One might, in the future

Posit that poetry was my religion.

It was not.

 

Rather, I used poetry as a vessel

To establish—by two or three witnesses—

What was true.

 

First, my knowledge came from the Bible.

And often poetry—even wicked or not—

Would affirm the teachings I find in scripture.

 

It may be the ugliness of Communism

Or the reality of communication.

But, great poetry foreshadowed

The truth;—

It proved truth could be found.

 

It did not supplement my religion.

It, rather—even if professing not to—

Confirmed it.

 

Because what was often on the pages

Did work.

More often than not, our most flagrant Atheists,

In their poetry, were prophets.

More than in essays

The poem had predicted and far surpassed

All other human inovations

By showing us where our race would end.

 

Because it was dreams;—

Poetry is vision.

Whether a demon or a saint

The poets had foretasted, eerily,

Every major change in history

In principle, and they did this

By understanding the passing bodies of knowledge

Established throughout time and space—

Captured in the portraits of literature.

 

Poems are prophetic

Because they built off of the other great poets

To see more clearly a vision

And to make less opaque

The future.

As Keats noted, the future is…

We poets are rather windows to it.

The radical is the catalyst to it;

And often radicals find in poetry

A formula for their own success.

 

I, I, liked to merely understand it

What all was in my limited grasp to understand.

However… I would also like to preserve my right to do so

Which is why my poetry was written.

Not to change the world, but to simply preserve

This freedom of man to see glimpses of the future.

Here is the truth.

I had prayed that you were the false prophet.

I had prayed that Trump was the beast.

While in captivity

I prayed, and I said,

“Isis would come,

“To show itself the power

“Of the pagans

“To be consolidated by the enemies.”

 

The next day, Isis was born.

I had prayed this prayer…

 

Also, in a vision,

I had spoken to Ramsey

And told him I would say the most absurd things

In order to frustrate him.

 

If you are a Christian,

Please forgive me.

But, from the beginning

Before this was,

I had said I would say absurdities to frustrate.

He can even attest to it.

 

And seeing the most absurd things I have spoken came true

And seeing the enemies are getting closer to being exposed

Let there be peace between us.

For I had only spoken error

To expose the LORD’s enemies.

It is what I had told Ramsey

And I do not repent

If it means these wicked foes were caught.

 

Jesus Christ is Come in the Flesh.

A man ought to have gone to war

In 1942.

 

In 2019,

One man could turn the sky red.

 

There is a difference between now and 1941.

It was before weaponized plagues.

It was before the Engine of Satan

Prophesied by the great poet Milton.

 

Let the law overthrow the engines of statehood corruption.

Allow the law to do what it’s supposed to.

Allow brave men to speak out

And to overthrow corruption with their voice.

 

Because freedom and reason must triumph over power.

 

Youth, we like to be idle.

The far away hopes

Of utopia

The guaranteed 80,000 dollar job

How we just stumble into it one day.

We want to sit, and make money

And comfortably eat and squelch

And sow our seed into every heifer.

 

Then, by the age of twenty-seven

We begin to see the Earth is flat.

We see, “I am well fed.

“My roast Pork is delicious

“And I can go to the market

“And get it whenever I want.”

“I have a house over my head.

“I have family members I love.

“My dog is nice.

“I might not get as much sex as I wanted…

“Really none at all because I’m not married…

“But, there isn’t anything so unreasonable

“That needs to be changed.”

 

Then, some high minded intellectual

Gets elected to office, and changes something.

“I was treated nice at the doctor’s.

“Now I’m treated badly.

“I was treated reasonably

“Now I’m treated unreasonable.”

The reformer had never grown out of youth.

They had never seen the great benefits of the system

They wanted to destroy.

They, unthankfully

Want to change something.

 

And frankly, any conservative knows

There are little things that need changed.

Perhaps criminal records ought to be done away with.

Perhaps people should get free healthcare.

But, nothing so radical as being taken care of…

As a youth is naturally disposed to this mindset

When they see that their only lifeline is their mother and father.

They cannot conceive, at that age

That someone other than a parent can take care of them.

At about age 30…

If you’re spiritually mature…

You realize that it is possible.

Maybe perhaps not for you…

Or, maybe there are other problems

That you understand are not true for everyone else.

 

Silently, you meditate on all the silly notions of youth.

Then you realized that the world was barren in your novel;

That was the necessary feat to bring the Utopia you loved.

And it didn’t last long, at that.

Somehow, we all know that as kids.

Perhaps at a certain age, we bite into the Pomegranate

And realize something we couldn’t as a teenager.

But, the most destructive people are those who never grow up.

I am not the narrator of this poem.

It’s just how I feel people think:

 

I sit upon my bench

Judging the world

Wanting to make all right.

Eagerly I search

For the final solution.

 

If I could be idle,

And smoke marijuana

And twiddle my thumbs

With the remote control

That kills the villain

In the pixie dust.

 

If I could just hallucinate

My sexual desires

And all day, all night

Spend my time at the feelies

Playing… Murdering…

 

Wouldn’t life be nice?

It would be the dream I have.

No man could offend me.

No woman could touch me.

I’d have all I ever wanted

In my pocket.

Therefore, I will pick up my rifle

And join the cause

To bring this to the masses.

 

Or… I could be just the opposite extreme

And fight to preserve what is already here

Claiming it was never broken to begin with.

Either way…

Grand Masters convinced

That Chess is a broken sport.

Computers innovate the game.

 

Frankly, I don’t believe it.

I think because the computers went one tick faster

Found one trick better

Before we could find the winning move…

I think that’s why computers are making us stupider.

 

They, calculatingly,

Connote there is no creativity

And, therefore, our battle with giants

Doesn’t let us make the smaller steps

Needed to progress.

Let me describe a feeling.

Maybe you’ve had it.

That feeling like we are going to save the world.

How high, how delicate,

Intoxicating, vain and prideful,

We get that drunken high

Of having to save the world from danger.

 

It feels like adultery almost;—

Or, what I would assume adultery feels like.

Thrilling, we speak the words

That will save the world.

 

Our product becomes the great saving bounty

Of the cup… the cup of inebriation

To say, “I and I alone can do this.”

How our hands will not save us.

How we say, “We take the bull by the horns”

Disregarding the very fair warning

That by doing so

The bull had to have slipped

In order for us to have tackled it.

 

How many poems will I write?

They usually get deleted

The ones that contain such feeling…

That greedy gain to fix what only we can fix

To stop the breach of what we

Quite possibly

Have broken.

 

Angrily we type to solve the world’s problems

Angrily. I do it, you do it, we all do it.

To take the step back

As the torpedo of our words

Fire for the cove

Blasting to pieces allies.

Angrily, I look at every foolish one of those words

I have spoken, and would rather someone else had said it.

 

Great is our freedom of speech;—

So much so that the government wants to steal it from us.

Why? It doesn’t matter.

Proles dance to the siren of the nude

Nymphs, whom make the internet go round and about

As we responsible intellectuals

Try to solve the world’s crises.

Frankly, I do not know if we can,

But it is our freedom to “Ought”.

And ought we do, but freedom exposes a weakness…

That we can be wrong.

I stand by my statement earlier.

That it would hurt the victims.

 

Now, let me talk about the accused.

 

If in every trial,

The accused were to have their victims present,

It would be far less likely for justice to be executed.

 

Everyone takes every affront personally.

Every bad thing done to us

Is a crime much worse

That it possibly is.

 

This is why justice needs administered

Without the bias.

If someone is truly hurt

They will pursue their rights

Already afforded.

 

I’m afraid that there is a reason this needs to be addressed

Is that many of us don’t consider ever getting in trouble

Until it actually happens.

Perhaps we had a bag of Cocaine

Perhaps we were driving too fast

And caused a fatal or harmful accident;

Perhaps we were falsely accused

Or were rightly guilty of a crime

Much less severe than society deems it.

 

We need a fair court proceeding

In the part of both victims and the accused.

The truth is;—and here is the truth;—

We need mercy.

 

Dostoevsky, as noted to me by a friend

Saw that a man committed a theft

And the preacher set him free.

It set that man on a course for becoming a good man

And rather than throw him in prison

The man was forgiven.

 

Regardless, there are dangerous people

Who need to be put in prison.

There are dangerous criminals who need to be off the streets.

But, the courts need to be unbiased in finding this out.

This is why we’re afforded rights in the constitution

Because innocence is to be assumed before guilt.

And not everyone who claims to be a victim actually is.

 

This is very controversial.

I know.

But… I don’t say it without understanding

The damaging effects such a law would present.

 

First for the victim

Because it would inure the courts to their pleas.

Second to the accused

Because it would ultimately turn the courts into a drama

It never meant to be.

 

Please understand I see this from both perspectives.

They seem to be contradictory

But certainly, both of these would effectively

Work in tandem

And the one thing that wouldn’t occur is justice.

A Union Jack is the same as America’s “Star Spangled Banner.” It is the poetic word for Britain’s flag.

A Man of War was a British fighting vessel.

The point of the first part of this poem is to juxtapose the Brier with the Dutchman. It simultaneously tells the story of both ships, before their clash at the end of the story.

It is a “Phantom” ship. I wanted to tease the reader. Maybe the Brier is fighting a specter. Maybe they are fighting real pirates. With my poems about Fairyland, I thought it was appropriate.

It was a happy little thought when finishing this poem, at the end, that Stew would set the Brier free from the Dutchman’s masts. It was a surprise, and happily, I chased that song. Because Stew had fallen into the Lagoon, and to think that the Dutchman, if it cared anything about its crew, might have been the ship spared.

A form of pirate torture was to string a man with rope, and pull them from bow to stern underneath the ship. The barnacles at the bottom of the ship would tear them apart.

“Lemon Stew” refers to a soup made of lemons that the British would feed their people so they would not get scurvy.

Fats were used as balms in those times. There were reports of Cortez using human fat to balm his men’s wounds. The thought of Whale Blubber was a good poetic choice, and because it is the St. Brier, they would have an ethical way to balm people. They’re not pirates, like Cortez.

The recurring line “Albion’s Reefs” was one I had made last minute. I saw it was a good complex metaphor.

The “VOC” was the Dutch East India Trading Company. They were famous for their piracy. They were the British East India Trading Company’s largest competition on the high seas. The Dutchman—being a possibly phantom vessel—had to be flying VOC flags, for the ambiguous reference to the state sanctioned piracy.

“Cull” here means to depopulate and populate at the same time. It is a cantonym. I had originally written it “Caul”, but realized that wasn’t the word I wanted, so I consulted my work “Young Shadows” to see how it was used in there. It was spelled “Cull”.

The inspiration to this poem was Pirates of the Caribbean and Master and Commander. Coincidentally, both of these stories were played in close proximity to each other, so I had been immersed in naval warfare for a period in my life. And, I found the scenes where the ships would battle in the high seas quite educational for this imagery.

I had worked Tree Trimming, so the idea for this was natural. Though, I had never seen trees get entangled in one another, I imagine that two ships would get their masts tangled quite easily in battle, and that the image of Stew—who I had decided to make the hero of this poem—saving the day by freeing the mainsail of the Brier from the Dutchman.

If the mast had not been cut, the Brier would have been sucked down into the abyss with the Dutchman.

I don’t believe Judges were ever on sailing vessels; but, I had written the poem from various sources pulled from memory. I decided to put a Judge on the ship for this reason, to represent England’s laws, that the Pirates would not be sentenced without a fair trial.

And of course Stew is the one who set St. Brier free, so the queen awarded him a medal and knighted him. I don’t know if such a thing would happen, but I decided to include it, since the Dutchman was a famous ship. I suppose it would be in this case appropriate.