Turtle Island

'Turtle Island'
expresses the idea
that the Universe, the Earth, or North America
can be understood as the
back of a great turtle,
a mysterious natural consciousness.

it's that last word that intrigues me.

for i'd known, since my instincts opened my eyes
that the myriad kindred spirits
lighting up our
fellow bits of stardust
had the same claims to sentience
as we.

from this i divined
that the human-obsessed entity
personified as "god"
was a near-sighted attempt
to fill the space
a perceived absence makes
of that same
extended connection;
what i address as
Universe or Great Mystery,
taking a cue
from those who
willingly refrain
from the arrogant conceit
that would limit or define
the unfathomable collective consciousness
of our trillion, trillion, trillion
concentric selves
(whether with pale,
cookie-cutter archetypes
sprung from our
little twig
on the primate tree,
or no).

but it would seem that our
ancestors are telling us
that the frame of our
self-identified awareness,
the trembling stage in this
infinite panorama of elusive illusion,
is conscious itself.

the breathtaking ramifications
are as the numberless seams
of a dream within a dream.
**** ** **** ** **** ** ****
- Evan Hawthorn, the 20^th of February, 2017

ensnaring hares with scary bears (oh, my!)

it's astonishing how many sentient persons

are caught in the snares
of the latest Russian scare,

brought to us by the very people
who crushed
the independence of the sixties,

subverted the dreams of Latin America,

opened the clouds of hell
above Southeast Asia,

and condemned large swaths
of the Middle East

to rediscovering the stone age,

the dependably duplicitous CIA,

with the righteously remunerated,
self-aggrandizing encouragement

of their insatiable enablers

those virtuous beacons of truth,
the Times and the Post,

and the Party that pretends
to be Democratic.

now this league of lesser,
more effective demons

is condemning the
Great Strutting STrumpet's

outrageous crop
of dead disruptors.

not for being a despicable gang

of disastrous,
disassembling dissemblers,
no.

for communicating with the Russians

and attempting to interrupt
the eternal pounding
of nuclear war drums.

(and just when our Nazi bedfellows

were so handily installed in the Ukraine,

throwing over yet another

displeasingly independent election,

consigning yet another
population to penury,

at the very same time
our nooses are strung
so invitingly

around those inherently evil people
born in Russia, Iran, and China,

and the skyrocketing
profits of Armageddon

beckon so brightly
from the glossy pages
of self-indulgent,
suicidal prospectuses.)

this talking with,
instead of threatening,
the Russians,

who've embarrassed our terror spin
once again

(by actually taking territory AWAY from ISIS),

was perhaps the ONLY tattered shred
of questionable evidence

that the 45^th corporate representative

of the insanely profitable military machine

wasn't intent on destroying

every vestige of humanity
his piggy eyes can see.

but no president since Eisenhower

has successfully waylaid
the war plans,

er…"foreign policy",

of the Deep State's
feed-me-Seymour,
regime-changing,
border-bashing,
"exception" pivoting
(from sea to oily sea),

threat-inventing,
peace-circumventing,
un-elected and irremovable,
heedless-headed
hydra
of "Defense".

and they're NOT going to let it happen now.

*

there can be all kinds of dissension

amoungst the Empire's minions.

(indeed, as Noam Chomsky points out,

that's how the rumours of Democracy spread.)

but stepping away
from a lockstep subservience

to the manifestly infested,
unquestioned myth

of America's
divinely predestined
Right to Rule the World

is NEVER tolerated.

that is, in fact, why Martin Luther King

was taken from us.

of course the Russians,

and every other government capable of it,

spy on each other.

all diseased people
who feel the need to lead

turn out to be paranoid.

it's quite the nature of the beast.

and this unrelenting insistence
on secrecy
(thus preempting
the unthinkable situation
of an honestly informed Citizenry)

coupled with
an exponentially expanding,
virtually limitless
eavesdropping on us

is the precedent
our very own
"transparency president" set
(at an astronomical, "1984"-shaming level).

but blaming our fiasco of an election

on Boris and Natasha,

notwithstanding its fashionable nod

to McCarthy's apple-pie,

with-us-or-against-us,

righter-than-white tradition,

is a desperate and pathetic slap
of last ditch projection.

a refusal to face
what several decades

of bipartisan defunding
of the commons

was all about.

a denial par excellence

of the quadrennial circus'

descending death rattle

dearth of choice.

an acrobatic avoidance

of the 'Democratic' un-Democratic
primary race,

the FBI's final-hour,
branch-breaching sneak attack,

and the graceless coup de grace

of Hillary casting aspersions

on the very people she needed

to cast swing votes
for her.

if it's so upsetting to contemplate

the latest hatching of
congenitally disingenuous,
purchasable persons

discussing invariably
hidden-from-their-people

inter-conspiratorial relations

with their Russian counterparts,

why wasn't there a REVOLUTION

when the courageous,
recovered acolyte

(Edward Snowden),

that fugitive from American-style "justice"

held at bay by 'liberal' yapping hounds,

informed us that President Obama

(he who chased him to the ends of the earth)

was sharing all of our private and personal,

constitution-protected
communications and data

with the "five eyes"

(the national spy outfits of Britain,
Australia, New Zealand, and Canada)?

can it be that this

ridiculously misplaced thing
called 'patriotism'

(this fear-based grist
for manufacturing walls
between human beings)

only gets offended,
or swells into deputized censors

when the 'foreigners'
raising our
eternally vigilant eyebrows

don't speak English?

funny, that.

**** * * ****

- Evan Hawthorn, the 26^th of February, 2017

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