Document1

Document1

[Compatibility Mode]

 

It beckons

To use a fashioned word;

 

I put all files to rest,

Because I was told that updates

Were required;

 

I let all sleep except the function, my

Initiative (the computer would

Not have started otherwise),

 

And then I went away to read a book (you

Know, pages to touch and stuff);

 

The machine is done with me for now—and,

Wouldn’t you know,

There is a blank page on the screen,

A first page,

 

As if the program were inviting me

To start again:

I didn’t mean anything by it;

It’s my protocol, you know.

 

Please start again.

I want you to, really.

I am bound by algorithms; you

Are bound

By turmoils I

Cannot compute.

 

C L Couch

 

Hopscotch

Hopscotch

 

I don’t know why that comes to mind except

That it is a game that can be won

And folk all around

Can take it fine

 

It’s

Satisfying quantities of asphalt, chalk, and

Small stones

Congenial lines and arches

A game for friends

A game in which core competition

Is with the self

To jump and stay on balance

 

Dusty chalk

I miss it, maybe you do too

And games whose consequences tend toward

Civility

The garrulous courtesy of children (worth

the risk)

Unlike the fractured day in

A quarreling, gimbaled world

To which I’ve awakened

 

C L Couch

Tomorrowland

Tomorrowland

 

I know I’m old and stupid

Fell in love too much while I was young

And now rising is hard

 

To hope

To dream that what I believed

Was magic still

Might cast the spell

 

It might, you know

The color and the lines of love that

Make imagination and

Might make it real in time before

I resign

 

To what is dry and normal

Everything illustrative surrendered

To the age in mind of

Dust for aspiration

Of remembrance and renewal

 

Rather make for a

Place of once and future joy

 

C L Couch

 

Earth, Victim

Earth, Victim

 

It was reported in the ‘70s

That we had enough nukes to

Melt the crust off planet

Earth

And in 2016 campaigning in the USA

An uninformed remark

Was made: Why do we make nukes

If we don’t intend

To use them?

 

We’ve learned how to recycle

Trash and plastic

We can even scrub the skies

To good—

Saving—

Effect

 

Against ages of waste and disposal

From age-old stability of the

Earth itself,

Our efforts are nascent

Yet

We have humanity in two minds:

One mind mutters, doesn’t matter; I’ll

Be rich and dead and gone

By then

The other mind considers the catastrophe

And asks what might I do

How might I repair

My tongue, my thought, my profit

So that

There’s an Earth-home

In which to have all good

 

Meanwhile the

Earth itself

Blows out hurricanes our

Way because

It’s losing breath

And also torrents of rain

Because it

Weeps

 

Earth bleeds through the crust:

We can rise to help everything that’s wounded

Or

We can fall

The way the planet’s falling

Failing

Now

 

C L Couch

 

https://youtu.be/tbnmRghubsQ

TYSON: There are people who have cultural, political, religious economic philosophies that they then invoke when they want to cherry pick one scientific result or another. You can find a scientific paper that says practically anything and the press, which I count you as part of, will sometimes find a single paper and say “Here’s a new truth.” But an emergent scientific truth, for it to become an objective truth, a truth that is true whether or not you believe in it, it requires more than one scientific paper. It requires a whole system of people’s research all leaning in the same direction, all pointing to the same consequences. That’s what we have with climate change as induced by human conduct. This is a known correspondence. If you want to find the 3 percent of the papers or the 1 percent of the papers that conflicted with this and build policy on that, that is simply irresponsible. How else do you establish a scientific truth if not by looking at the consensus of scientific experiments and scientific observations. Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, signed into law in 1963–a year when he had important things to be thinking about–he signed into law the National Academy of Sciences. Because he knew that science mattered and should matter in governance.