Poetry

Doomscroll

My auntie texted me today,
“Is <app redacted> on your phone?
The news declares it should be gone!”
She wondered what I had to say.

I offered her a metaphor:
“Imagine time is gasoline,
the <app> a wood chipping machine,
and every brain a two-by-four.”

“You start to click; it starts to roar.
The fuel needle leftward rolls;
your mental lumber scrolls and scrolls.
You’re left with sawdust on the floor.”

Now <censored>, it will never last.
Like other fads, it too shall pass.
But by observing let’s amass
of tasty truth a fine repast:

Technology is just a tool.
A stone, a wheel, a clock, an app,
they’re pen and ink; they’re not the map.
A fool with tool is still a fool.

Dear reader, if you would be wise,
above all treasure, guard your heart;
for wisdom is an inward art
that best rewards selective eyes.

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Poetry

Bridgework

Words are the bricks and mortar of the mind;
pictures alone bear insufficient weight.
“Message” demands a bridge more strongly lined,
passing from brain to brain our human freight.
Wagons of thought traverse these worded roads,
linking through space and time our separate heads,
making from widely spread synaptic nodes
a single mental net of verbal threads.
Mathematics traced our footsteps to the moon,
but Johnson didn’t calculate alone.
The brains that steered the astronaut platoon
amongst them counted Archimedes’ own.
Since words convey between us all we know,
how great that art that shapes them as they go.

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Poetry, The Environment

Biodiversity

The earth’s a complex, integrated whole,
each part entwining in a common waltz.
And in such systems backups have a goal—
“Enable full recovery from faults.”
When chestnuts died, the birds found other homes.
When pigeons died, raccoons found other eggs.
Extinction’s cold, destabilizing foams
cannot collapse a house with many legs.
But pavement is a desert, hard and dead;
suburban lawns are barren for a bear.
A farmer’s field will bring the wheat to head,
but other creatures only perish there.
We celebrate our tower growing tall,
but all the while we undermine its wall.

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Gaming, Poetry

Dopamine

Their eyes—intently luminous—reflect
kaleidoscopes of pixelated light.
Frenetic echoes afterward project
on shuttered eyelids, sparking in the night.
With urgent fingers, frantically they clutch
and click controllers, keyboards, screens and mice,
the never-satisfying fruit of much
rehearsal, constant thought, and streamed advice.
Their voices burst in shouts of rage or joy
at new achievements, leaderboard defeats,
each loot box, headshot, killstreak, skin, or toy; 
the feedback loop continually repeats.
Their wallets, grades, and spouses know the score:
“I think I’ve got the time to play one more.”

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Family, Poetry

My Father’s Epitaph

My father was a complicated man.
A surgeon, pilot, seminary grad,
he used the opportunities he had
to overcome the life where he began.
(Depression-era broken home; my gran
divorced his cheating, alcoholic dad).
Conversion, war, then Harvard, marriage glad,
five children—much he did in short a span.
But middle-age provoked a darker turn.
He left his wife though teaching Sunday school
(his father’s lessons he forgot to learn),
for years wrought pain, lascivious and cruel.
But grace abounded; guilt began to burn,
till Twilight Mercy Found a Grateful Fool.

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Poetry

Maker’s Lament

His fingers led the quill’s familiar dance,
ensnaring thoughts in sinuous lines of ink,
unwitting in his ancient scribal trance
that Gutenberg so soon would break the link.
Her fingers passed the shuttle through the warp,
transmuting garb of sheep to that of kings,
accustomed to the music of her harp,
unwary of the song an engine sings.
Their fingers summoned visions from the mind,
with brush, and stencil, pen, and Photoshop,
illusionists astonished now to find
an artificial artist heist their crop.
Of all creation, humans are the head;
but what remains when human art is dead?

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Faith, Poetry

A Bedtime Prayer

God, the time to sleep has come for me at last;
this day, though blest, has been a weary one.
Both pain and gain I had beneath the sun,
and now I close with thanks for what has passed:
You gave me breath to walk, and work, and sing.
On wicked words and deeds, please, mercy show.
You gave me light to see, and know, and go.
I wanted more; I could have had much less.
You gave me hope, enduring in distress;
above all things it kept me fighting sin.
You gave me love—of beauty, kith, and kin,
delights enkindling love of You, my King.
So many were your perfect gifts as through the day I pressed.
With gratitude I gently go most sweetly to my rest.

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Faith, Poetry

A Morning Prayer

God, your brilliance lit each photon that has shined.
You wove spacetime. You framed the human mind.
Your might assembled every quantum mote,
and heaped up stars like sand, and formed my throat.
And though you’ve bound the universe with death,
today again you’ve filled my lungs with breath.
So speaking now, I kneel as I rise.
I place my hope in you. You hold my fate.
The Bible says you’re holy, loving, wise;
Muhammad says you’re merciful and great.
But me, I’ve never seen you with my eyes;
I only know to cling to hope and wait.
So lowly, weak, uncertain, full of sin,
I’ll worship, serve, and sing as if you’ll come again.

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Academic Writing

Revalidation Exam: ENGL 725 – Victorian Novel

Note: In 2003 I started a PhD in English at the University of South Carolina. I never finished the dissertation. In 2012 I switched careers to IT, and eventually all my coursework expired. In 2020, after a job change brought us back to Columbia, I decided to try and finish. One of the first steps was revalidating all my old coursework. For one class, I had to write an essay. The essay prompt was defined by me in concert with the English faculty examiner. I submitted the finished essay this last weekend. (DL, Dec. 7, 2021)

Original Course Description:
Survey of the development of the novel form, with study of major and lesser-known figures, in relation to social change and publishing conditions; authors include Dickens, George Eliot, and Hardy.

Instructions:
Write an essay in response to the prompt below. Essay length is at the discretion of the student but may be considered by the reader as part of the evaluation. This is a take-home exam. Expectations in regards to proofreading and source citation may accordingly be high.

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Movies & TV

Movie Review: Dune

Note: This article was written for and first appeared on the Imperium News Network (INN), a news website dedicated to the space combat video game EVE Online. During the two years after I started contributing in the Spring of 2020, writing for INN was an enjoyable hobby that reminded me of writing for my college newspaper. During that time I wrote more than 40 articles, most covering various space battles and drama in the game. This article was one of the few not directly related to the game. I permanently quit playing EVE and contributing to INN in May, 2022. (DL, June 7, 2023).

I’ll begin with the TL;DR:

The movie Dune is one of the greatest novel adaptations I’ve ever seen and also a magnificent sci-fi epic in its own right. If you like EVE, you’ll probably love this movie. If you haven’t already, go see it in the theater, and soon.

What I Wanted in Dune

This first section is background on what I look for in movies. Skip to the next section if you want to get straight to Dune.

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