Conundrum Squared

image borrowed from bing

Conundrum Squared

“And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy

to his mighty heart, until the Devil whispered behind the leaves,

“It’s pretty, but is it Art?”.” ---Rudyard Kipling

1.

Again, again, Islamic extremism rears its ugly head,

as immigrant converts murder & maim innocent people;

Infidelism now is the jihadist slur America suffers.

2.

Christianity has been misused by zealots throughout history,

yet today too many view Islam as a religious cancer,

and mosques as breeding grounds for extremism & terror.

3.

Yet much of the world remains tranquil ensconced within

Buddhism, Bahai, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, & Taoism.

Even the plethora of pagans prefer peace over chaos. 

4.

Does God, in his many guises, smile at our fervent posturing?

All inflexible worshippers seem to be lost in their stoicism,

and doves cannot fly in a vacuum of grief and misguided gall. 

Glenn Buttkus

April 2013

Posted over on dVerse Poets FFA

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Chaos Blossoming

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Chaos Blossoming

“Only a poet can capture the essence of chaos.” 

---P.H. Coase

Brilliant blossoms have now burst from their buds

like a living patchwork quilt draping

the ridges on the foothills near your farm;

luscious dew-splattered leaves,

fifty shades of green, have sprouted

in various shapes & configurations;

dressing the bare spines & gray appendages

of maple, oak, and alder that surround

the blue rainbarrel ranch like a fairies' ring.

**************

As Kim Jong-un struts like a dwarf peacock,

attempting boldness, forcefulness, & breathing fire,

struggling like a plump larva surrounded by fire ants,

straining to take his inherited place in what’s left

of the Kim Dynasty, hoping that one day soon

his own colossal statue will stand granite

shoulder to shoulder with those of his father

& grandfather, playing nuclear roulette as

his long-range missiles perch like kimchi condors.

*****************

Hummingbirds are now taking turns hovering

at the blood red feeders hanging 

on your puncheon porch just above the hand-cut

wooden letters that spell Home backwards,

and I can easily hear the honied melodies

of the morning birds, setting up a spooky chorus

with the last of the night dogs belting out

the final notes of their mournful ballads;

seeing you in a Spring work dress squatting 

like a golden maiden, your hands buried

to the wrists in the rich black earth

of your several raised garden beds.

****************

As investigators in Boston are now looking

for a young white man wearing a back pack,

a black jacket, a gray hoodie, and a white

baseball cap worn backwards, and another

white youth who dropped off a suspicious

bag minutes before the first cowardly blast

exploded, bringing death, blowing off limbs,

embedding shrapnel into the innocent

bodies of the the soft targets selected.

*******************

I can see sibling cats leaping white-bellied

into the air after my blue-belled cat lure,

with Sarge, the shepherd, lying next to

the metal barrel stove, watching me,

hoping for another hike up to the 

clear-cut bare foreheads at the edge 

of what’s left of the National forest, he & I 

sole witnesses to massive cloud thighs

masking a cold sun in an eggshell sky.

*****************

As the FBI arrested Paul Kevin Curtis for sending

lethal letters laced with the poison ricin to President

Obama, and a U.S. Senator.

As a fertilizer plant in windswept West, Texas

mysteriously exploded like an atomic bomb,

leveling 60 homes, killing several, wounding hundreds.

*******************

I can visualize that incredible star-choked wedge

of night viewed through the skylight above the bed

in your loft, dreams running clearly

like the icy water rushing sweetly & strongly

down Dry Bed Creek, constellations preening,

vying for our attention, spreading mythos.

But April remains Olympus and defiant,

and obviously it can not be captured

within the slim lines of one poem. 

Glenn Buttkus

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Dragon's Embrace

image borrowed from Edwood 2011

Dragon’s Embrace

There I was

beyond the curtain, piercing the veil

as I reclined in meditation,

awakening to the arrival of quiet

billowing gray-white clouds that filtered

in through the high barred windows

thirty feet above,

moving to hover directly above me,

that suddenly erupted with twin bolts

of kundalini embrace,

-- white lightning --

of kundalini embrace

that suddenly erupted with twin bolts,

moving to hover directly above me,

thirty feet above

in through the high barred windows,

billowing gray-white clouds that filtered,

awakening to the arrival of quiet

as I reclined in meditation,

beyond the curtain, piercing the veil,

there I was. 

************************************************

Cold Case

Rock stars too often deified,

being adrift in a kayak,

without any radar,

your ideas ready to pop

with tons of stats,

used to solve the murdrum,

this being your civic

duty, a much higher level

of pure investigation, Madam. 

Glenn Buttkus

April 2013

Posted over on dVerse Poets FFA

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Ursus Pretentious

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Ursus Pretentious

“I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony--

but chaos, hostility, and murder.”--Werner Herzog.

Timothy Treadwell was a true misfit, a charismatic clown,

a sometimes actor who was proud of being born on the

same day as Daniel Day Lewis, spending his youth

surfing, screwing, drinking, & doing drugs.

During one of his paranoid flights from society

and reality, he found his handsome self

on the Katmai Pennisula in Alaska,

a federal nature reserve swarming with

Ursus Horribilis--grizzlies.

He loved it there, and returned several more times,

feeling connected, driven to be there, convincing himself

that he was bonding with the fearsome bears--who

were busy eating salmon and wild berries in preparation

for their hibernation--and oddly tolerated his presence.

He became embolden and began to walk up to some

of them, giving them pet names, swimming with them,

almost petting them, facing some of them down--until

they became his life.

He returned summers for twelve consecutive years,

shooting hundreds of hours of film, passing himself

off as a bear expert, calling himself the Grizzly Man 

& an Eco-Warrior, appeared on the Discovery Channel, 

Dateline NBC, and once even on David Letterman, 

gave lectures to wildlife groups & school children, 

formed a non-profit organization called Grizzly People, 

soliciting enough money to keep funding

his annual treks to the Katmai.

He prided himself, bragged about facing the grizzlies

unarmed, never took a weapon with him, not even

a pistol--began to fancy himself as the bear’s

“Protector”. Looking into the camera at one point

he said, “I will die for these animals.”

It began to be obvious that his posturing was

becoming false braggadocio, shadow play,

a sad absurd sham. His effeminate speech,

gait, and demeanor did not ever threaten

the indifferent swarms of bear. At one point

he faced his own camera and said,

“I often wish I were gay--life would be 

so much easier.”

In 2003, after an altercation with an airline employee,

Timothy snapped, and returned to the Katmai

with a female companion just as Fall was

turning the peninsula crimson.

One cold night in October, a rogue embittered old boar

came into their tent and dragged Treadwell outside.

He was only armed with his camera, which he activated,

but had left the lens cap on--so what was recorded

was only the terrible audio of him being eaten alive.

His companion did not flee. She attacked the grizzly

with a frying pan. He turned and killed her too. 

The bear took two days to devour them both.

All that was found later were some tennis shoes,

part of a hand and wrist still wearing a man’s watch,

part of a head still attached to a picked clean

backbone, and part of a female ribcage. 

Years later director Werner Herzog made a documentary

about this strange deluded man, trimming the hundreds

of hours of raw footage down to 103 minutes of film.

“I found that in all the faces of the grizzlies he filmed,

there was no kinship, no understanding, no mercy.”

So after a strange decade of bruin charade,

Timothy Treadwell got what he truly wished for--

a martyr’s death. 

Glenn Buttkus

April 2013

Posted over on dVerse Poets MTB

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