am
For awhile when you were little
your would avoid your image in the mirror

We wrestle with our twin in two places at once
while everything not us is empty other

Torn away from the suckling womb not fills
with loss in both the child and mother

I gazed at my reflection in the windowpane at night
startled so to scream a boy my age looking back at me

Making faces not my own of how I looked reversed
to myself my smiles and brow, grimaces seen from the world

I brought her rag doll flowers to appease her ghost
of evil that lurked behind her clown face lipstick

She called me pathetic in worship of her ravens
sent them to pluck my scarecrow straw for her nest

* * *God's Creation Undefiled
by L. Edgar Otto on Thursday, July 8, 2010 at 12:06pm

God's Creation Undefiled L. Edgar Otto

Let us sing again as did he poets of Araby of old of the zodiacal light

A chorus to the rising waxing neap of dawn, and isle at zenith,
then the ebbing waning falling twilight

Perhaps a game of chess, symbolic generals with covered faces,
war like love not cloaked when lovers breast to breast embrace

Gentle our touch in blindness, dry well nadirs to be filled
with cometary rain and desert light reflected on the smokey
ocean's clouds that guides us through the work of climbing up

We pilgrims toward and down from the vaporous dunes and
clotting blood of scripture thirst, high mountains

Only to sing atop and no further at eclipse or think to drink of and
crave our lover's lips, carefree songbirds in youth or dotage fading
one same sky song standing on the empty quarter without water
oil or dust

Ten thousand years no guarantee- but not to rust, survive, leave our mark
footprints on plots of sand until time and space unmeasured finds
Love again and the birth in evening of the awakening stars...

Tubing On the River
by L. Edgar Otto on Friday, July 16, 2010 at 12:26pm

Tubing On the River L. Edgar Otto July 16, 2010

Foggy whirlwind devils dance and spin
over the river's mirror and reflected within

Their depth and space dragging directed Dervish
soul that I change directions with my will

Or just that I change my mind's perceptions?
flip the vertex color, infinity the span?

All along the mayflies and dust motes,
fallen leaves and spent egg cases

Seem to spin both ways with the river's flow
upstream as well as downstream seeking levels divine

The further back in time flow to origins
the universe shrinks and its age grows, eternal its measure

Here now I float with the river its glass bottom with
my prying eyes on an inner tube and all is timeless

My brain is full of entanglement on a staircase
yet this too even save in some bubble I doubt as real

Where would I store the ice and rainbows of some
grander design from my dreams to build

Measure my soul against the aether wind of the river's water
even if my dust's nature is still lest than my artful hands?

* * *
In the gray we also find the black squirrels.

Superconduction Supercollider
by L. Edgar Otto on Friday, July 23, 2010 at 12:56pm

Superconduction Supercollider (For Your Love, Pedestrian Hitchhiker)
L. Edgar Otto July 22 2010


What was bound in Heaven let no man break
Drawn apart in dreams colliding genders
By doing nothing win the fight, forsake
Our hearts taking the jolts of fender benders
Survive the lean while Love's heat fat renders
As our chain mail takes dints and scars of stars
Trapped in fate to lesser love surrenders
Comfort laughing at other's bumper cars
Immune to pain ourselve's electric fires
At the cross road each with right of way turns
Until our shells we mar without spar tires
Sideswiped that all must fall, everyone burns
I like your chipmunk teeth and parrot beak
Love walks, rides doomed, of it God does not speak.


You Will Be There When You've Been There
by L. Edgar Otto on Wednesday, July 28, 2010 at 1:30pm
You Will Be There When You've Been There
L. Edgar Otto Jul.28, 2010


One day you will miss the sea
your blood drawn and settled down
into your foothold space in crystal city

Only in your dreams will your longings
dwell two places at once, your heart
transparent in its nakedness

As light goes deep into blue forgetfulness
far from the city's colors, your center and
all connections to others and long life

Until in the violet death you make your own light
answering the decaying dusty scud of rain
warnings to be seen, your ghostly magic inferred

That all opaque in secrets, isolation the greater threat
than the weathered vulnerability of our souls.

* * *
One Way Mirror
by L. Edgar Otto on Thursday, July 29, 2010 at 12:21pm
One Way Mirror
L. Edgar Otto July 29, 2010

My sky is clear as I touch Antares
my pinhole eyes compass dividers
that sees the lesser and longer motion
of the moon, feels earth in spin

My mood and poem interrupted
by the jet dark haired girl in the distant
surrounded by her cloud of smoke
I must check out her velvet sheen of darkness

She sees through and past me
her sky the grayness of the moors
her moral law within, her eyes disguised
doubtful of love yet churns the dewpoints

We know the hour's past for forgiving blemishes
we draw the blinds save for a last star at night

* * *

I knowing you once close in dreams
but you cannot know that, I but a stranger
in fantasy our soul's encounter breaks
doubts can only rob us of our healthful sleep

You of the apple when its ripe tease me
give me only shadows knowing I see them
as you lift your thin arms to wash your breasts
I cannot bite so green and bitter to my belly

I am the sun and source of clarity and light
you in your spin give sparks, store the songs
of meadow larks and shun the cacophony of crows
our bedbugs of time grow past our wars of pestilence

How could you know I was the one when our shared love
in each one way its melting fun house mirror?

* * *

This is where we were before, where we were expelled or
came in to some point, cycle in the play
when the world has changed, not renewed our love
as our bodies betray us, empty your hourglass form

I do not know if you got the message yet you stood there
so long by the screen and soft light as I
opened and closed frantically against the line wind storm,
you before the screen hearing the sirens

The I heart you cut out from a cereal box that only
the brightness stands out, sheet lightning but it was
not thunder to give you but your blue glow silvered glass
as I cannot just leave in anger, you alone

I passed this way who loved you or said he did
All you would let me give you in your naked singularity

* * * Flower Words
by L. Edgar Otto on Monday, August 2, 2010 at 3:45pm
Flower Words L. Edgar Otto July 31, 2010

Let us distill our flower words
into the perfume of poetry

Our two faces and four arms once one
odorless, beyond gender, our emptied hearts

As the moon or sun, masculine the
equatorial or polar guides for the hunt

The perfume of spirituality, of love and war
messages between women and man's esprit de corps

Spinning good and evil declared by perceptions
nouns and verbs, right or left our brains and hands

Before love and war our meaning deep goes speechless
as we who once walked upright fall to our knees

Like dark scratches on the rainbow of the sun
color spaces weave shadow knots and God's the ultimate shadow.

* * *
My Bare Charge and Her Naked Singularity
by L. Edgar Otto on Monday, August 2, 2010 at 3:52pm
My Bare Charge and Her Naked Singularity

We played opossum as much as peek'a'boo
a thousand days of love's end closer now
Than far away and I still don't know your name

Only the vaguest hints show through the
aurora of your shower curtains and so
Close your double slit experiments now quantum clouds

That hid your perfect hourglass of ever distant
frozen time without stretch marks your
Fading virginity and I still don't know if you dance for me

Can it be me? My generation forever young that
cannot grow old gracefully? My mind awash in ads for
Diabetes, health and plot insurance, catheters and wheel chairs

How you still cling hot in flashes ritual faith in your fading fertility
I forgot you yesterday awhile, Katie alone, sundress and baby, hugs
When she bade me kiss her Virgin's ring, things meant for the young

* * * I am not Colorblind to Your Layers of True Colors
by L. Edgar Otto on Tuesday, August 3, 2010 at 8:11am
I am not Colorblind to Your Layers of True Colors L. Edgar Otto
Aug.3,2010

Your introverted soul completes its cycles and
my empty space spins towards your letting light

Your cave and sanctuary may be full of shadows
but your shadows are full of colors wanting to be seen

Only I in your aether wind can see the errupting
sunspot and parting curtains of your braids of plasma

The Belt of Venus peeks through your shear blue gown
mountains tied to earth's times of twilight, of sunrise

Not the Winnie-the-Pooh sweat shirt and baggy pants
in innocence so still your half-heart exercise to the screen

You linger longer than usual reaching high to make your morning
coffee, bend down for milk, perfect triangulations...

* * * Cosmic Latte
by L. Edgar Otto on Tuesday, August 3, 2010 at 10:19am
Cosmic Latte L. Edgar Otto Aug. 3, 2010

I'm sitting by the river on a muggy day
where I wrote so many of my lost poems
My second time fallen through the snakes
Phoenix again to climb the ladders
in the street, the morning dew heavy for my eyes
Inky running water colors

I am like the young playwright, Shakespeare
in a parallel universe living off the original poet
To solve a glitch in a paradox of traveling time
I would feel but a shadow of those poems
Plagiarizing myself if I could recall them
but even then the manuscript is lost to the cosmic latte

I recall reading them out loud to the morning's wildlife
Drops of tears on paper, gentle rain under the cottonwood

* * * Contour Calculus of Barbed Wire
by L. Edgar Otto on Wednesday, August 4, 2010 at 1:14pm

Contour Calculus of Barbed Wire

* * *

She did not talk about much save something from the movies for a half hour as if she could not see me following her moves aimed toward me... Some things are too bright to see clearly such as the full moon. But if the slow were not good lovers, wiser than their script of lives in the art of it, would the species still be here if our IQ's could not fall fifty points beneath the sheets? Hey, you who long for the meat market and forget its frustrations and wounds and false promises, and you who dwell in the ant farm and seek fish plenty in the sea follow the water like sheep and cattle and you horse thieves of our Cadillac Escalades it is only metal gleaned by this era of organized bacteria for mineral rights for those to come in veins of iron and rusty auto part yards.

* * *

Of course there are no fences really yet there are locations, places- and if we can only see two sides and a half by our eyes and brains bilateral and symmetric- or can see but one of the multiplicity of three dimensions at a time- then the next step is to see dimensions eleven and beyond, aware of them, moving freely through them at least in our mind's eye.

Yet, something there somewhere at its maximum motion so it seems still, is still a motion. I see space between these places and levels of dimension, these bar triangles over the free range of the light cone of peak dots. I can touch her at a distance. I can feel the almost metallic shape of my bones as if the whole world of tangible things is felt as if an x-ray eyes- a solid world hidden somewhere between the hot dust and stones and cacti and the ghosts and memories in the granite mountains and on the call we echo to the free wolves and coyotes that we were once free and then they branded us as if they the Gods and gravity itself rather than those who build the toll bridges of gravity, who charge what the market can bare until those who cannot bare the market fall on harder times.

* * * The Sultan and Philosopher Exchanging Bits of Poetry
by L. Edgar Otto on Thursday, August 5, 2010 at 3:29pm


Dedicated to Sultan Ratrout who for the exchange of poetry I joined facebook...

* * *

The Sultan and Philosopher Exchanging Bits of Poetry Aug. 5, 2010

Let us go down by the shore of the Great Sea
be those children again still close to pure poetry
Collect shells, marvel at the relentless rhythm, waves and tide
hide under the sand like ghost crabs
Splash cool water on each other, laugh in water play
I will not scold you, admonish with switches of drift wood
Mimicking the laws our parents in their wilderness
gave for our promised lands in war between gods
In which they only half believed

Trade and make our own truths between each other
as the cadmium orange sun sets in their dire straits
A blob of pigment on canvass, lost first art forgotten once
its perfect sphere haunting yet grown distant in would be artists
That we recall again before the wounds and needful discipline
the dream you were, unique and ever full while life
Weaving baskets ever emptying, consuming its poetic waters
all things past yet so ever new save your promise I've known forever

For we free to wonder and wander again what took
so long and strayed so far that we reach the mountain
Caught between our own parting of the Red Sea
into the gulfs of Aqaba and Suez...

When Dreams Still Act Lost in Fact
by L. Edgar Otto on Friday, August 6, 2010 at 8:19am

When Dreams Still Act Lost in Fact L. Edgar Otto August 6, 2010

You are too close to the face of the deep
to see those tears the prophets weep

On the checky and cloudy shores so worn
still diffuse din our sin rests its warning foghorn

So cannot tell what's sea or strand once one
the dendrite coral clings to needle fish, universal laws to bond

There are levels, steps skipping stones, our flaws
Old School's short dog years, our walks, we miss as if no falls

Do not talk about our guilty love as if our child
nor ask if we ourselves survive the infinite in some mythic wild

Her flower goes to seed as my vector calms her mood
she between my night, my worship before her holy rood

Love needs no boundaries, no magic for its guide
though in fear you sleep alone, I am by your side

* * * Lillybeth
by L. Edgar Otto on Monday, August 16, 2010 at 11:05am

Lillybeth



Aug.14,2010 L. Edgar Otto



Lillybeth the sun flowers follow you

how bright the stars that meet once blue



The ladybirds guard the wedding feast

the Little Bear there for the sacred words



The river's view though full its flood not crested

the day broke gentle August for Midwest



From the teary eyed sky of salt and endless sea

one Brook sparkled most beautiful to deities



Lucky Bill beheld her labour labeled dress made by

twinkling freckled divas, stars at night from East to West



The heart's the midwife Love cannot resist

the two together is all they need of catalyst



Love's dream this time around we bow down to vow

and bless, wish them well that they will find the best



Yours as my whole world began with such a kiss, Little Miss



* * *Somewhere in the World the Mormons Still Tame the Purple Sage
by L. Edgar Otto on Monday, August 30, 2010 at 2:02pm

Somewhere in the World the Mormons Still Tame the Purple Sage L. Edgar Otto Aug. 30, 2010



To be in the world at the backbone of your fate

at once with the actuality, steps and cautious choices

Seeing the essential moves ahead and the near misteps behind

how can I describe for you this on the surface cascade?



Time then becomes a clockwork where to walk the

same city streets anew one feels the same state of mind

Timeless for all it matters which year or season repeated

so in the main, equal to the world your mood

The imaginary ticks and tocks commensurate a prison without resistence



I who perceive through a cat's whisker spin effortlessly

a ship in peaceful seas or at the mercy of the wind

I am too far behind to build a power supply for the lawless plains

no horse to walk and trot, gallop and foam a day's hundred miles


Saturday, September 11, 2010 RoundupCategory: News and PoliticsRound Up (Inspired by Zane Gray's Under the Stars of the Western Sky and some serious thinking on the current issues of 911)


by L. Edgar Otto (Comments on yahoo.mail are all over the spectrum of angers and superstition, a day like today might be better left for time outs and burying our heads in the sand- that or try to do something of civilized if not meaningful ceremony for our human condition.)





God, if we choose to see, has never left me



not at my dancing core and two-faced spin



Nor I Him, ultimately, two-faced time, births and deaths



I've never left Him, followed the fallen others.






They who do not know what they believe save theirs



forgiven guilt, by blood appease Adam's half face sacrifice



I, creature of the Savannah, prairie - not some garden



unobtainable but fleeting joys between storms and round ups






For though the prophesy is sealed and no new prophets yet arisen



among the children of the Christ, the gates of Hell



Open and close like clockwork wound, unwound, and broken



No Promised Land, no bloody spurs and studs ran to the ground






Nature abhors mavericks and messiahs, praises horns of indifferent bulls



protecting mothers - the bawling and bleating come with brands, wild the frontiers






* * *






The battle lost, more causalities from the rout, demoralized the stragglers



Calves lassoed with broken legs left forgotten for the wolves and vultures






* * *



So tall the towering horns, bravado, propagana, burning double first crosses



but what profit her charging nursing virgin mother's horns to build



Near another meaningless ground zero, new lands and people shout chosen



if vanished into perpetual mourn the fruits of her child bearing?






* * *He Rattles but No Snake Can Leap at Us
by L. Edgar Otto on Tuesday, October 5, 2010 at 2:10pm

He Rattles but No Snake Can Leap at Us L. Edgar Otto Oct. 5, 2010



What awaits us watching from not looked for webs

we explain as Evil, the Snake or spider entraps us without escape

Sucking slowly out our juices, mummified our imago for blood?



The mouths of wormholes in our minds, our ships of state

a tangled topology of small and great decisions lost

In the sticky maze, out of time for exits or the center



Here I hold and find a sacred codex and awhile in the

cul-de-sac and doldrums I thrill for its own sake and not

Promises of happier life to pursue, every line and word know true



Or upon a chance turn, doubt even the prophets and Creator

a hoax and plot, Christ lost submitting to the destiny of hell

Tainting our grounding by who we were then, that too now past



Until closer to God we see how small our vision, how little the comfort

As web-less desert spiders jump, attack, our joyful evidence set in prophesy

Forgotten Acorns Buried
by L. Edgar Otto on Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 11:10am

Forgotten Acorns Buried Squirreled Away

for Winter Made the Boundless Forest L. Edgar Otto



Why do we not expect surprise

when if we think about it

the universe itself is the first great surprise?



In subatomic depths Dirac's caveat

for what he could not speak, only in the

outer clouds no longitudinal waves in nature



Yet in the solid ground and churning core of IO

tidal warmed, the transverse surf self-same

as we ogle the De Broglie particle boogie



Doubt the Boogie Man as long as we drink the music

certain of finality the hearse, carriage, and jazz band

we should rather expect the norm new states unforeseen



Indescribable without magic spoken or unspoken tactics at some turn

One name or ninety-nine lost with the ash, the universe our urn



* * * Playing the Guitar with Broken Strings
by L. Edgar Otto on Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 1:11pm

Playing the Guitar with Broken Strings Oct.6/7,'10 L. Edgar Otto



The reality is too bleak, how in three score moons

you have aged, survived but came out broken

small steps, soul free in recovery, body still in chains

only the rust holds up your belt and brittle shackles

Worn our rope on probation holding you by your mind



We meet and talks, not much to say but hello and how

you miss my original music, he just does cover tunes

we hug goodbye exchange numbers on fragile bits of paper

curse the slum landlords, say we are good now and our

Capture helped but still did not praise the police, left jobless



No security deposit back, or place to rent, broken credit

red lined, equal opportunity now to keep the ghetto back

I know that Bitch says first month's rent up front, and ten bucks

not refunded for the application fee I told her and Oh

Month to month there in Imperial Circle- a lot of crack heads

hanging out there- I do not do that you said



We are ghosts now really, wondering why we didn't

get out of this ghost town- Oh, I could love you again

never stopped really but more like your daddy you said you didn't need

Needing a lover, overdosing and nodding out with the music

how you draw me to the Columbine of mythic Colorado as

If I could hug you like I should and deep, find you in the mountains again



If we keep others alive after some near miss or finality in sacrificing love

for greater dreams as long as someone remembers them

I hugging your drooping shoulders, half hearted and unsure your grasp

alone together and no one other in the world to come between our truths

in the full sun and higher definition, flaws in us and the broken strings of destiny

You still before me, alive and real only my memory of you forever young.



* * *Mysterious Riders on the Bits and Rays of Light

L. Edgar Otto Oct.7/8,'10



The lowly crystal worm sprouts its folding dihedral wings and

the wings determine the path and fall, the flight of worms



So the dust determines the terrain of space and

space the paths and fall of luminiferous dust



But can we gaze into the twinkling pin points of stars

say there is some ending, find there the irreducible?



Or see our fall an endless quest, all measures, levels reconciled to

the echoes of infinity so solid empty everywhere reaches quasicity?



So count of corpuscles not some prime mass of stringy models

all apply, fractions and the source of fractals, fractured amplified



Yet dampered far from the stem muted regenerations the once and forever

Mysterious Rides and fragile seasons global warming Columbines



Back when our youthful world did not destroy creative words

or those built up into any myth and code, traps not asking the why



When we were unredeemed from angry gloom our gambles and

of no romantic story not expect, demand a happy ending



* * *



When metal is exhausted, no tool to dig deeper into the earth as the sea evaporates

for good, the Giant will digests us, again to chew the world, barfs up his cud



His scaled pony with fins and flippers stands by obeys and

on the load stones for his gizzard it learns to peck and graze



Its tail defends him, mind of its own with its hidden fingers prays

what is human in him as well in Love in God left fleeting yet rides and stands amazed



* * *Awakening to a Theory of Everything
by L. Edgar Otto on Friday, October 8, 2010 at 2:48pm

Awakening to a Theory of Everything

L. Edgar Otto Oct. 8. 2010



Primitive man, wiser than save his wonder at the world

must have felt his light and shadows hombound, safe

Not homesick in the falling, immense space racing away

unreachable past the speed of light



So he drew on the blank slate to heal the outer

boundary of his fellow's skin, stars and points of

accupunture, the ash of herbs, some constellations

Full of ships and beasts chance scattered, unique destinies



To divine what new to his early wisdom only his

intuitions vaguely see adn where the cure's worse than

the disease he risks experiment and bottleneck philosophies

Symbolic then his brave chest pounding badges of art



As if seeing sickness in the world try heal the face of God Himself

Dance with dream cycles sun, moon, and earth model, and yes it is painful.



* * *



Commentary on the nature of poetry:



Just as the poetic in us inspires cosmology the sciences inspire poems. For me this was true of photos and links over the years from the Astronomy Picture of the Day website- but alas most of these poems lost with the details. Today an article on newscientist.com

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19557-ancient-tattoos-linked-to-healing-ritual.html about tattoos crosses my poetic mood and I

am aware of moods and details of a poem (above) in my contemplations of this day.


Magnetar
by L. Edgar Otto on Sunday, October 17, 2010 at 8:48am

Magnetar L. Edgar Otto 10-17-10



We once dreamed only of the earth, before it thought

flat or round, that within the nothingness was everything



Then our clockwork of the planets and celestial holes

of fire, we still or the sun center, God held by a wire



Newton tamed the tides, his levers weighed the spheres

blemishes on perfection, we nothing special, anywhere the storm of stars



Einstein folded up the dewdrops and crosses of a boundless city

three players in one galactic cocoon on crusades



While Hubble cataloged the clouds, and Becquerel

the broken light beneath the spatial dynamo of frontiers



So we stand and that we do fancy we unique before

that old mystery we whisper, could there be a multiverse?



With keener sight, more of us, the pulsars, freckles and moles

metastasis, more still in our core than seen between us.


Jessica Told Me Long Ago of Her Secret Dream of Deltafane
by L. Edgar Otto on Thursday, October 21, 2010 at 11:35am

Jessica Told Me Long Ago of Her Secret Dream of Deltafane L. Edgar Otto 10-20-10



Our past in the pueblo and mesas

our dreams when I look for you

not just deadwood but a petrified forest



It took so long with my meager tools of sharpened sticks

to carve for you a cist through white gypsum

set beneath a vertical slab of sandstone three by five



We, who dined on eagles eggs

shells and stones and worked deer bones

mats and baskets, feathered prayer sticks painted green



Ten pieces of pottery, bowls and dippers

seeds of squash and corn for you journey to the underworld

shattered, cleaned, crushed and charred your ossuary



Where they made a feast of your soul

yet set you in the Northeast, daughter of royalty



Even then seeing God and time so much closer

in the desert, faces toward the single sun

sacred frog the symbol on the vase, water carried from far away



The people spoke to each other as we did with spirits

of happy hour in the bar drinking sulfur springs and toxins

doctors gave to you slurring your speech but not our resonating DNA



I do not know if I loved you for your spirit or body alone

or for longing to taste the tears from your single azure eye

we talked of our lovers driving us to ruin, not looking crossing streets



Oh, he is not around me no more, Cherwine from your home town

says he needs food but I saw his dozens of empty vodka bottles.

So that's why you couldn't sleep that night I heard your name crash on my scanner.



I said I'd marry you if you had not found someone by thirty

we did not hold each other to it, now your passing in your prime



Only you must know how I react to it, our hearts long dry, too numb

too wounded long ago our loving, yet ours always morning sun



* * * Gull in the Dead Zone
by L. Edgar Otto on Saturday, October 30, 2010 at 1:11pm

Gull in the Dead Zone by L. Edgar Otto Oct. 29, 2010



Sustained gale, threatening wall of gusts

waves suspended breaking on the rocks

Gull in flight riding the wind shear

one eye frozen on the beam East South East

Razor bill sword edge Zound's lighthouse ray



I Shall obey, Aye shall all ya', in His Will, insha'allah

Will I? Its stillborn thought, resting heartbeat

Pausing sea the face of Wisdom and Longevity, no seashell sound

My single iris of the storm eternally far, expanding

From falling through the Dead Zone half blind, we carbon dust of stars



We ride the dark to nowhere, we do not feel the

hailstones, shake with them the grid of one and many

The last of warmth our soul asleep through winter, Leyden foil

our fates but strands of hair flying apart, insulated Tesla coils



* * *



The great umbilical christening oil from above or lost

deep six below, broken turbulence, chaotic top and bottoms

Pinches apart plasma anchor rings, I cannot see you on this surface yet

I follow you as they pull the plug, my tail not eyes ride light, lighten bug

My X-ray feathers cold and soaked oil slick heave made of

spumes and scud of vanished forests and fauna up from the mud



How can we weigh, explain how our spirits and stars evaporate

if we cannot see that of the dewdrop, the universe one and

All electrons on an oil drop, sleep itself a windless aether?

Without your wings I swing through jungle vines like rope

Catch your hopes before distilled, fermented Everclear your wine

there in some diorama of your Deltafane our child's hands play school

Drawing, learning our "A B C 's"


The Soul that Died
by L. Edgar Otto on Thursday, November 4, 2010 at 5:12pm

The Soul that Died L. Edgar Otto 11-04-10



The soul can die in the here and now

if we think it can in some beyond



All vague and mysterious unknowns we young

in restrained awakening make struggle



In the shifting climate the zombies

eat my brain, the vampires suck my blood



You cannot win, lone wolves worn down

by the two parties, Hell's Angels and Outlaws



You reinvent yourselves in cycles, each second

accelerating one way expansion multiverse



Ride both the bottomless descent and sky-less ascent

the opaque sterile particles in and at creation fertile



You cannot reason with the faithless, their

superstition devils, nor with the faithful robot phalanx.



* * * My Socialist Sweetheart
by L. Edgar Otto on Saturday, November 6, 2010 at 12:06pm

My Socialist Sweetheart L. Edgar Otto 11-06-10





Why did I love Mary?



What did I see in her?



Why did I throw red pain with her



On the ladies at the ball wearing fox fur?



We danced all night in the perish of St. Paul



Sang homesick hymns to the poor in Portugal





What a thrill we dancing goats, dosidos, Virginia reels



Drinking Star-reals on the ha'penny playing sheav-groats'



Housewives in the coffee war with Brazil



Those ninny's not getting any with breakfast in high heels



After dreams of fallout and the Argentine umbrella



Shame them into human rights national and nuclear





Priests and generals skipping ranks, Obama's sambas



I some Garibaldi and his shadow tanks, her vigilante cowboys in Amazonas.



* * *The Sacrifice L. Edgar Otto 11-14-10
by L. Edgar Otto on Sunday, November 14, 2010 at 2:33pm

The Sacrifice L. Edgar Otto 11-14-10





Peaceful at night,

the old farm house

familiar stars

the children sleeping

the newborn satisfied

by his mother's milk



I sense something wrong

a hundred screams and

bits of walls and glass

falling, yet so far away

I nod off on the porch swing

feel trapped with the shawled lady



Her toddler crying near her

she ignores pain in her leg

they have given up the digging

the searching, listening for sounds

no one assumed alive so long

without warmth and water



A miracle, all over the news

found alive ask how

her fingers bound and scabbed

she had cut that her child could drink

as the cathedrals fell in Mexico

and her faith a third part for the world.



* * *Chating Between Poets in Translation
by L. Edgar Otto on Tuesday, November 16, 2010 at 10:59am

Chatting Between Poets in Translation PeSla and Sultan Ratrout 11-11-10





Each of us are true to their style of loyalties

that does not change for the superior or inferior soul



For the Hawk does not drink of the nectar

and the sparrow lick its talons of blood



I craved some candy last night but

ate it all after I went out and bought some



Your poem is writing a poem-

must be the sugar high this morning



Tomorrow it will be high sugar motivates us doesn't it?

motivates us sexually and mentally



In the end we desire the sacrifice of flowers

to satisfy our nature red in tooth and claw



Poets like the sweet sometimes, but it is bad

for their teeth needed to kiss the neck of fauna



But the sweetness should be natural or like her

sea waters makes us more corn syrup thirsty



I wrote a funny post on Jordanian food candies

I meant it motivates u more and more



Voluptuousness leads to voluptuousness,

but if you do not use the heart you lose it



* * *Uncanny Valley Walk of Shame
by L. Edgar Otto on Friday, November 26, 2010 at 1:33pm

Uncanny Valley Walk of Shame L. Edgar Otto 11-25-10



I saw one morning your walk of shame

What's in it for you to play the game

You don't remember scratching your itch

Just a vague pain, dry mouth salty pink lipstick



Left Sunday morning, net hose, stilts for shoes

Zombie after Halloween, neck and knees bruised

You were good, by the way, your head hung down to look away

I'm only teasing, give you a lesson, but I know you'll never listen



So who's the baby daddy worth your drink and drama

Your child so young excuse, if you can keep your baby mama

What dreams are left from you to her but

Withdraws and shakes left of your liver?



Brag to me the night swell, bad ass of your bitches

Courageous badge in stitches, swear your'll never tell

Abandoned heart, awake enough to bleed

Priming up for the dog show to be the best of breed



Of course you are a dish, I wish to kiss your tattoo

Play cuddle fish lucid dream happy endings with you

Chase away your belfry bats and stalking wolves full moon

But the daddy in me thinks you've speant your love too soon.


Smitten by the Acoustic Band
by L. Edgar Otto on Tuesday, November 30, 2010 at 1:57pm

Smitten by the Acoustic Band L. Edgar Otto 11-30-10





They where three virtues whose songs were lighter than a feather

yet the notes fell as fast as my stone heart in the vacuum of my soul.



One strummed the guitar and the other the accordion while in the

background the third keep time with her snare drum



Gitbox and Squeezbox with Tambourine three virtues or fates

took me to the shores of ancient inland seas, their gig, my dates



Unsigned their harmonies, simple plain their songs, one so distant she

seemed a moving marble statue made of whispering stars and moonlight



The other reflected her as if earth shine, obscuring Venus behind

what stood out against the starry night beckoning, cradling me with her crescent



Cymbols was just another Ringo one of us whisks and rims and drum head

my body felt within the echos of the rhythm breaking the membrane of my brain



Which one shall I love, or each in turn, will they turn upon each other

I the wind for her sea shell song, or drunk dancing to her sisters?



* * * You Were No Angel
by L. Edgar Otto on Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 12:31pm

You Were No Angel L. Edgar Otto 12-01-10



(some first ideas for a novel project recalling the lives of relatives- whom at the time I did not think the stuff of novels... The general themes here, when I can learn to write better, are the changes we go thru over time so far from others, we now butterflies disdaining the egg let alone the worm or ourselves and each others metamorphosis. And this one that seems so visceral and sensual and creamy- that great question of what it means to deal with one's real and step parents in the context of individual experience, culture, and what is passed down as myth and family.)



* * *



"Too often we learn, if we learn, compassion for others because we have hurt them."(my status on facebook today)



"You were no angel in days gone by, you asked no question so why should I ?I don't care what you used to be, for I know what your are today." (an old country duet)



* * *



Intent and distracted, concentrating on his mixing of colors, the flow of water and salt like tears on paper with the gravity, an eyelash detaches from his camel hair brush as he tries to paint within the lines, melt the hues and break the cakes of wax from his color box. Eugene's cigarette fell from his lips that surprised him with involuntary quivering delaying his jumping up to find it from smoke and ash and the sunset cherry threat of fire between his legs.



In the dry desert sands before empires spread the Sultan's rule over the trade routes and migrations of the people, before the prince had his nursemaid and the eunuchs served and entertained, their boyish chants and songs, their catering and choice of gossamer veils assisting the lady of the day with her toilet, she picked from the harem, the tribal and pagan people following a wandering star across the milky way ten thousand generations in search of frankincense, Abigail knew that it was not she who gave birth who was the mother of her princely child, but her big bosom slave woman who indulged him with her breasts.



* * * You Were No Angel - 2
by L. Edgar Otto on Saturday, December 4, 2010 at 12:40pm

Eugene and the Snowflakes



Eugene looked outside the big picture window of George, his grandma, and saw for the first time silver dollar sized flakes of snow.



George's apartment was Eugene's whole world, and was as warm and inviting as a womb where his brother and sister, Bungle and Cagey, and all the Crickmans came together at dinner and crack the crab legs and picked the bones carefully from the Mullets. After all, these were simple fisher-folk who took their boats out into the Hampton Roads in a time of pure rain and teeming life of the Tidewaters.



"I want to go out and get one, Grand."



"Oh, that is why you are trying to put on your jacket. Well, alright, but take it off until I put mine on or you will not feel the goodness of it when we go out."



When Eugene went out into the wonderland of soft snow he realized that he was very cold and that was not a pleasant place to be. He was surprised at this- yet held his ground, did not complain for he wanted to see the snowflakes up close. But when one finally fell into his hand and for some brief seconds he saw its crystal form and feathers- he was sad that it melted so fast- and he did not like that it left his hand cold.



"Let's go back in, Grandma."


You Were No Angel 3 (a footnote)
by L. Edgar Otto on Saturday, December 4, 2010 at 7:44pm

L. Edgar Otto Status:

I will try to capture those people...like trying to find a winter's flake ofsnow... like not seeing the beauty at the time but having pressedflowers in lost pages and lost hours- yet there was beauty at the time.such is love- and even our l...ost books of Love.



Yet, from some viewpoint the experience, for ill or good, achieves a certain sense of permanence and reality that seems to transcend time. Again, snow is a cold crystalline and almost Gothic thing in its material starkness- and yet a source of joy. We are cradled sometimes in memory, sometimes forgetfulness, as if we are children who play in the snow, a day off of school, and for a generation it seems they expect Christmas to come sooner. But what is the need for gifts that without them and the sacrifice for them if possible but another source of sorrow? Children enjoy the same story over and over again, it take long before the Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner blurs as one worn out memory- or after working in a convenience store and hearing the hundredth copy of Little Drummer Boy one secretly wants the Little Match Girl to freeze! Humbug until the ghosts of Christmas, too late for this world for Scrooge, perhaps- brings us the truth if not promise of the Christmas spirit. But did I not love you a thousand times and never grew tired of you?

You Were No Angel 4: Sleepy Home with Eve on Leave
by L. Edgar Otto on Monday, December 6, 2010 at 1:56pm

You Were No Angel 4 : Sleepy Home with Eve on Leave



Love that takes a long, long time and love at first sight. How often does the hero encounter a whif of young lass in the promise and fires of youth? Not that he thinks there is more than some vague attraction hidden under the desires that beckon him under her rag doll figure. She responds as well with a smile, a suspension of disbelief in the narrative stated at the beginning of a simple lyrical song that repeats a bit in the chorus, a spiritual thing potentially not based on lies, for no one has written the book of love when you get right down to thinking about it. He leaves her to her dreams and sense of belonging- and that is the best way to end a song, to leave something romantic and mysterious that our hearts in couriosity may figure out.


Who knows or even really cares what the future holds as Sleepy comes home on leave awhile from the Pacific war, still with a glorious head of hair and she looking like a red lipsticked actress in the flesh fallen out his own movie star, Monroe from the silver screen. He rests his rifle over his knees and feels he is a man with nobel purpose to save the world from its evils of conflict and scarcity. He thinks that she will do, maybe this is the trophie and reason he is fighting for, she may not be as far along in her grasp of the world, including its evils, in her philosophy- but this does not mean that in her own feminine ways she is not equal- even superior, just a differnce that drives the world in its outward appearences that as with the sunflowers or the arms of galaxies their spirials entwine, evolve, move with the possibilities of love awed looking skyward but mercifully private and the only island universe they know.


Sleepy was not amazed at seeing the earth from space- nor amazed more in the years to come at the caldron of starbirth from the Hubble photos. Yet, without it being said he and Eve knew deep down that in the swirl of their reels of their life movie and the soundtrack of their dreams that new stars were on the horizon. This as if a universal law that they did not need to look for simpler ones, nor question that their love was self-centered and self-causing, for in the accident of place and birth they knew love a gift, an uncaused cause.


It would be a long run before the evil hearted one intervened, and Eugene shed no tears for her even that she had licked the wounds of his father sleepy when their family died in his arms- for those who work and live a lie are the ones who wind up alone and bedridden in the end with their body failing and sick of sugar, just as their hearts failed in its parts and treatment of people- and Eugene did not know of such a one now part of some past states of his life who in her pain- she who hates her womb so much it bled both night and day- no one was even there to pull her plug.


We cannot know how things may turn out. How a chance encounter in the dark becomes a foundation of a deeper love and trust between lovers. The grass greener and yet what monsters may await us on the other side of the mountains as we hold hands thru the maze and tunnels of love. Nothing says there is perfection, that all will be smooth and easy- but do not doubt that passion cannot be a permament revolution provided our spirit tries, looks deeply into the soul of another even in the dim light of nothingness and lowered expectations, settling for less we imagine- for someone whom if we were not wounded in love would never look at in a thousand years nor give the time of day. All is fair in love and war they say- they who are alarmists to make shallow drama of the lie. Eugene thought he should have listened when Abagail said "Go away, I am not good enough for you." But that was another life, and in that life he prayed and thought he had the answer and the prophesy of all the stars to come to them. Love itself is that worthy of such a prayer and when the new lady smiled at him in the grocery store he was too battle scared to think of her as but a rag doll that knew no better- nor would he insist on the dancing and unrequited neighbor of her dreams that they meet- for she knew herself better than he, and not all people were worthy yet of prayers to themself if in their core they were wise enough and strong enough and true enough to be made of and survive long by love.



* * *You Were No Angel 5 ( Buddy )
by L. Edgar Otto on Tuesday, December 7, 2010 at 4:04pm

You Were No Angel 5 ( Buddy )



We can look back at the events of our life and what else may we conclude but that our individual experience is unique and at least relatively of great importance and purpose as reality. So it is that at some place in our lives, if we have the leasure and stability to look back on things, if we have reached a decent distance from the intensity of being there at the inception of such reality and not being there emotionally in the looking back, that we may survive the recalled feelings of thinking and writing about them. Not that we bury the past to see what was its depths and trivialities in the raw truth of things, nor as if ghosts morn for the other times and place, perhaps the simpler view. Some caught up in their past at the moment, thirst, desire to write about their situation, better than the events that befell them and traps them into a loop of the role of victim. then some have felt the rhythm of life, sensitive to its abundance and glory too strong to fall into almost any trap for their core and soul, by which adversity rolls of their back like water on a duck.

Only time itself can freeze their small ponds of experience and trap them in the ice if they waited too soon for the migration, and forgot too much to heed their higher intuitions with clear eyes.



For while we may say, in some sense of the accounting of time, that we have lived a thousand times, even if by some reckoning we escaped the cycles of day into the unknown- it was also true that little Buddy in the dreams of his father Sleepy, died a thousand times.



I recall the fist snow in December out the window of the old house on Derby Road and what should have been a joyful season became a vision of sorry. For I knew that by spring my brother Buddy will be taken from us, and there was nothing I could do about it, not even change my place in the scheme of things, of fate, I stuck having to take up the cup of circumstance by any of a thousand choices as if I responsible, aware as if hypnotized in mechanical motion although forewarned.



So, when he came into my room, wanting to play with the windup toy called The Farmer in the Dell I graciously gave it too him and told Bungle it was his now- let us not fight over it anymore and by then he did not care much for it any more than I did. I did not mind the constant winding it up for him nor the thousandth time we heard the tinny music box metallic music. I had resolved looking out the window that I would speand the whole day with Buddy, do whatever he wanted to do. And I did.



What is life that for some of us from the beginning we can see the events to happen in our time on this world and make sense of some of it- and what are we that in looking back we can see such things in the past- and from far enough into the future fancy we can change it all, that in some ways the past is not a fixed thing anymore than how at times so fixed seems our future?



* * *

Buddy, a blue baby, would have been the first to get the operation at the Naval hospital- but it was delayed because of a recurrent bout of pneumonia. When spring came and we walked out of the school instead of walking home or father was there in uniform. He said nothing to us but Bungle and Cagey and me began to cry.



Days later after my folks could face coming home again, and Neal the St. Benard a week in the house with his big bag of dog food confined in the kitchen- he glad to see us but afraid he would be scholded as he had to go into the house- but not for long. We cleaned things up and I said

"Dad, why do you believe there is a heaven?"

"Well, son, it is just a nice thing to believe."



Eve, our mother, was so upset but seem calm now after her recovering from the bottle of pills and her stomach pumped. We went together thru the house and when we came to my parents bedroom where Buddy slept with them on the corner, the bed was made with hospital corners all tight and neat and where he slept it was turned down seemingly just for him. "Who made the bed?" Cagey asked but not one answered her. Sleepy walked over and bent down and seem to be caressing the air as if Little Buddy's head. None of us were afraid to sleep in the house that night.

* * *
* * *
* * *You Were No Angel 5 ( Koi Pond )
by L. Edgar Otto on Thursday, December 9, 2010 at 12:43pm

What then of relevance between each other, over time and in a wider sense of time, and in a subjective time, and time that perhaps flows in the eddy's faster or slower in onward but no certain direction? Each of us like a lotus flower somewhere in the koi pond of time in a moment of eternal spring, we try to be or feel what it was like and is like to be others who come before or after us, parallel to us and even hauntingly like us. And what distinguishes which the real or the shadow of the formerly real or real to come? What in our private worlds with its idealism defends against its practical, pragmatism- or accepts only the story of the moment so entertained our thoughts by others, the complex in the military-industrial complex where the experts claim not only the agenda for learning of time, but whole eras of the evolution of thought? Each soul in perspective a constellation to some center as if the galaxies in galaxies expand away from each other seemingly to recede from any one place- but that analogy not good enough to explain the higher dilation's and expansions of the multiverse.



Looking skyward half blind to time toward some hemisphere, the flowers, still born and in still life, and still fresh at the grave of my own grave, I see the brighter stars in the Northern Sky or in some forgotten place of time long burned out near by and bright. How bright the lotus of little Buddy- brighter than my own back when, and only the incarnation I am and erudite stands out- stands out just in front of my eyes- but so would I in the snow on wine asleep from all realities so hibernate, exist with peaceful oblivion bar some accident of storms, but in the absurdity exist, and know this tattered page as my soul will persist awhile as the reality and as the dream. 


You Were No Angel 6 ( Match Scratch )





Jimmy was a tall man and not very bright. He was the last of George's children and was not born with all of the graces of wisdom. He was back living with her in the old apartment on thirteenth street. When Eugene would stay with his grandma, usually over most of the summer vacation, it was always difficult to deal with Jimmy. If someone needed to move something heavy like a washing machine, Jimmy would just lift it on his back like a sack of potatoes and not think much of it. Home from the state mental institution Jimmy had all the stories of how his job was, as a trustee, to deliver lunch to the ward of all the naked ladies.



"Thanks for moving that washing machine for us, Jimmy. Surely you will let me give you a pack of Chesterfields or something.?"



"I don't mind, Sleepy. You are the sanest and nicest guy I know. People say I'm crazy, but I am not stupid.'



When Eugene came back from the service he decided to look up George in the old neighborhood. He felt so guilty doing it because even talking to this side of the broken family brought up ill feelings and accusations of how he was just like

Jimmy, rather backward even for the lower class of the crass fisher folk.



George, when he had found her asking in a bar near where she lived, on seeing him jumped up and down for an old lady. She had dreamed of this day, she told him. "You can stay awhile and sleep in room with your uncle Jimmy. I will try to find Eve and let her know you are in town."



Eugene and Jimmy spent the rest of the day savouring what George cooked up for them. Her tea tasted like it did from the summers he spent with her and all the smells came to life again with his memories. It was difficult playing rummy with Jimmy because if you won or lost he would get most upset, he just wanted to keep the game going and everything even out.



"George, you know Eugene is more like Sleepy than Sleepy." He told her at the table.



" When Eve comes today, you guys have to tell her Eugene is her brother." Her sheriff husband she met serving time for driving the getaway car when her boyfriend robbed the liquor store with a church key, does not know she had a child so old. You hear that Jimmy? "Yeah, mam" he says.I'm sorry to have to say that, Eugene."



"That's OK Grand, no one knew I was coming and we have not been in contact for years, I do not want to mess up whatever my mom has going for her."



The rest of the evening Jimmy admired a small magnifying glass Eugene had picked up in the dime store and used it for various things like lighting cigarettes when out of matches hitchhiking.Jimmy seemed amazed with it. Obviously he wanted to keep it very badly. "What do you want it for?" Eugene asked out of curiosity- for as Jimmy would speak to him he would repeat under his breath some things he had just said. Jimmy had lit a few matches and was looking at the soot trail they made on the table cloth. "Match Scratch, match scratch," he said and repeated it a few time "Don't you think that funny? he asks as Eugene tried to figure it out. A simple poem maybe which for him is a serious achievement. Eugene thought he should fake a laugh.



" I can see if there are any gol-dern lice or bedbugs." Jimmy replied then, "match scratch, scratch."



Whereupon Jimmy went to the corner by the big picture window and opened his zipper and seemed to be looking with the glass.



"What are you doing, Jimmy?"



"I gotta see if I have the crabs." then he held out the glass to Eugene



"That's OK, Jimmy, I want you to have it. Match Scratch." he said as he laughed loudly.



The old neighborhood was very run down now and it was not safe to walk the streets at night. But George was not afraid to shop when Jimmy was with her. He walked in a suit and with his hat looked like Humphrey Bogart from an old 40s movie and no one would dare bother him and tried not to look at him.



Years later, Eugene asked about what happened to Jimmy after the old lady died. Did they put him back into the institution?



"It was in the papers eventually" a cousin Eugene finally found and called, " He put on his suit and walked out into the streets saying nothing to anyone- and no one knows where he is or where he went."

You Were No Angel 7 ( Globe in the Magic Shop )
by L. Edgar Otto on Friday, December 10, 2010 at 12:11pm

Minnie, there is no light, but I guess there is not pain. It has gone into the night along with gentle rain your drank from your rain barrel. You were alone those last few months but for your son the goon, and no one has seen him since he walked the streets. You always were his shadow moon



This morning one of my old songs came to mind; Minnie there is No Light which refers to what Hank Williams said to Minnie Pearl before he died of drugs and liquor in the back seat of a car on the way with her to play music. Of course I am thinking of this as it applies to the last post (where George is Eugene's Minnie). I am not sure it is easy to do both a physics and a literary project at the same time- usually poetry and numbers give me a well balanced perspective.



* * *



Ever since I was a child I have tried to make images of things around me- not the least of which was the Globe in the Magic Shop. George would drag me along her selling artificial flowers and crepe paper dressed Kewpie dolls to the sailors on leave from the Norfolk Navy Base.



George was an indulging god to Eugene, and she moved freely through the streets of Nickelodeon which is what Eugene called Norfolk, a magical place which had its own seven wonder of the world. The greatest one was the celestial Globe in the travel agent's window next to the shop of masks and magic tricks. Eugene would beg George to stop by it when they were making their rounds to the amusement park and theaters.



"What is wrong Eugene?""Grandma, I am afraid that you will die.""Hwo, ho," she smiled, "that will be a very long time from now, don't worry about that.""When were you born, grandma?"" I wasn't born, I wasn't hatched...they say the buzzard shit me."



Somewhere in a cartoon of imagination Eugene saw the storks in flight and the buzzards harriing them.



Eugene gazed into the globe, he had already learned to draw most of the nations of the earth and the seas. He had tried to trace the contendent on a sheet of paper from a ball. He asked once what held up the moon and was told a very long rope- many a night he tried to figure out where that rope was tied at the other end. He thought that the globe had all the stars and constellations but could not see how all of them could be put on a ball. Then, thinking of the string he had a vision of how it was done and he felt comfort in his solving the question on his own.



But to see the globe in the light of day, not in the flourescent light, all the magical and fantastic figures were traced on it for the constellations in soft blues. Beyond the stars were the lesser gods and dragons, the lyres and vultures and eagles. And the great belt of milk that ringed the sky.

You Were No Angel 8 (Sleepy and Bluegrass on the Radio at Night)
by L. Edgar Otto on Monday, December 20, 2010 at 1:51pm

You Were No Angel (Sleepy and Bluegrass on the Radio at Night)



I go to at the open mike at the mouse trap bar. I am in the agreed box from where the band stands to give us the music and the lights to which the people drink and dance and sing along. They start with Silent Night- a song so familiar the musician in me can see the errors and appreciate their trying the song, see the differences in the styles of say the woodwind harmonica and the percussion against the body of the electric base- how each individual in this play works his individual path and style.



But I am struck by the mandolin player. All of reality comes down to an atom in one of its strings. All the city around me, all the people I've known, over time too as the masseuse I knew once in the coffee shop now has short hair and a new beau that looks angry at me while she says hello. For awhile my vision is blurred as the strings are double strings and they resonate in a duet with each other, love bigger than both of them.



I do not know how it will turn out- but each point in time and each life to which things can be described so complexly, so wastefully it seems of nature and her reproductions, so uncanny that we can take the time to dream, to play, to hope that what we do has at least a purpose for today- or drunk try to enjoy it while the music plays.



Somewhere the music jumps between the memories of my mind. I am a child on US 1 going to Miami. The AM radio makes its cacophony of bells and whistles, dots and dashes, squeals and squeaks. My Dad tunes the channel after one fades away while we went under the bridge. He is looking for country music but finds Blue Grass. He says he cannot stand it but I find it refreshing to the tears in the bottom falling out of the beer glass of his life of blues and cheating hearts. And for a brief few moments I hear the mandolin- and the same atom of metal I hear now- somewhere still resonating with the few persisting and half life of the carbon atoms we are now and still are if we can only grasp it- then.
You Were No Angel 9 (The Flower Gardner)
by L. Edgar Otto on Sunday, December 26, 2010 at 3:03pm

You Were No Angel 9 (The Flower Gardner) 12-24-10





Snow fall in a day reached the record of a score of decades to come before that much would come again.



Rip walked through the narrowing path of shoveled snows on the cleared sidewalk by the house were he worked as the flower gardener, spring to fall, layed off in winter he was on his way to visit friends, spin tales, talk politics at the neighborhood salon.



The side streets were not cleared. The county ran out of its budget for kerosene to melt the snow with a wall of fire and gasoline for the tractors and horseless carriages, even some of them stuck in their snow clearing duties.



A shaweld and gray haired lady came thru the narrowing streets with her walker of snow ski and passing him on the sidewalk said "What a beautiful day!" Rip replied to her knowing she was the mother of his boss in the big house and her's was a mission of Christmas cookies for him, "and it is even more beautiful with the memory of all the flowers on the porch and garden here."



Eugene sat by Rip at the Thanksgiving Diner and everyone asked how Rip felt. He had fallen down from the old ladder while building a tree house for Eugene and Bungle. He did not want to go to the old folks home and Sleepy said not to worry, to move in with us.



How odd that some delay things until after the holidays- as if the ritual of it all keeps the pneumonia at bay, so the family said finding out a small broken twig in the ground where he fell had punctured his lung.



Rip looked at Eugene and asked him why, after showing him how to do it, he did not water the tomato plants he planted in the back yard just before the trees by the little ditch. "I do not know, I did not think about it. Everyone was so worried about you and I felt so guilty we insisting you build the tree house. We were so sorry."



Near the corner of the house Georgia had planted some radishes and Eugene helped harvest them with her just before the end of fall. It was sacred ground to him because of the shawled old lady. When spring came he forbid his brother and sister to pick any of the wild flowers that sprung up there. Of course they picked all of them and when Sleepy came out to see what the argument was about Bungle told him. Sleepy gave Eugene a whop on the rear and said, "you really should learn to share some things with your brother."



Time is like footprints in the snow, Eugene has thought many times he should have told them the why of things and how sorrow he was for his selfishness- Sleepy, in his example seemed so right. So it was that Eugene wanted to be alone on the holiday, think about things a bit, the future perhaps more than the past. The way things were he had lost contact with so many of his family for so long that he was afraid of what he would find- and he felt it was not his fault- he was the sentimental one trying to keep memories alive. But like the memories they were alive only in the unreachable past as all things that are ghosts. Holding the thoughts alone as if to speak of them as real and yet they could not become alive in some future reunion again was to hold the past as a lifeless corpse- and what point was it then if for all our sentiment and care such future is past?



All things fade, are weighed down by all the memories superimposed on our fleeting frames and places where we live a thousand times and days. All things can shift into being forgotten and as they say dust returns to dust again. Eugene began to not make sense of it all, although from his world nothing was ever lost or faded for his core of faith and reality remained a fixed beacon strong and he was not ashamed of earlier and newly returned fads and styles of life's truths.



No one really knew the meaning of things, the reality one way or the other beneath the shallow surface of occupying a place, that paradox of a place of one's own that is a trap- but what else is there that we remain real? It was better than lost under a bridge under the meaningless traffic from place to place, Little Red thru the forests on the way to grandma's house. All the hungry wolves in this Its a Wonderful Life. Yet when the state in the end has to make a choice as to how to deal with civilization and rules to live by it too has to ask the lone individual what is in the end his state of mind. Behavior and words cannot really convey the situation. Lies are great placebos. Faith in our doctors is protected as much as for the healing properties of faith in itself.



Perhaps we never make that transition, and empty present, between adult and childhood- not when that part is missing from the continuity of a family- but even for the timeless it is hard to meet again after so many years- for it is not a vital thing to let our memories of others age in our dreams.



Eugene went into the streets and wondered if the others will find such joy in the end-times and hope they would not think of him as alone in the dark- a prisoner of gravity where the state first made him a ghost that they can make him a corpse so long before the hard objective fact. These gamblers not in control of their own health and fate, insurance a protection, a service imposed by the very ones imposing the bets on others. What is left but the few of us who feel the ever higher weight of this world's gravity until we cannot stand up, or move far, or talk and touch only to others that are close to us- until one day, we said poor planners, even that crushed out to be alone- for in the luxury of freedom we are like the mussels on the rotting piers of time where the shore meets the sea and the tide shift- we are fixed and remain so once fixed, on the now empty shells of others who came before us.


What is Behind the Curtain Dr. Oz ?
by L. Edgar Otto on Friday, January 7, 2011 at 3:37pm

Every once in awhile I see something that strikes me as humorous. In the brick wall of credentials (for those open to inputs of varied thoughts before their paths get too fossilized- Pitaken had a great statement of this creative yet essential for science state of mind in the enquirers recently in comments) or to quote Kea - a PhD on a brick wall is still a brick wall...) With nothing else on I saw the program Dr. Oz where they discuss various medical issues- a great show really especially for my hypochondriac neighbors. Some people are paid a lot for such research as- coffee raises the sperm count- passing out copies of that newscientist article I got the whole coffee shop in stitches- or for some mysterious reason it helps prevent breast cancer. The influence of things we consume seems to change so much it probably would not help if the average consumer had a Phd in organic chemistry and could do more than then be able to read the labels.



Dr. Oz, an offshoot of the Oprah Winfrey show, called a lady from the audience to point out on a chart of female anatomy just where the G spot was- and she got a bulls-eye. He then said there were two more spots discovered recently. One at the Vaginal opening that is small but easy to find called U and one under the uterus hard to reach but covering a larger area called A. Now I am thinking, if we have the G and U and A can we expect the T ? Or is that something classical and obvious like the C with its butterfly of nerves--- maybe all four together may explain a mysterious geometry read four at a time, that is if such things exist at all in the greater sense of replication over time and the oceanic feeling of woman. :-)

I am One with the Weather
by L. Edgar Otto on Wednesday, January 19, 2011 at 2:00pm

I am One with the Weather L. Edgar Otto 01-20-11





I am one with the weather



Seeking not avoiding the sun



as I walk on the melting below zero snow



Rare the wind chill's intermittent reminder



its the humility not the temperature



Homeless or at home brief recollections



being one with life and my freedom



Not caught in a sweating box, layers



one with my winter coat and scarf



Trapped in a cave or sooty fire place



as if that my one, soul far from equilibrium



Darkness above the dipping midnight sun



surprised at the quenching of light that



I can still see, no need for torches



when the stars are once again so close to us.



* * *



[inspired by Sultan_Ratrout's facebook status:

"Once you embrace projection as a self-defense mechanism, you gradually embark on blinding yourself !!"]


Sun upon the Snow
by L. Edgar Otto on Thursday, January 20, 2011 at 11:54am

Sun upon the Snow L. Edgar Otto 01-20-11



The snowflakes sparkle like stars

against the blinding, crystal

melting bank that always wins



Like galaxies to my closer looking,

these mirrors shift and turn my way

I the lesser God, there to see them



Under the cover the field mice tunnel,

nest, insulated warm, litter and mom

I turn over, quickly replace the log again



How cold my toes, how awakens me the

sunlight and brisk chill to wash away sleep

yet how the eyes tire into purple haze again



She smelled of lye soap and well water, one bare light bulb

Untangling her hair at night in the glare it reached to the ground



* * *When Last did it not Snow
by L. Edgar Otto on Thursday, January 27, 2011 at 11:31am

When Last did it not Snow L. Edgar Otto 01-27-11



I walk by the flower garden in the recurrent dream of arctic snow

recalled the flowers there, past and for to come, my dream last night



The Christian is out in it again with his snow plow and I

can walk easily around his house, he knows no other life



Perhaps in dreams of life to come his all the more real, at peace,

taking care for the blades and belts, winter's harvest of fingers



Three or four the seasons, more so three as my time on earth

becomes the bare bones, the last autumn leaves of trees



Somewhere in the antipodes it is summertime and yet things

stand on end when it is till Christmas in July, Orion ever horizontal



Eight the stances of the martial zodiac, then the shifts, then sixty-four

runes of my thoughts flow and coagulate, sideways blowing snow



The cities have no funds for salt, like the poor they think of sand

collect fines, only our sidewalks clear, wide enough for wheelchairs



* * * Becca
by L. Edgar Otto on Thursday, January 27, 2011 at 11:58am

Becca L. Edgar Otto 01-27-11





Becca you are still the most beautiful person in my world



but I was never worthy of you, not exceptional enough to fill your needs





You really did not know how beautiful you were, young lady



oh you flirted, priming and presented to the world, like anyone else





Still, felt so alone in paradise, not to build up your hopes



the bronze sea salt glistening will come for you on his surf board





I dreamed about you the other day, no lust, no tension in the dream



our short window for a short time together for it to work now gone





What is left in our pot bellied stoves against our winter but what



was lost that stoked the fires of which cold from behind we turn to face





Save that we were friends and in the sooty smoking love's embers



longs for that past thing too beyond glossed over evils that you do





Surely we were beyond all this, the prying plans of broken others



I did not think if you would steal from them, you would from me.





* * *Feathers, Seeds and the First of Stars
by L. Edgar Otto on Friday, January 28, 2011 at 11:06am

Feathers, Seeds and the First of Stars L. Edgar Otto 01-27-11



Overcast the sky's pink glow

unnaturally returns the city's light

That ate the Milky Way long ago



The air so thick I drink it in refreshing me

I did not notice when the first icy star fell

Noticed at some point the slippery road



The profusion of them in all directions of the wind

the loon peeped, owl screeched, unconcerned as if

Snow itself was but a sandy beach



The Masked bandit peeked out from the rusting gutter drain

warily eyes me holding still, sniffed, went back again

His underground highways, snowmobile trails and rain



Tomorrow piles up mud and slush again until great floods

Nature bursting at the banks, brings back the rainbows.


Pebbles before Sand, Raindrops before Snow
by L. Edgar Otto on Friday, January 28, 2011 at 11:06am

Pebbles before Sand, Raindrops before Snow L. Edgar Otto 01-27-11



My calculator seems alive tonight

less the wires and glass bead game, an abacus

How I wanted one, then crude and costly prototype

freedom from the slide rule and when

They ruled the world, the first word of my first born



Oh, it needed sunlight or carbon and zinc to feed its

eerie dimming day glow eyes to help me think, discern the skies

Do long divisions and square roots not by hand so wise a babe

no more than I understanding the spewing out at creation

Reaching the pesky inverse of zero



Although it could not dance beyond two to the three three oneth power

The fractal shadow ghost of Ramanujan welcomed its poetry lost while its program error.


No Strings for My Weather Baloons
by L. Edgar Otto on Friday, February 4, 2011 at 2:01pm






No Strings for My Weather Baloons

(While Still Dreaming of Past Springtimes)

L. Edgar Otto 02-04-11



Our legend, urban, claims to know

those who live in houses made solid by the ice

Have ten thousand words, all their show for snow

no two stars the same in all seasons, not made twice

Just their tribes, eighty and one bare ozone afterglow



Bare as Google mapped Mars and the Moon

or stark branches, fractal trees against the fog

Startling us with will and motion, windchill and monsoon

asks not what moved the gusts, turned away or trusts the sled dogs

The tundra melts past the dew line, jet stream icy roads in June



Now that the cold war has indian summer, Urals, Altaic,

the herring fishing thrives again in Riga throughout the Baltic



* * *

The Vikings and the bees see crystals, polarized the cloudy sky

to navigate the sun dog rings in the WMAP

They play nine men Morris, their compass twenty-four

Follow the sign of the Fish and Dragon to Greenland

The icy wind, will of its own, no dancing middle class in Egypt



Only large enough do the geodesic domes mimic spheres

the pentagrams, pentagons and Penroses match the hexagonal

Diamons of the honeycombs that starts the capsules, contains

larva and food for their metropolis out of pollen and propolis

No leaves to hide my camp, only greay white fur snowcover for my soul.



I soar, one wing toward the icy river underground, one to electric plasma skies.

* * *The Cosmos as Word
by L. Edgar Otto on Friday, February 4, 2011 at 10:30pm



The Cosmos as Word L. Edgar Otto 02-04-11



Some word, fleeting in its span of relevance, its lifetime,

a minor constellation of vague connections, nuances

Lonely in the context of its symbol for this day, its meaning.



I know some thought or term, no word for it really,

transcends the ground and frontier problems of our time

Fails the quantum theory to show from nothing flux, creation.



How minuscule our notions of multiverse

how pointless the constancy, yet distant births of inflation

So distant no addressing, even spoken, know if and of beginnings



Neither theories M, Ekpryotic classing branes nor

eternal inflation can twist or see the waves of gravity

No regions of variable laws, most words flat and empty



No averaging over time dimensionless and measureless, scaleless constants

That life fills space arising everywhere, slow the tightrope of time



* * *



We are not the center, even in our dreams, because

we would not be here otherwise to know light, to dream

The word then, mine but your shadow, you the unique center, multiverse



We thought at last we could count, understand the infinite

name and number the beasts and mounds of Mars, share the

News, for ill or good, our certain steps called history



The rabble full of wisdom reading stars as much as babble

the message but the bare minimum, a dot to say hello from far away

On this to build, conjure our myths, or follow the bouncing ball.



* * * Little Buddy
by L. Edgar Otto on Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 2:41pm

Little Buddy L. Edgar Otto 02-08-11



[This was the start of a new song that came out better on the guitar- but I made it a poem for now to save some of the ideas. I think I may have included too much or it was way to intellectual for a song and not quite what I had in mind. Maybe too much time on the physics in relation to my post on pelsablog on the dimensions of subjective time.]



I feel that day we shared the sunshine

and felt the snowflakes on our face

Knew our world would last forever

to laugh and play with time to waste



Now the years go by much faster

yet our brief years but yesterday

Where I see the world through your eyes

life long as mind, time enough anyway



Save the shadow echoes of my weeping

for what you took with you from me

My drive to live two lives, yours in my keeping

hold her twice on earth, you never knew your first love



You my guardian angel where I stumble in the dust

whispering the world forgets and no one is watching

The empires even made of silver turn to rust

the ice storm's unknown paths a praying mantis crouching



Life got busy, full of there and then elation's

as I in turn built a nest, watched over my hatch-lings

So I sent you to spring break, Daytona vacation

you released me from your bonds of earth and the beyond



But my constant dreams are changing as we meet again

the seas of entropy colliding, will our memories stand?

Or be forgotten as your sibling's to me out of touch, not moved on

who could not face you through the granite slabs and plaques of brass?



* * *First Day Above Zero
by L. Edgar Otto on Sunday, February 13, 2011 at 12:06pm

First Day Above Zero L. Edgar Otto 02-13-11





Even the murder of crows is happy

their squawks individually and in profusion

That their numbers filling the sky

Will find plenty in awakening spring



The blond comes out of the coffee shop

to make a private call, she has no coat

Her loose blouse shows off her martini glass breasts

love to be reborn again and grow, she is springtime



The kings of the earth are embalmed that

they will not return thru the chaos of Pieces

Freedom made formal in cycles of formality

abandoned like a familiar lover, she remakes herself



We cannot escape their ghosts, only deal again

In violence or of peace, love and its cacophony



* * *Dragons in the Foam
by L. Edgar Otto on Friday, February 18, 2011 at 1:12pm

Dragons in the Foam L. Edgar Otto 02-19-11



Grasshopper, how can you expect to walk on the rice paper and not wrinkle it?



As you eat the Botan candy its wrapper made of transparent rice tastes to you of cellophane.



Are the dragons in the foam not the same creatures as if they're looking in a mirror?

All things being the same, you taste the one but cannot taste the other?



What does it matter that they have five toes, of if the candle you lite its connected by or surrounded by other flames at some distance, synchronized like fireflies?



Nor that the pyramids we build have steps in tune with the planets in the sky and seasons, our shifting zero or that at some beginning or end in our reach to the top of the world imagine them covered smooth with alabaster and crystal finials?



We speak of mythical creatures as if they part of the natural zodiac without them leaving holes while in our meditations we awaken to the thought we too are mythical.



Caught between idolatry and godhead, we beggars in the paradoxes of learning, of seeking, we cloudy foam perceivers, our hearts burning in worship of deceivers



* * *What Middle Class?
by L. Edgar Otto on Thursday, March 10, 2011 at 3:41pm

When I see the signs saying the rich are attacking the middle class I think of all the times the entrenched bureaucrats keep the poor down. So what if you lose 3000 more a year? Back then that would have kept me going two or three years being I had a third world economy. When the gas price is high the police do not routinely hassel the poor as they are wont to do. I expected nothing for service to the country but did not think the VA would be my land war in asia and a ticket to second class citizenship that precluded oportunties I had as entitlements everyone else had as a non-veteran. All but that I was not disabled. Full college through grad school and with very high entry exams.



What is the university really but a business and a source of someone's idea of change- at least giving the minorities lip service but no real help? I made the mistake of thinking it was a place to learn and do research and find some reasonable qualifications and credentials.



Hutchingson, well I appied there and the state at the time gave them tax breaks for more local employment. Now they say business is slow and machines do the work better- and they have outsourced a plant in Thailand!



You cannot make someone hire you. You cannot force a university to admit you. What is a union but a tool against the threat of communism long past? Unemployment? Social Security? Who is the enemy in our new Sputnik Era Mr. Obama? And what does it achieve but passing on the cost of things to the people down the line? Or in the case of the university the raising of the tuition? What sort of fairness is it that we pay more to attract new faculty than those already with tenure on a pay grade? What if this was not done everywhere?



If the women, provided they are trained in something more concrete than feminism 101, are to receive better treatment and pay from the universities in which they are a majority where the minority citizen males have lost half the ground they had before civil rights- what does citizenship mean anyway?- then they should start by making sure that this idea of tenure by teachers, competent or not, in the grade schools is abolished in favor of merit and results and not just some social self fulfilling prophesy of a constitutency of professional degrees.



But I do not mean to sound like the last and before that selfish generation- I would have walked away from the debate as most veterans who served (and did not claim some sort of sickness- although some who need help most certainly do not get it) had it not been a burden on my family- and an ongoing burden for their generation.



I understand the expectations of the bureaucrats and the income maintence ( for god sake if you go to job service and even if you do not have to go to that professional protester who claims he was in Nam and gets compensation for some sort of wound- do not accept a job as dish washer for they will maintain your income on that forever.)



So, I do not feel sorry for you one bit- and I will honor the constitution and democratic process sick of all the behind the scenes infighting in Wisconsin as if they take turns trying to screw the people over from both parties.
I am also Spring
by L. Edgar Otto on Friday, March 18, 2011 at 11:02am

I am also Spring L. Edgar Otto March 17, 2011





I am also spring

when one can fall in love again

With this city, forget the winter bears

who do not hibernate but walk

Half hungry with inches coats of ice

just as the first men moved into the tundra

Without the benefit of the discovery of fire



I am the melting snow

grime and broken crystals

Solid baggage loves first drops

a roller coaster building hail

Falling, evaporating even in the cold

Seeking the shafts of sun once shunned

snowcover blinds me in its lingering lies.



* * *
Of Great Pyramids and Astrophysics
by L. Edgar Otto on Monday, March 28, 2011 at 10:32am

Of Great Pyramids and Astrophysics L. Edgar Otto 03-28-11





The street lights rise over the melting snowbank

leaving a long shadow on the sidewalk



I feel the music of it in the soft contours

here and there a bunny's paw prints, avalanche



Icy tells over the layers of snow and wind, sunlight

wasted this walk out of the way, countless crystals



But I would not change the song, deconstruct its

message, I like keys lost still there in the parallel universe



Perhaps I still cling to the myth of right and wrong

winter struggle not like the storms to be ruthless



Yet the windchill can be stimulating in the dunes

digging children on the beach, a puzzle of a dog's vertebrae



The scavenger gull eyes us, lovers skirt by the waves

arm in arm and bundled still in their innocence



The young lady screams stumbling over the man castle

we made just before the tide line, and the sitting sun



The old judge by his walks, the city streets and sea walls

picks up another marble, cat's-eyes and earths



Render Unto Caesar
by L. Edgar Otto on Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 10:24am

Render Unto Caesar



Three government officials walking thru the woods, a president, a governor, and a civil servant come across a large bag of gold coins. They divide it into three.



The governor says: "I will give 30% to the people for national security and jails and incentives for corporations to move into my state, and keep the rest."



The president says: "I will give 30% to health care, recycling, global warming and other environmental concerns, second hand smoke and the homeless disabled, and keep the rest."



The civil servant bureaucrat says, the people are sovereign, they are God."



"Hear, hear", the others shout to agree."



"I will toss mine into the air and let God take what He wants, and keep the rest."


Leons and Lionessence
by L. Edgar Otto on Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 3:50pm

Leons and Lionessence L. Edgar Otto 04-06-11



*1 - A lepton may change generations as a measure of its mixed mass, but with respect to lionessence its mass is opaque and its spin is absolute



*2 - A quantum leopard may change "flavors"



*3 - A quantum leopardon may not change flavors or colors



*4 - A leopardon contains an intelligible number of leons



*5 - A felix of leons may decay or combine



*6 - Felices of leons may combine opaquely



*7 - Leons obey partition theory across the span of a quasic field of so many binary subcells



*8 - Leon prides vary over local regions of the calicontinuum



*9 - Prides may connect or leap opaquely such that lionessence and essense globally work together



*10 - A constant or invariant value in the uncertainty of the quantum cat may vary values and structures by Tabbylation (quasi-contiguity flows both ways across and between virtual and opaque mirrors)



*11 - A quantum cat has nine lives and always lands on its feet if falling



*12 - A quantum cat may vanish int a black hole of itself reduced to hair ball catastrophies as there are no paths but cataracts



*13 - Quantum cats tangle balls of string theorists



*14 - "Cats have fleas with little fleas and little fleas upon them and so on, ad infinitum . . ."

* * *Semi-transparent Mirrors
by L. Edgar Otto on Friday, April 8, 2011 at 3:20pm

Semi-transparent Mirrors

L. Edgar Otto 08-08-11





You who crave my touch

cocooned in your sticky webs

Compensate by sight

present to me obtuse angles

Around corners with perfection

Brighter head on your explosion



Thus I drink of your rays of light

that darkness fades it not

My crystal radio my mind amplifies

finds the sweet spots, sparking cat whiskers

As whispering stars in motion I hear

the snow belt city, double pleasure mint gum



Our glass windows seen not heard

we reach beyond the light and whips of strands

Your stinging hair in a pick up truck on the way

to the Springfield Fair I so cradle you

How else in our entangled synchronicity

we both awake or give in to sleep?



We both in our ground of sensations

see the other dimly, less intense, or wise

In this world, in this life, in time less than frozen

half again beyond light our event horizon

Glues us to each others half fulfilled dreams

all there is we will not leave our shared warmth



* * *In Search of Mertyl the Snapping Turtle
by L. Edgar Otto on Tuesday, April 12, 2011 at 4:09pm

In Search of Mertyl the Snapping Turtle L. Edgar Otto 04-12-11



Bungle and Scorp played hooky to explore the estuary. The hint of summer to come too much for the long closed classroom. The followed the Little Ditch through the reeds skirting the quicksand mud in the mudflats and sometimes had to jump as high as the dragonflies over them to breathe from the blanket of methane fog.



Like the older boys who sometimes set a muskrat trap-line for the pelts and selling the meat in the inner city of Norfolk town, they were trying to catch the great old snapping turtle that eluded them. They planned to hold it up by its tail and show it off with it snapping but not reaching their hand like the older boys did with just the smaller ones.



Last time in the salty Creek just before the fences of the Naval Ship Yard, Scorp has spotted Ole Mertyl near the bank and reached down and grabbed it tail much impressing Bungle. But it pulled away very strongly, and it did not help that its tail was slimy covered with algae.



* * *

"Where is our splorin' flag?" Bungle asked. He would take the role of sidekick or Russel to Davy Crocket when they went exploring. Both of them carried walking sticks, Scorp carried the flag.



"Well, it was gone for a week and finally I found Cagey using it for a table cloth for her tea set. She seemed a little scared I found her behind the chest-o-drawers. I was happy she thought it beautiful, all the curls and sunrise and the two perching birds, flamingo on white and the saying Dominion of Scorpio. So I smiled and said she could keep it."



* * *



Bungle, called that from the song for a nickname, "Bingle Bangle Bungle I don't want to leave the Congo, no, no, no no; no no, no no, noooh!" pointed out the red headed girl in the baseball cap.

Scorp felt a little attracted to her, and had not thought of her until one day he watch a television show with his boy and recognized the Pink Ranger.



"She's always actin' like a tom boy. She called you funny boy last time when you thought it was flag boy."



"Yeah, somthin' seems strange that girls are made so different. I thought that the way we were made was just about how everyone was made and made the right way. You know she has a cracking deep voice but somehow I can still hear she is a girl, cooties and all."



* * *October Eyes of Childhood and Niel
by L. Edgar Otto on Wednesday, April 13, 2011 at 9:53am

October Eyes Of Childhood L. Edgar Otto 04-12-11



When the cradle of our childhoods is secure, so full and complete that world the children's eyes see wide magic in the wisp's of lines and the moon a thousand rainbow colors in the white. Their eyes grow tired, their mood colic cranky, bored and outgrowing their swaddling clothes and baby shoes in a wink of an eye, smug and satisfied, their wide dreams of light inside them reflected on their cave walls conjure angel wings in the closets and bogeymen dwelling under the bed.



Scorp went back to the old house on Derby Road a lifetime later. The small tree they planted in the front yard was so wide and tall, but the old oaks a little further down the ditch, once dwarfing in girth and height tenfold over those now that they planted now were gone. The children's magic forest and unreachable tree houses became a wide empty parking lot all the way to the highway.



The scribbles he and Bungle made on the back of a National Geographic map, tales of exploits, wars of super heroes, the reach for space and stars, the fanfare and wardrobe of kings, but their eyes a little older saw only the doodles, knots, and dots, pencil fading grays only a child would draw or maybe a great ape. So too in the shade, the long walk past tall metal fences blocking his old paths and way, long diversions after all day coming back home from play outside, the shadow of the planted tree gave respite from the rising heat as if a desert mirage to walk on its distortions and all he saw in the world now from the canopy of remembrance of his childhood was those lines, long fences. parking spaces marked, forgotten all the magic.



Niel



Niel was half St. Bernard and half collie. He was a constant companion of Scorp and Bungle, guarding the younger kids no matter how they stepped on his tail or rode him like a pony. Let no stranger dare look threatening to them. In there latch key days Niel looked after them more than their parents. Sleepy over seas most of the year in the Navy. Eva Gunn, visiting family and friends for long hours sometimes in the bars, Niel when she was home - it was easy in her sleepy morning to get a note excusing them from a day of school, she would sign it and go back to sleep- but the kids would turn it in three days later missing a month of the fifth grade - Niel would come along with Scorp and Bungle on their exploration along the tidewaters.



The last house on the street to the Little Ditch, well, here they called it the Big Ditch as the brush and it grew wider. A sign the owner put in their yard said "Cricket Hollow" aptly named. Thru a child's eyes even the black crickets were a very distinct and different, almost equal species and their world teemed replete with all the denizens, the biters and dragon flies that they could never catch or see up close unless they found one on the pavement to admire its prismatic transparent wings and metallic body of blues and greens. Only at times would they stand still with there finger held high in the air and have one alight as if on a reed.



Yet a little up from the bank before Big Ditch crossed under the highway widening into the estuary. One last house with a metal fence against the greenery full of briar's and honeysuckles, poison ivy. In it was a collie and Niel would race up to see her. One year Bungle and Scorp were large enough that together they could lift him over the fence. They wanted to help him play with his friend.



When Niel fell to the the other side before long he mounted the Lassie. Bungle and Scorp were not quite sure what Niel was doing yet it struck them as that don't talk about adult mystery that often provoked laughter among them while the kids pretended not to know what they meant or be paying attention. After awhile a gray haired old lady came out with a broom saying "How in the world did you get in here?" and eventually she chased him out the gate.



Now Sleepy got great delight in ripping off a great bomb of flatulence and the children's laughter. You see, our family ate quite a lot of beans. He would grin and the kids would already begin laughing. Well, it got to the point he could control it enough to play "shave and a hair cut two bits" Eva managed to do it eventually and Scorp almost could. But as the years passed Sleepy reached doing it six times in a row. One morning the kids awakening him early he almost reached his record of seven bars but just making it to the last "shave and a hair cut" the notes fading out to almost imperceptibility he stopped saying "Sorry kids". But just then Old Niel who always slept by their bed boomed out a loud "two bits!



* * *The Emperor and No-Clothes
by L. Edgar Otto on Saturday, April 16, 2011 at 12:39pm

The Emperor and No-Clothes L. Edgar Otto 01-15-11



The warrior-emperor had other things on his mind, establishing a dynasty by a great public ceremony to wed the kingdoms as much as to claim the princess.



The realm was long at peace anyway so when the scientist advisers for war machines came to him suggesting a detailed survey and analysis of his new realms he approved and dismissed them right away whispering to his minister to give them funds. The donned there white coats right away.



"What shall we do? The Emperor did not ask nor read the stars,. We can study anything."



"Let us seek out that naked Jain who stopped him in his tracks from crossing the Indus. Our emperor would not question how valuable the results of those observation, that or fear to look."



"That Jain has such respect for living things he is careful not to even harm the lice on his head."



"Good," he looked at the scribe," It is settled, so begin the records. We will go unto the Jain and carefully collect the varieties of nits and lice and other denizens of his body and classify all the species."


Through Blinds, Glass-ly
by L. Edgar Otto on Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 10:33am

Through Blinds, Glass-ly L. Edgar Otto April 2011



Another snow on the Robin's back

Cruel month of spring, false starts, new loves



But I cling to your red breast

distant your touch, my cradle second best



I will trade our hugs for light that

your shining glow sleeps not alone at night



Your heart in frozen creeping time

Builds up to storms of fire and ice



Dancing in your skin, talking to the air

As I pick my nose, you muss up your red shift hair



In this world or in some other, further

pretend we do not see, so close our dance together



Oh, you've dyed your hair in compliment

to robin's egg blue, too late to make it true



You who take our light for hugs

where nature's drapes matches the rugs...



* * *Through Blinds, Glass-ly
by L. Edgar Otto on Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 10:33am

Through Blinds, Glass-ly L. Edgar Otto April 2011



Another snow on the Robin's back

Cruel month of spring, false starts, new loves



But I cling to your red breast

distant your touch, my cradle second best



I will trade our hugs for light that

your shining glow sleeps not alone at night



Your heart in frozen creeping time

Builds up to storms of fire and ice



Dancing in your skin, talking to the air

As I pick my nose, you muss up your red shift hair



In this world or in some other, further

pretend we do not see, so close our dance together



Oh, you've dyed your hair in compliment

to robin's egg blue, too late to make it true



You who take our light for hugs

where nature's drapes matches the rugs...



* * *I Miss the Sea Too
by L. Edgar Otto on Saturday, April 23, 2011 at 1:11pm

I Miss the Sea Too L. Edgar Otto April 23. 2011



I miss the sea too, and would miss it more

if my world had not slipped more toward slumber

became a desert



Somewhere under the poles, dry the ice

or in some crater on a moon, what's left of

pristine vital water



Or Saturn with his crown of hex

sends forth the narrow beams of sparks

to explain, heat my core



I lost in the sands like all who thirst

recall replete the waters, now for anyone to hear

write my last poems in blood



She has such soft and pure spring rain skin

so formal her dress in the bar at night

seeing my hidden drink, not her straw man companion



Why did she steal a glance and smile

her eyes are not dry and over shadowed nor wrinkled

worn as the spirit spent lady beside me?



I gaze out across the landscape, regrets in sweet solitude

even the concrete jungle is a desert, light and vermin

going nowhere, in shadows everywhere



Yet my heart grows brighter in the whispers of the stars

I too once daring the surf of hurricanes and undertows

fearing not the chance of sharks, insensitive the jellies stings



I shall not forget you as our waters are left only in the stones

we once a new and baby galaxy too fat so great our novas

of drama, so hungry for metallic dust, not teasing sugars taste



At a distance I loved you as no other, that you already know

As we leave the bowl of stars with wisps and whips of afterglow



* * *The Rose Between the Ages of Poetry and Prose
by L. Edgar Otto on Sunday, April 24, 2011 at 2:31pm

The Rose Between the Ages of Poetry and Prose

L. Edgar Otto 01-24-11





Here falling up or down into the aether

its shadows a firmer ground than light



I recall my explorations through the

petals of a rose, its scent and velvet feel and taste



Oh that was another time, no noble savage place

to explore before the age of steam, then Witches of Endor



When poerty was empire and progress, that or gyres

were one cannot see the sun save its darkside fires



If this is what we take with us, shorn of thorn

life was no waste, no rose spiders for butterflies



'Tis said the hourglass figure is a sign of intelligence

I must say you were very smart



Back when Time's river flowed four fold in its floods

as did the budding stars within my heart



* * *
* * *Cheshire Grins and Other Generalizations of Euclidean Space
by L. Edgar Otto on Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 9:36am

Cheshire Grins and Other Generalizations

of Euclidean Space



Well, maybe this is all we can see of the Higgs particle, the U of the Cheshire cat's smile.

Not quiet the feisty quantum cat with nine lives but a more subtle creature. In any case one might go down the white rabbit hole- time speeds up and the white rabbit races because he is late. maybe it is not that we wonder where dreams and dust come from as if nothing, a black hole of sorts, but from some mysterious source appears the white rabbit hole.



Now, sweet Alicia playing with her little cubes written on them Latin letters, does puzzles made by the old Oxford don logician- wondering what keys he holds in the bulge as he punts along the back of the Granta in Cambridgeshire, his caterpillar blowing smoke rings and letters around hidden truths and hidden dreams in which we are always at times the Mad Hatter celebrating the un-birthdays as the clocks and planets turn, capturing but the promise of a smile in photographic light- Alice does not know yet how to get thru the doors to that kingdom of hearts as she discovers not what he is smoking but how a few mushrooms might change her perception of scale.



Let the kids play while for appearances sake, that there be no scandal as the old Don dates the chancellor's wife and Alice's mother- or fill their heads with questions like looking glass written poems and lesser quantum fires on the other side of the mirror. Or running in place as so many do in dreams challenge them with the fundamental question- How is a raven like a writing desk?



* * *
* * *