Virtual Intelligence

Tags

ballade, Elaine Stirling, form poetry, French medieval dancing songs, privacy, reality

Paranoia dressed for a night out

I

The message came from someone I don’t know:
they’ve plans to take away our privacy.
Spit twice and rub your elbow till it glows
then carve your name inside this canopy.
What I’ve just said is utter lunacy,
but paranoia makes me roll my eyes
and cross my tease, for in reality
who hasn’t stolen has no need of spies.

II

By thinking new is how we best can grow
the neurons that surpass redundancy,
so why spend hours chasing, to and fro,
the same complaints through life’s brief tenancy?
We’ve all known random acts of piracy
and plenty you will find who’d patronize
your pain for their own history;
who hasn’t stolen has no need of spies.

III

While nations tangle in each other’s woe
and advertisers claim transparency,
the greater part of you would rather flow
with trust and mirth and sweet serenity.
Through heart and mind aligned, prosperity
knows how to plant the seeds that maximize.
This rhyming ballade you may read for free.
Who hasn’t stolen has no need of spies.

IV

Since I’ve no answers for modernity
I’ll take my chances with the grand surprise
and leave this tiny clue for all to see.
Who hasn’t stolen, has. No need of spies!

~~~

The ballade, as it’s known in form poetry, derives from the medieval French chansons balladée, which were originally dancing songs. Three 8-line stanzas rhyme ababbcbC (C being a repeated line) with a concluding envoi, bcbC.

Image: A costume design for Louis XIV as The Rising Sun from the final entrée of Le Ballet de la Nuit, 1653.

© Elaine Stirling, 2013

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Feathering Bits of Nothing Much

Tags

acceptance, boredom, Elaine Stirling, momentum, reality, self-pity

Image from fiddlersfoundblogspot.ca, 2010

Momentum builds in the trough
of the wave, not the crest, in the
depths of the ocean, not the
glittering turquoise surface.

Spend less time polishing
your opinion of things, people,
places, events like a servant
in the sub-basement kitchen of
someone else’s manor house,
and more time listening to the
shape and quality of the “no”
inside your head, and you
might become aware that
you’re polishing tin and
it’s wearing
thin.

Monotony, you say? asks
the Universe in majestic, ever-
granting wanting-to-be sureness.

Rub, rub, rub.

Very well then. rubrubrubrubrub
rubrubrubrubrubrubrubrubrubrub…

Our fear of invisibility may be
greater than our fear of death
and so to every thunderclap we
add our peep, lest we not be
heard, lest we be thought
less of, or thought not at all.

Guess what? Mama bird
stopped listening to our
cheeps long ago and
thunder doesn’t care.

The feathered nest we ache for
requires our leaving the fundament
that someone else constructed for us;

and if, after a respectable number
of circuits flown in all manner of sky
one cannot yet swallow that birds
and worms negotiate agreement
in their creating sustenance of
evermore, evermore, then it’s
best, I suppose, to learn to live
with being eaten.

© Elaine Stirling, 2012