Freethinkers Unchained

Trash God

Men of Reason: bold, progressive
hammer wielders, depth resounders—
shout from the helm your Godless missive
as our Bible-lifeboat flounders.

Send that Flying Spaghetti Monster, FSM
our imaginary friend,
to the myth-conception dumpster:
let the Bronze Age folktales end.

Make the idols bow to Science.
Your progressive task: to mock—
seek that end in brave defiance.
Down with the shepherd’s useless flock !

Laser-focused human reason
serves to clarify the matter,
strips the symbols from the season,
superstitious tales to shatter.

We, mere rubes in need of crutches,
simple children, willing tools,
must be rescued from the clutches
of the fables preached to fools.

Seamless garments, bushes burning:
are but schemes for fleecing sheep . . .
We are plebes devoid of learning;
rouse our silly souls from sleep!

Flood us with your noontide wisdom
decimate the weaker link.
Blow away our card-house kingdom
show us Christards how to think.

Then, like you, we shall no longer
cling to ignorance and lies.
Missing links make chains yet stronger,
dragging fairies from the skies.

We shall join you in assurance
that there is no great beyond
thus no need for fire insurance
clergy, staff or magic wand.

We shall celebrate together
joyful, freed from superstition
endless, godless sunny weather:
non-existent non-perdition.

Having thus improved the light
and magnified Man’s modern day,
God’s angels will expire in fright;
the Lord shall meekly fade away.

HumanityInsanity

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Anti NaPoWriMo

Mar29

NaPoWriMo 2015

As an alternative to National Poetry Month, I propose that we have an International Anti-Poetry month. As part of the activities, all verse in public places will be covered over—from the Statue of Liberty to the friezes on many of our government buildings. Poetry will be removed from radio and TV (just as it is during the other eleven months of the year). Parents will be asked not to read Mother Goose and other rimes to their children but only … fiction. Religious institutions will have to forego reading verse passages from the liturgy and only prose translations of the Bible will recited, with hymns strictly banned. Ministers in the Black churches will be kindly requested to stop preaching. Cats will be closed for the month by order of the Anti-Poetry Commission. Poetry readings will be replaced by self-help lectures. Love letters will have to be written only in expository paragraphs. Baseball will have to start its spring training in May. No vocal music will be played on the radio or sung in the concert halls. Children will have to stop playing all slapping and counting and singing games and stick to board games and football.

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Copyright notice: ©1999 by Charles Bernstein

Medieval Simulacra of Pleasure

Dec6

Medieval theories of meter, in fact, frequently assume that the pleasure man takes in meter is a simulacrum of the pleasure he takes in the observation of the principle of order and recurrence in a universe which is itself will and order incarnate.

from: Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, Paul Fussell 1965

Hmmmm.
by simulacrum I guess he must mean an insubstantial form or semblance of something; or maybe the replacement of reality by its representation – or perhaps merely an image devoid of the substance contained in the original?