everyone else is threatening

alas!  just look at how threatening everyone else is...

imagine, if you will,
that we lived in a totally insane country
that spewed out weapons and death
like the Great Strutting STrumpet harnesses hate.

that contrary to its myths about good intentions,
this theoretical democracy had been exporting death
in its Moby Dick obsession for "full spectrum dominance"
since day one.

imagine how it would be if neither faction
in its closed-rank two-party system
were willing to do anything about it,
because they were both being funded by it's chief beneficiaries.

imagine that they hired guns
to keep their dissenting population in check,
empowered, of course,
to shoot the least priveleged at will.

what would that look like?
how much death would its own people
inflict on themselves?
who would they eventually
elect to lead them?

a hemorrhaging silence

in 2014, while 55 soldiers
lost their lives in foreign occupations,
269 active service members
and over 7,400 veterans
succeeded in taking their own.

what this says,
unanimously consigned to a hemorrhaging silence
by terror's own trinity
of patriotic profit, duplicitous parties, and lobotomizing media,
says more about
what they're about
than anything else that they say.

happy new year

as it happened,
this didn't matter to Americans,
despite Orwell's warnings and Edward Snowden's
breathlessly selfless sacrifice
(and notwithstanding the prattle about 'protecting our freedom').
but with the escalating shock
of big brother's karmic devolution
into such a blatantly ugly incarnation...

"perhaps they'll listen now."

Incredulous Musings on a Buttered Bandersnatch * * * * * * (the Russians STILL aren't coming)

my dear American-identifying fellow earthlings, enough already
with the 'traitor' stuff!  don't you realize how the dead disrupters
coming into office will use that?  kindly refrain from channeling
McCarthy, and bandying about propaganda for the military monster
long enough to consider the following points that, strangely enough,
are being obscured by the media:

the CIA has YET to supply ANY actual evidence, and their own former
agents are laughing at them.  don't you remember the 'absolute proof'
that Assad used chemical weapons on his own people (which turned out to
be the Turkish president - he that spits knives at the Kurds - scheming
with the ISIS terrorists we and our allies insist on supporting)?  can it
be possible that you've already forgotten where we left all those
invisible weapons of mass destruction?

and for Pete's freakin' sake, it was a LEAK, not a hack!  Julian Assange,
who's actually EARNED a reputation for honesty, and the former ambassador
who received the infamous emails, have both repeatedly stated that the leak
came from within Hillary's camp.  of COURSE the Russians picked up on this.
they're only trying to keep up with us (we, the name-calling pots who spy on
ALL of CREATION, who warped our constitution to 'protect' ourselves, wrote
the book on Cyber Warfare, and have interfered in COUNTLESS elections,
not to mention murdering several Democratically elected presidents, while
crushing the dubious reflection of our "beacon", over and over again).

and even if the Russians were responsible for bringing the leaks to our
attention, so what?  do you really believe that the swing voters experienced
burning bush epiphanies and switched to the Great Strumpet because they
actually read the Podesta emails and became incensed at Hillary's contempt
for Democracy?  and if this unreported, miraculous event occurred, and
these elusive, wide-awake Americans actually reacted, for the first time
in decades, to their leaders betraying them, what then?

the revealing illumination lurking beneath the cries of "treason" is that
someone provided the American People with proof that Wall Street
paid Hillary several small fortunes to privately assure them that she'd
been lying to to us all along, as well as a confirmation that our guesses
were correct, her apparatchiks had indeed stolen the nomination from
Bernie.  would you rather this information had been kept from us?

is that how Democracy works for you?

while the bipartisan gang of unquestioned, unelected Regime-Changers
have made it abundantly clear that Putin is in their sites, the Party
that isn't actually Democratic has broken all its mirrors.  so this
motley band of professional deflectors of everyone else's attention,
along with the usual mis-informants at the Times and the Post
(taking a break from calling the independent voices they haven't
drowned yet "fake news"), and a little last minute help in the
form of a parting slight of projection by our 'Transparency President',
have hit on a way to kill three bedraggled, embarrassing birds with a
single ricocheting stone:

thwarting the anticipated thaw in Cold War II,
shirking the dismal failure of the recent electoral circus,
and diverting and funneling our frail attempts
to focus flighty attention on the blatant internal threats
to our (exceptionally apparent) Democracy
SOMEWHERE the bloody hell ELSE.

- Evan Hawthorn, the 31st of December, 2016

new years present

auspicious felicitations
on the observance of the commencement
of the next arbitrary segment
of the cluttered string
of temporal considerations

appended to the
weighted and mythic,

human perception of the present.

which is to infer,
that was then,

(which isn't),

and this is all that is.

but in this space,
with its limitless potential
for placing bounded things,

where a presence of awareness
finds awareness of the ever present,

a magical possibility resides.

for notwithstanding
distracting illusions and reinforcing delusions,

circumventing conventions and deflections and denials,

the intrusion of insecurities and ricocheting ramifications,

and the fraying disruption of the noise, noise, noise,

it is ever thus:

to try and stay focused on,

endeavour to illuminate,

and fill with living love,

the glimpse that glimmers future,

the treasure beyond measure,

the key that opens everything,

the ever present now.

- Evan Hawthorn, the 30^th of December, 2016

2016

the delusions of denial astonish me.
there are people actually bandying about memes
casting aspersions on something called "2016".

as if the lines on calendars aren't fabrications,
like all the other borders.

as if there's the faintest reason
to expect things to get better
- any day now.

as if seventy years haven't taught us
that we haven't a chance
until we all come together and take it on ourselves:

the Lakotas and Veterans Against the War and Black Lives Matter,
the workers in India and the children under the drones,
the millions in our prisons and the billions in their hunger,
fleeing misery and the rogue regime-changers' path;

for that's what it will take to
defeat the ruling psychopaths
and their zombie army
of corporate operatives the world over,
who prey on the future of life itself.

the sinister implications and revelatory timing of an unequivocal coup de grace

i don't wish to be an alarmist.
but Quasimodo, report to your tower.

"liberal" good-cop Ascending Saint Obama
just pulled Democracy's plug,
enabling,
with a fell stroke of his irony-leaking pen,
and without even the pretense of a comical "debate",
the Great Strutting STrumpet
to "legally" stamp out
all those pesky, unpatriotic
(unregurgitating)
sources of information
that
        "undermine"
                                 "national"
                                                     "security"
                                                                          "interests".