unfinished poetry

My Craigslist RSS feed for canoes showed up today with this, 

text:

This is a project my dad was working on that has now gone unfinished. His dream was to strap the canoe on top, and take it down the Colorado River to the Baja. Both the canoe and the bus have a little ways to go. The interior still needs work to be livable. Comes with a refrigerator and a toilet and has the pump and tank in place for a sink. Also has redwood, butcher block, countertops in the kitchen area. It still needs a futon and carpet and it's ready to go. It runs and drives well, it was previously owned by a church who took very good care of it. He has hardly driven it since then. He painted the outside faux-finish to look like an old surfer woody.

Canoe also included if you want it. It also still needs quite a bit of work. Inside needs finishing and the outside needs sanding.

We really need Richard Brautigan to tell stories around this, but he's gone too.

It occurs to me that an RSS feed from Craigslist for canoes may qualify as a tiny implementation of a Machine of Loving Grace..
 by Richard Brautigan

I'd like to think
  (and the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
 (right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
 (it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

Instead we have PRISM. So it goes. 

at a slight angle to reality

Visited seven ponds here in S. Denver this last week, looking for carp, so far 0/7.. did see two fish lying  close by the bank in the S. Platte near Overland park, but they faded away quietly and comprehensively when I clumped down the bank to get  around some trees. There were 4 other flyfishers on this stretch at 11am on a weekday morning, don't they have jobs to go to ? ha. 

Meantime the Public Domain Review has some sketches from a painter of the floating world (ukiyo-e) of Kintaro riding a carp,



Kintaro is a kind of superbaby from Japanese folklore, who seems to like carp. Here's another pic of him wrestling an alarmed-looking big carp, from the Metropolitan Museum collection,



But my favorite is the one from Wikipedia's page on him,

The weary mother scanning the horizons for her renegade baby, who is happily plunging with the fish, strikes a note that my mother would recognize. The mouth of the fish is portrayed in feeding mode, so I guess he isn't much bothered by his rider. 

wealth creators

and the poor were, what they were used to being,
the creators of wealth not, as now they are,
      an expensive nuisance.

 Letter to Philip, W.H. Auden. 1969.

This echo sounded by the modest proposal from the Tennessee legislators, using school test scores to deny welfare to families with underperforming children. Dickens would not have thought to make a villain so cruel.

The bill was withdrawn when its author was shamed by a little girl following him around the Capitol. He's still keen on punishing the poor, though:
"Stacey Campfield asked the state Senate to further study the bill, giving him the opportunity to bring it back up next year."
Watch for him to sneak it through in a midnight session, after the children have all gone to bed in their cardboard boxes.