My sweet sweetie took a video of me reading my visual poem “ANXIETY” at boston city hall today (4/25/25). It got honorable mention at this year’s city-wide poetry contest.  Here is the reading:

I will be reading one of my recent visual poems at this year’s Mayor’s Poetry Reading in Boston, tomorrow (Friday 4/25/25) at 2pm.

Here are the details as well as the poem:

It’s Wednesday April 16, 2025.  I am sitting in the living room while my cat snoozes behind me.  It’s 5:02pm.  I was unable to sleep last night and my mind drifted to a plexiglass painting I made and sold 5 years ago.  It was called “Last Sip of the Oligarchs” and it was a contour piece.  I remember that there was a piece of writing across the entire back of the painting, but I couldn’t recollect exactly what it said.

Wired on too much coffee, I decided to go digging for any documentation of this piece in my “archives” (old notebooks, old phone photos, old documents/records/computer files).  

I found what I was looking for in my notebook from 2020 (what a head trip that particular notebook is!).  Here is a transcription of the writing piece on the back of the painting:

“4/30/20 - Greenough

Last Sip of the Oligarchs:

Living for the moment hasn’t always been a good thing.  To tell someone to live for the moment - are you not possibly suggesting that they have no future?  Do you not want a future for this person?  Why is it irrelevant to them?  I’m sure they mean well.

- An alien lands in the USA & tries to make a go of it (life) - I live in the present, & I am present, but only because I cannot consider my future.  Not with a serious face.  It is my fate to be doomed by illness.  Most of us are.  I have to look poor on paper to keep my health insurance.  An insurance that doesn’t even consider all my body parts as important.  I must not be that important.  I feel sorry for my teeth.  I hope they don’t have feelings.  They would be hurt.  My teeth hurt.  How is it not in your best interest to help everyone?  As we have learned - illness does no one favors.  It picks everyone… Why not give everyone a chance to live a nice life?  Have a nice time?  Then, you are ill less.  Therefore, those around you may also be well.  Being well, together, is nice.  How is that not everyone’s main pursuit in life?  I think they call it happiness.  Why not help those vulnerable?  The general rule seems to be - treat others the way you want to be treated.  Do you want people hunting you?/Fighting with you and your loved ones.  Pointing guns, dropping bombs.  Withholding food and shelter.  Do you want to be pushed around?  Silenced?  Restrained for no reason?  Do you want to be detained from your daily life?  Do you want to be made out to be a villain?  Or worse, not even warranting a title.  Being made to feel like a speck of dirt on the bottom of a boot.  Said boot once licked by said specks.  But everything changes eventually.  Especially if it doesn’t work - it will collapse.  Broken systems are faulty.  Good will one day prevail - I trust.  In service to my present.  Because the present is all I got.  And guess who made it so.

_____

I get to experience the good, the bad, the awful & the ecstatic.  I can only tell the good from their relation to the bad.  The only useful example of a binary system that works, that’s been presented to me.

The feeling of being the uninvited guest - they manufactured this emotion.  Imagine having manufactured emotions, daily.  Imagine thinking you have a lot when you have so little.  Imagine controlling others.  Deciding their fate - as opposed to nature.  Then nature got mad.  Then others got mad.  Solidarity among these “others” saved this species.  I know there is a “good” that can prevail only because I saw the “evil”.  Imagine “evil” existing?  Lots of data to collect, but drawing conclusions from said data is the majorly confusing part.  Imagine only having faith in those that hurt you?  If time were unimportant - would this phenomenon still exist? Love you. ”

The whole thing makes me think about the cyclical nature of time and history.  The older I get, the more I see lots of annoying, repeated patterns.  In structures/systems, governments, culture, people.  My theory is that aliens refuse to engage with people on planet earth because they can hardly be bothered by such stupidity.

Some photos of the piece: