Pew Study: Atheists, Agnostics Know The Most About Religion

 

		Atheists, Agnostics Know The Most About Religion
	A new survey of Americans' knowledge of religion found that atheists, agnostics, Jews and Mormons outperformed Protestants and Roman Catholics in answering questions about major...

 

From The Huffington Post (09/28/2010)

Drafting Floral (addendum to "Synthetic")

Synthetic

is a rosebud 
long stemmed and vanity thorned
in a blue or glass vase posing
 
rose moan, trembles loafing,
its brown lipped petals forage
nostalgically, regrets for forgetting
 
the scars of artifice
defiant with a bruised swagger

there, right there, is a rose waiting
for you to compose it beautiful

here, on the front porch or balcony,
is a plastic rose placed careful,
pretending roseness is a perspective
about and abounds your willingness

when does a rose exact clarity
when are its ideas accidental

self-pitying is self imposed
for a self doubting rose in repose
 
it is an embarrassing occupation
this correcting of your memories

Cicada thrum and the drooped frame of the cowboy's mustache

To pass time, the cowboy’d climb
down from his reedy steed
To pick up empty soda cans and bottles
that verily litter the verdant plains, 
collecting them patiently
and postured purposeful
in a feed sack he’d pinched 
from a grocery loading dock
in one of the nameless and dying 
small towns he’d proved through
on his westward prowl.
 
Each day alone
(when the sun quits
it's quitting time/
noon is a boon
to napping under cool)
Necessarily lonelier
(rise and shine
for the promise of progress/
the time of your life
is now or never for the better)
Sculptural solitude settles in.
 
Chain smoking romantically
the cowboy eyes yonder nearby...
confides in his diary ...
stirs beans with a wooden spoon ...
darns holes in his undergarments ...
whittles n whistles to bore his insomnia ...
boot scrapes with a cedar branch
and whispers into a meaty breeze,
“damn, I am nature – too messsy for words”

He squints, he sits. 

The cowboy posed on a ridge between two great mesas: supposing the nearby distances with caustic ambivalence; inhales deep the prairie's dusky flatulent bloom; caroms between memories of loves that bound him fast and loves that led him to embrace lonesome.  He reckons himself attuned to his fears, sincerely, reflective and accepting of all he's done and the roles he's played in outcomes prior to his current circumstance. 
 
Inching towards, inching away ... baby stepping is a baby sometimes falling down ... mapping any ol next-frontier or out-of-box hankering. Certain like a man of steel weighed down by a coat with pockets full of broken magnets. 

Recalls a saloon floor's peanut-shelled clutter and the echo of floozie slurs. Card players, tall hatted even inside, and a cane barrel appropriated for branding iron on haunch anticipations. Prideful sniffs to catch her scent leaving through the buck and sway of flapping doors.
 
Cowboy pause to bed alongside the razzle dazzle of cacti thumbs  and respite from his dust tour of the great wide open. Giddy for the next day's roam and blanket skinned against the cold lonesome of occupancy under a billion stars, his eyes close meditating on the vast variety of choices that might birth his tomorrow. 
 

Sometimes I Have Nothing to Say

So I am quieter then
And now

The Machinery of Silence

I was caught today at the train crossing on my way to pick up the kids. Me and everyone else: Engines idling, thunderclaps spitting the leftover dribble from yesterday's storm, the gentle rocking lull of engine rumble. All of us on our way someplace else. All of us stuck in-between "there" and "here" together, waiting. Despite the roar and clang of boxcars brimming with granite pounding along over steel rails, my anticipation of the youthful squeal and complaint of tired and possibly ornery children that was soon to fill the car left me marveling and soothed by my current circumstance -- awash in the machinery of silence and quelled by the symphony of machines silencing the moment ...

Movie Review: MACHETE!

Robert Rodriguez new film, MACHETE, opened this week, and in talking about I don't want to give too much away or set the stage for too many expectation. Blood, guts, steel, subterfuge, redemption and heat. Women with smooth skin and men who hide behind their pores and scars. There, I've said enough -- probably too much.

With both kids ensconced at friend's homes for sleep overs, my wife and I headed out for some grownup fun. Thankfully, Rodriguez homage to 70's era socially critical exploitation films satisfies completely with daunting and delicious self-aware glee.

I'm usually not one to celebrate violence as a trope for social justice, but Rodriguez' use of satire as a political weapon is so carefully honed and cinematically honeyed that I was sucked in to even the film's most explicitly depicted death scenes. The good guys are really good, and the bad guys are really really bad in this bloody critique on American xenophobia. I even laughed out loud during several moments, and I never laugh out loud.

While the film won't garner any academy award nods for acting, the actors (big names and small) all make perfect sense in and of their roles. Further, it's always nice to see Austin, TX put to good use as the interesting and complicated small big-city that it is.

Fortunately for me, my wife also found the movie to be an awesome visual and visceral escape from our routine kid-centric forays in cinema. I highly recommend to those of you with a refined taste for satire, slaughter and revenge hewn justice.

Labor Day Weekend -- Yeah Workers!

ACLU: Sign the Pledge: Stand for Religious Freedom

http://action.aclu.org/site/PageNavigator/Religious_Freedom_Bloomberg?s_src=UNW100001ACT&s_subsrc=100902_religious_freedom_nonAT

A Song of Progress for You

you, you are a million years old today,
you sapiens:
bi-pedal and frontal lobed;
​big idea'd;
​maker and remaker of things.
 
but dates don’t matter
for a tool putterer like you.

your relatives are real,
really busy with their own lives:
wearing history;
machining sincerity;
connecting improvements:
​meticulous evaluators of the particular.
 
"happy birthday human"
the plains whisper,
"we admire your entrepreneurial spirit."

the seas and boneless sky sing,
"gosh, everything ours is yours,
we applaud your industriousness."

​the trees nag, “I remember when
​you leapt out my limbs,
that was no joke,
tree faller-outer."
 
the animals chorus,
"you began too thin spined to speak,
you knuckle dragged grunting, 
just wrecks of hair knot and gnat picking in small groups,
​loping and hoping to bend bronze
​or shake an acre."
 
the continents moan shifty,
"you are a big skull now,
all pulp filled up in the brain case.
you talker and detail preener:
efficient at key and lost sock finding;
weary of loneliness;
nervous at parties."

the wind chimes in,
"you know the story:
you read a lot of books;
act clever and practice emoting;
like to categorize understanding
and reflect on self-doubt.

happy birthday,
good luck."


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