stay soft in your heart

 stay soft in your heart, as the rain

 quick in your care, as an embrace

 fair in your features, as a countenance

 reflecting the heart of your maker.

why i cannot sleep tonight

if only one- the one who has been on my mind half the night- reads this, and it changes her, then it has been worth it all. but, if this is for you, another, because God will not allow me to go to sleep tonight without writing this, then accept it.

when faced with what happened in your life...the heartbreaking childhood...because other people made horrible life decisions that could have ruined the entirety of your childhood...and your life...you must compose the story of your survival. the brutal truth. it is there because you must compose- write, interpret, sing, dance- the truth. not a religious blanket thrown over your life so that it looks like everything is fine now. No, you must face every last sentence of it. it does no good to write platitudes, to write around the subject. we do not want your rubbish. you can make it a poetic journey, yet it reflects nothing. vacuous. what does that accomplish? do you think that God is impressed by a piece of Art, a book, or a random collection of something that is not your heart and soul? 

i lie awake because i had to repent. i tried writing someone else's story. that isn't my job. you have to go back and find out what really happened to you...not what you remember happened to you, but all that you went through, including the truth about your parents. 

one of the key verses in scripture reveals that the Spirit of the Living God can and will reveal everything to you. every point, every angle, every place each character in your story has played. even those who have died. and certainly, those who left you confused. God is not the author of confusion. You may have yelled up at Him as you wandered around, and you can be sure He heard your heart. But, did you hear His heart? He wants to tell the Whole story. What good is it if only part of the story is conveyed? 

God wants you to tell the story. All of it. Good night.

Silence in Red

 so beautiful, so tragic

this figure of vibrance...

this lion of ancient grace

slain by blind madmen

in a lust for destruction

in a lust for disgrace.

what Hell has awaken

stains alleys and sidewalks

bloodprints on buildings

bodybags in schoolrooms

lace, bows, ribbons all red

silence the sister of the dead.

An Interlude

 While I am working on my novel, I shall share with you a series of stories in a series called "The Speckled Seagull." Although I have written a fair number of these, I have not returned much to them in several years. I am revising them, re-orienting them more toward the central character- a woman extracted from her childhood in a different land, where she daily enjoyed the seashore, her father's nurturing love, and a time she desperately longs for. The story deals with her life as a woman, a mother,  a wife, and a 'speckled bird," not the common bird. Enjoy these short pieces.

a day in the school house

 she sharpened her pencil...until it filed down to a mere nub. but she was not there, she was watching a movie in her head...remembering the early days when she would walk with her father, hand-in-hand, her wee little one in his- down along the strand...in the days before America. before she lost him. and he lost her.

it was not the best of times, nor the worst, nor the in-between. not, in a sense, much different from anyone else growing up along the seacoast. she expected nothing but his big clammy hand, a cup of the warm stuff, and always that scrumptious-wool-blanket when the nights chilled her father's features so.

she played by the sea, took in it's breath, drank deep of it, and lived in those salty breezes, but as the pencil stub fell from her hand, she forgot herself and fell back into the present, in her place of exile. and as she cupped the pencil shavings in her hand, she glanced at the boys in the back of the classroom and smiled. for one day, they might grow up to be as tender as her father...

the ruddy-cheeked boy in row 4 raised a hand and the girls around him giggled.

"Uh...may I go to the restroom?"

"Why, of course, Billy. Take the pass and don't forget to sign out," she chirped.

the ruddy-cheeked boy left the room and the class continued working on a mathematics assignment meant to stimulate their secular side. she moved up and down the aisles, careful not to brush any chairs. the students worked feverishly, their pencils squeaking.

"You have ten minutes."

the ruddy-faced boy opened the classroom door, but it did not close. for behind it stood a man in a white collar, and that ubiquitous black outfit they all knew too well. for here at Saint Anne's Preparatory School, the children expected the bellowing voice to find their room, one time of the day or the other.

Father McCallister loved every one of them like his own children. but even more, he loved to read to them, just as his father had read to him. and when he saw the face of the still lovely teacher, he sighed. for she too knew what would come next...every one of them would try to finish early, and their scores might not be as good as the next class. they would enjoy themselves, listening to his tales as he spun them wildly through the air, and they were taken back to a time even he did not remember...a time when sailors sailed into ports of distant lands...

and that made her happy. happier than she had been for years. happy, remembering her childhood...before the boat, the nun, and the long voyage away from Prince Edward Island...

but when the bell rang, and she grabbed her purse and Doctor Scholls from under the teacher desk, she remembered to where she was returning, and why. and she held the purse tightly, her hands clasped like fingers around a throat, and she had a flashback...and saw the face of the child...her child...and the face of the stranger she had once called "love." 

the fallen

in memory of the thousands killed in the streets

one wanted to make his mother proud-

blessed with quick reactions, quick feet,

he excelled on a field his oppressors ignored

until he wandered into the wrong alley.

one wanted to make her father proud-

so she studied to show herself approved

and walked into the night with no hijab

with every student from her neighborhood.

one wanted to live a life divorced from the past

driving down I-95 following the lights home,

the smell of cigarettes and dull perfume

and a photo of her cousin on a cell phone.

one wanted to spread joy as a cosmetic surgeon

to fix the smiles of thousands of damaged children

in a world so coarse, cold, and unforgiving

she stood against the sea of oppression and fear.

one wanted to be the strong one, who stood up to evil

though his parents pleaded with him to stay inside the house

he boldly proclaimed: If i don't go, nothing will change.

so, he slipped into the night, into the crowd and gave his life.

the fallen, all of them, so numerous in the street

the people, gunned down, lives cut short by hate.

An adolescent's dream

 written during my adolescence

It whispers down on angel's wings,

 raising hands to the shattered sky

this wintry canopy of velvet white

leaves a spark of tears in my eye

the snow globe whirls round and round

like dream and song and sigh

but far from here you are, my dear 

so in my heart, my very soul, i cry.

If you will but seek your inner desire

you'll find that the longing is there

for i am deep inside your heart

embodied in my every prayer.

So come away from where you hide

And join me so that we may be One

And we can leave our pain behind

Like the setting of every sun.

A Note

 Just a quick note to say I will not be posting political pieces anymore as my audience clearly does not like them. It was an attempt to provide a steadier stream of prose while I am composing poetic fiction.

 I'll return with poetry, prose and poetic fiction another time. Currently, I am writing a novel. Later, this summer, I will hopefully have an author website and a creative project available there.

 Until next time, enjoy the 100 plus posts I have written.

Daithi

  

The Post-Globalist World

 This morning, when I woke, I had intended to go grocery shopping. I'd like to eat something other than ham, have fruit not called "apples," and resupply the fridge figuratively decimated by multiple snowstorms. But when I checked on my news feed, I saw that in the middle of the night, while my belly was suffering from a spicy relish, the US Military liberated the people of Venezuela from the Narco-Terrorist Regime of Maduro.

 And while I try not to make life all about politics, as I got enough of that from my father while he was living, the first Trump press conference in 2026 confirmed what I have been sensing in my mind and spirit- the Age of Regionalism is definitely here. 

Tucked in between the paragraphs -basic narrative- of what happened and why, the president and his secretary of state revealed some sharp revelations most of the press did not seem to grasp fully.

The United States of America cares more about protecting and influencing the western hemisphere than it does in interfering in the rest of the world. No one has the desire, other than those with Cold War hangovers, to promote a World Policeman mentality like numerous former presidents did.

Trump purposely referred to the "Donroe Doctrine" (Donald + Monroe) and his insistence that America (USA) needed to have good neighbors. He described, again, the Ukraine-Russia conflict as one "far away," a total departure from previous presidents. 

In light of his re-affirmation of the foreign policy doctrine formulated by the early US President, James Monroe, we can assume that the following scenarios are possible in the rest of his term or in the term of his likely successor:

The USA will "liberate" Cuba.

If the Mexican President does not act, the US Military will destroy the cartel network in Mexico.

The Colombian cartels and government have about three years to end cocaine trafficking, or they will find themselves like Venezuela...without the oil.

Chinese and Russian influence in the waters around Greenland will come to an end either from negotiation or an American military operation they are not prepared for. In light of that, the people of Greenland, are likely to call upon the American government for a political Protectorate (the USA already protects Greenland militarily). 

The Canadian federal government is on notice to leave the path to Socialism or risk the decoupling of part of Canada and the fracturing of the Canadian federation. 

In light of all these potential scenarios, and the acceleration of change throughout the world, we are finally leaving behind the old order and emerging in a post-globalist world.

Can you see life in scenes?

if we are observant, we can reflect on the past and re-imagine scenes, memories written and internal, that tell the story of our stories. many of those scenes have primary and secondary veins running through them, like a complete organ or system that one can visualize as part, section, whole, and even sinew. The latter is our bridge, or connection, between the perceived scenes that, like a chain, make up that story.

everything from our experience can be a relatable story for an audience. so, each scene that teaches a lesson, reflects a truth, or encourages one, we can add that scene to our testimony of life lessons.

the same is true for fiction- written or oral. every author tries to tell a story that has continuity, or what we used to call "flow." It is crucial, for the audience, if the story flows...every paragraph slipping into the next, with or without transitory images, words, or phrases. 

so, in the revision process, we can look at those scenes we write where the story "went off" and figure out if we can place one or two, or all of those scenes somewhere within our story.

someone older and more experienced argued that nothing written cannot be used for that story. it may not be in the first five minutes, the first chapter, the first 10 pages, but the idea, or the entire scene may be useful. and upon further reflection, you may find that the scene or idea is better suited for something you composed earlier. That has happened to me multiple times, including a scene that was dramatically creative but did not fit my current novel. Instead, it fit a series of off-the-wall pieces I have strung together as a skeleton for another novel, a comic piece like Catcher In The Rye.

we need not contain this revelation to literary writing either. the idea can be applied to long speeches, business proposals, policy statements, or bills for congress...

Waking up in the Accelerated World

 Like waking up from a dream where you had to fight a fire with whatever clothes could suffocate the flames...I woke up with a sense of urgency to put words on a screen. There is a fire awaiting our graduates and there is no mechanism to put out the flames. No mechanism that does not come with hard work not gathered from the statistical and analytical interpretation of printed pages. 

We are now living in "The Accelerated World." We can no longer just print off a page of whatever Google, ChatGPT, or Grok...an AI entity...responded to our queries. We not only have to interpret that dissemination, we have to do it in a way that defines our answers, that expands our parameters, and that leaves us a loci to build upon a theme. That may sit well with those of us who have accumulated a particular vocabulary or developed a deep sense of analytical discernment, but not those fed a juvenile education lacking those elements enabling the student of life a modus operandi to assimilate themselves into a world where the answers to the questions we ask are beyond their comprehension.

Why am I racing to put out the fire in the dream? Because we have a vast under-achieving class of people who cannot enter the level of thinking necessary to master the AI-influenced world. The system will inherently fail on a greater level as the new world accelerates. Without a rebuilding of the education system in light of that new revolution, we will be producing that underclass, that peasantry, that settles in the basement of the performance charts. 

Because learners are at such a dark disadvantage, those individuals must take the reigns of their own education. The teacher, without proper re-education, cannot be the agent of change since they have been wedded to a now failing approach. The way to enable the graduates of tomorrow to reach the level necessary to succeed in this new world requires critical analysis skills developed from a much more sophisticated and rigorous vocabulary development, with a reading level no educator proposed before. The student must read not two levels more but at least ten levels more than any graduate level entry student. They must reach a vocabulary level and critical analysis skill set we now expect from our doctoral-level students. Unfortunately, for today's secondary teacher, it requires that the intransigent system be removed from the equation so the student may excel. 

The fire is upon us, students, and your goal is to put it out with knowledge you must assimilate. You must rise above the copy and paste and build an intellectual base within that will weather the coming times when intelligence is paramount...or you will be relegated to the peasant class.

all the world was in black and white

the world was different some fifty years ago

when photos were glossy, but harder to picture

and you didn't have a second time to shoot

to frame the dark, the light, and the subject.

when Chronkite would say "that's the way it was"

and nobody watched past one in the morning,

i played with a Kodak hidden under the Pine

the finest plaid-wrapped present in the 1970s.

truth comes out following the finishing of a roll of film

like the photo of Santa's cookies where i drank Santa's milk

when we watched all the people a-passin' the peace

and the pretty girl beside me kissed me right on the lips

back when all the world was in black and white 

when we didn't have a clue about the absence of color

i captured a moment of everybody's time

in the window of my very first Kodak camera.

 

the endless melody

 when the music still surrounds 

then envelopes

the lines of your heart...

the cross beat

yours...and mine

shard-white shatters

scattered strands

cold silver tables

side by side by side

breath and bone 

the white cotton and the linen garment

one rising one settling both surrendering

one passing into another

one taste of afterlife

one drop of finality

passage.

The Coming Maturation of America

 The seeds of tomorrow's America are evident in X posts blasting involvement in distant foreign wars, gridlock in the mechanizations of federal government, and in paragraphs pining for a country where we focus less on everyone else and get our own house in order. There have been fervors of this sort in the past, but not at this level. We have come out of the tunnel post-Pandemic and are now heading for a gradual maturing as a nation, a settling, an almost quiet reorganization. An American tomorrow.

Gone are the days of boisterous globalism, with the realism that the world is a multi-regional pie where regional giants have a sphere of influence and free trade is a term of the past. Tariffs have replaced an Internal Revenue Service, and no one is full of "positive vibes." Unlike the prophets of gloom and doom, artificial intelligence has settled in nicely with no sentient antichrist threatening to globalize an over-reaching robotic mind. The fear of the day has returned to rogue cloning issues, particularly with regard to medical procedures and robotic clones, including "hybrid pets." 

Nick Fuentes had his day...days...in the sun, before becoming irrelevant when America turned toward...America. A new worldwide ecopolitical reality defies former logic as the USA, Persia, Central Asia, and Russia- in one surface alliance- dominate the energy market worldwide. Everyone may trade with everyone else...you may work "in Uzbekistan" via the internet and "streaming face time" but when it is time to turn off the lights at night, everything in your world is suddenly local. 

When anyone or anything matures, that someone has to face reality. America will have to face the fact that it is essentially built on debt. Debt funds debt, everybody owes the other entity. We Americans have such faith in this foundation that we are myopic. Everybody plays the game. That is why tariffs are the present and future stability to the economic foundation of the nation. And why it is necessary when regionalism rules the planet and your dollar isn't traded quite like it is today. The concept of currency is undergoing a revolution, and the future will be multi-faceted. It has to be. The status quo is untenable- for everyone. Crypto is just a playground for what will happen. What if you were to trade a percent of your business entity to do business? Is it likely? Like holding stock, you hold a very small percentage of each other's transactional base in order to do a transaction. Equity-trade brokerage enables a new kind of exchange bypassing a global or regional hard currency. And how do all these surface alliances trend, then fade, to serve temporary trading blocks and regional dominance? Is this the world of tomorrow?

Suffice to say, there is no roadmap to the future but the trends of the present. If everyone is to thrive in the coming environment, we must throw aside adolescent behavior and take responsibility for our actions- on each level, particularly on the regional and local levels.

Change is coming...it is in every post, every random reply, every face time, every message, every phone call. Will you change yourself, your country, for the better? Will America, reflecting on reality, mature? Or will we all deteriorate into a sci-fi scenario worthy of an unending book series for hard core fantasy fans? God, please, no.

  

 

 

Slicing into emotion- a layer beyond

sounds often have a hidden sharpness- combined or alone- as alliteration cuts to the core of an emotion. like a knife she slices open a surface glance, opening a wound, a vale, within. 

the word "sceal" (shkeel) in Irish implies a tale, a story. But "scian" (shkeeun), knife, cuts sharp like sceal. in one sight, those sounds work in conjunction, giving the American, or English-speaking, reader a sense of going deeper. And that is where most poets want to go...beneath the surface.

but it isn't so with much of what i read from other poets...when i do tunnel into that realm i generally avoid- other people's writings. these, too often, are populated by prosaic formulas that read like my failed college compositions and dark attempts at Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright.

Like a last-minute colonoscopy, these wet morsels of old soggy remnants come out, ejected from my system. The shock can be mildly nauseating. The verbiage in these wet morsels reminds me of speed dating...a terse word on one line, followed by two or three, followed by sequences not making a lick of sense. 

suffice to say, if you find yourself creating something not aligned with  fellow creatives in your field, you might want to avoid consuming much of their creations, lest you descend into post-modernism or pseduo-Nihilism. Rather, continue to write your own narrative, sing your own song, create as only you were gifted to create. 

I will, therefore, not compose senseless work of "art" lacking emotion and clarity...unless it is stream of consciousness or soundscript. Neither is in vogue, so I will spare you from such ventures. 

To end this chocolate-enriched dialogue just before midnight, I shall bid you adieu, leaving you with these dipping crumbs to add to your mental soup...if you are going to write poetry, for the sake of decency, please write something that cuts into the skin, rather than reads like the label on a GMO cereal box. 

 

An Cat Sceal

the cat tale

(An-cot-shkeel)

with a too-thin tongue

she licks the moon beyond

in that radiant reflection-

moon shine.

she's not so much a cat

as a connoisseur of the tail,

as she prances upon the table-top

framed in window-light. 

December 13th

 the snow has slowed-

gnarled, rough-winded, puffing,

sputtering along the way.

she's a wild wench from peasant times,

hair like a matted Medusa-head... 

this silent storm viewed from my window.

a breath like a December morning's pop-tart,

a slice of breakfast fit for an electrical failure.

Poetic Fiction Explained

 If you search through the list, the categorization of all genres of literature, there is no genre called "Poetic Fiction." Yet, I am composing a novel in poetic fiction.

What is Poetic Fiction? 

One of my previous posts explains what poetic fiction is. In essence, it is the poetic, including forms within a "paragraph" that mesh with a standard prosaic fiction form. It may look like this...

She was a child, riding a horse-drawn wagon through grain fields... wheels rutted in a slushy road, the cattle bells clanking within her eardrums...a concertina, a bazouki, a fiery-stringed fiddle...grandfather a young mustached gentleman, dancing within the music...now hillsides of wandering vineyards, caravan wheels taking her into the fog...grandmother smiling, babbling something, nodding her head...

This is a dreamscape from within my new novel. Like stream of consciousness poetry, it rambles, as a dream would tend to, maybe disjoined, maybe seamless. 

Or, it may look like this...

He sniffed pungency...the musky air, pine needles, soggy leaves, and decay...a guttural wail from somewhere on the ridge to his right...the reverb echoed inside his soul...and he trembled. Slipping through the shrub-boulder maze, passing rusty-red rhododendron, he came to the edge of a rock-ring...

The characteristics, within the descriptive part of the writing, tend to be punctuated and accented by the poetic. In Poetic Fiction, I may use the same word in three sentences within one paragraph because it is a tool used within poetry. In that sense, because it is fiction, which is usually prosaic, it must adhere to a hybridity, poetic style within a fiction format. 

Dialogue, and internal thoughts, work within standard parameters of usage, existing as it always does within prose. 

So, the poetic fiction piece is not wholly one, nor wholly the other. It is both. It is poetry, and it is prose. It is descriptive but may not follow standard description.

And while I am engaged in the composition of a novel, it is not my sole concern. At this point, I must pay my bills with an income from outside my principal gifting. It is the time and season. If, upon completion of this venture, I am able to embrace my gifting, enhanced with adequate financial reward, I will lay aside every weight that burdens me and run the race with unhindered passion.

Until then, I shall return to this locale, with a creative menu, feeding my readers with a buffet of beautiful works.