The New Simplicity: Five Poems by Tom Valovic

Pandora’s Apocalyptarium: A Guided Tour

And so it begins, the apocalyptic unraveling, Orwellian sleights of hand, the Pandora-like normalization of the surreal.  Hollywood burning as predicted in the day of the locust. Police in Howard, Colorado, recover more than 15,000 stolen tools. Wax statue of President Lincoln melts during D.C. heatwave. “Zombie cannibal star” discovered. Total plastic now on Earth: 8 gigatons—twice as much as the weight of all animal life. (Note: rainbows and unicorns are now available with appropriate biometric ID…act now!) But what should we expect from the Kali Yuga? I mean really! Some say it’s the dark before the dawn. Others say this dark age is just beginning and we are in it for the next 426,874 years. I am looking at my watch.

@@@

What do you call it when one thing becomes another? I call it “smooshing”. Of course there must be some more linguistically sophisticated word for this creeping over of the defined characteristics of one thing into another thing for no apparent reason. Has our reality field become silly putty? Pickup trucks as fashion statements. Rock music becoming country/rock and country music becoming rock/country. Buffalo Cauliflower. Corporate yoga. A Great Pacific Garbage Patch of things that want to be smooshed.

@@@

Some ad hoc smooshing of my own: Starring Albert Einstein as Ozzie Nelson. Starring Taylor Swift as Ozzie’s wife Harriet Nelson. Starring Sri Aurobindo as Michael Bolton. Starring Tom Brady as Martin Heidegger. The Secret Doctrine: Starring J. Robert Oppenheimer as Ozzie Nelson. Starring Taylor Swift as Neils Bohr. Starring Friedrich Nietzsche as Ozzie’s wife Harriet. Starring Sri Aurobindo as Elon Musk. Starring Nicolai Tesla as Jeff Bezos. Starring Vladimir Putin as Marie Curie.

@@@

Dehumanziation walks into a bar. Dehumanization is dressed to kill, with sad drooping eyes like a film noir detective. We chat over Black Russians, served dry in the manner of the day. I always thought of dehumanization in a negative way but he seems like a normal guy. We talk business. He says that business is good and offers me a special algorithm from a shiny and sleek silver algorithm case. Afterwards walking back to the armamentarium, we note that the weather is mild. I think maybe dehumanization has gotten a bad rap from all those eccentric existential philosophers who spend too much time thinking anyway. Maybe this is dehumanization’s time to shine.

Walking in October

Two souls. Two lives. The paths snake around, shearing right and left.
But we’re not lost just among those who wander.

We sit on an wall. Her eyes pierce me with an old wisdom, a special clarity.
The sun streams through tree branches as both

Overlook brown fields rolling and cresting. I’m an old soul but her
deep intelligent beauty hints at many things I do not know.

There is mystery in this ordinary place. So says the sun, our friend.
Rocks, trees, earth, infinite sky, all friends.

Tireless Machines Provide Transactions for People Who Don’t Exist

Teraflop, teraglop
Tikka tikka tikka

Ghost accounts getting emails
Years after the person dies

Tikka tikka news of the day
Behold the scurrying little

munchkins of the info juggernaut.

The Funhouse

After 26,000 years of evolution, this?
In the funhouse of the Kali Yuga everyone can

stumble on an equal opportunity basis. Inversions
abound, paradox on demand is in full supply. 

The movement of the Yeatsian gyres continues
its spin cycle. Meditate your way out of this says

the tiny cartoon devil on my left shoulder. The
tattered angel on the other is no longer offering

online tech support. But she speaks: why have
you become so small in your gestures, so willing

to sell your deep mythic and cultural treasures for another
toke of virtual reality? Why is grandeur and deep myth

the can that gets kicked down the road?  When the cycle
completes, the four ages begin again, a new forgetting

will arise, and the dead songs and existential litter we
long for will be buried in the ashes of unremembered time.

Heart Song in Blue

Those asleep must be warned. But how can these energies be
negotiated or understood since they are by definition beyond
our ken? The shaman weighs in, the indigenous scribes:
heart sense only! I drag my querulous frame across a space in time
near where another forest remains ignored by most of us, too
“dialed in” to grok the greenspace, dripping with information
about yet one more inconsequential thing. What’s important?
Hearts or clubs? The deepest connection possible or the shallow
alignment that makes life go smoothly? Nothing smooth ahead
warrior-heart, friend of the hungry ghosts, so buckle up and
go deep into Self where suns blaze and cannot be quenched by
ignorance, where all that glitters is the chakra-haze of your real
life realized and the sweet alchemy of your soul’s journey.