Daily Paper - Sept 22 2026

 

Daily Paper

Sept 22 2026

Everyday, like clockwork

I settle into my accustomed chair

in the warm light of my cozy den,

protected

by its four familiar walls.

Where I read about world events,

consequential things

happening faraway

I’m free to take or leave.

The news is relentless;

not a tsunami

where I could at least flee to higher ground,

but wave after wave

getting bigger and bigger

on top of a full moon tide.

A flood I can't wait out,

battering my coastal defences

even on slow news days.

Curiously, my life day-to-day

is much the same as always,

and the stillness here

in my quiet solitude

leaves the headlines feeling unreal.

Or real enough,

but still the same old noise;

like the animal sounds you hear out the door

on cold dark nights

that amount to nothing

when the morning sun returns.

But still, I follow the news

make my judgements.

Is this merely force of habit

I find hard to break?

A creature of routine

set in his ways

who finds comfort there;

like a workhorse

plodding along

ploughing the same old furrow.

Is it the example my parents set?

Back when people with ink-stained fingers

actually read

and trusted the press?

When after work

my father would commandeer his armchair

and disappear behind the paper, 

when on Saturdays

discarded broadsheets

would litter the wood-panelled den.

Or do I simply feel obliged

as a good citizen

to stay informed?

As if I wasn’t powerless.

As if my opinion mattered.

As if there’d be a test.

As if the four walls

enclosing this cozy room

really were the refuge I imagine.

My island of safety

my hardened redoubt.

My higher ground

against a rising sea

as the land recedes

and a faraway world comes crowding in to shore;

weary people

who are hungry and wet

loudly demanding their share.

I still read the daily newspaper I read in my adolescence. Which, believe it or not, is still being published and still doing well. (Yes, I was either precocious, or just a socially awkward teen!) And I still call it the “paper”, even though for years I've been reading it on a screen. …Do people still say “dial” a phone or “spin” a tune?

Hot black coffee and the news. 

But as I get older, I have to admit I care less and less, feel less engaged. Probably just worn out by the relentless sturm und drang. Trump hasn’t helped:  a daily diet of outrage and incredulity sure takes its toll. Or perhaps just consoled I’ll be mercifully dead by the time it all comes crashing down. Doesn’t make a difference how, whether it’s by climate change, geopolitical instability, natural disaster, nuclear war, pandemic, social inequality, or general human stupidity. My bet is it won’t be just one!

Dust Gets in Your Eye - Sept 21 2026

 

Dust Gets in Your Eye

Sept 21 2026

I rarely cry.

Sure, dust gets in your eye

allergy season.

But the kind that doesn’t stop?

When you can’t breathe,

gulping air

as if drowning

in warm salty tears?

When snot runs out your nose

and into your mouth,

spluttering and choking

and not caring how it looks?

When your face is clenched in misery

body wracked with sobs,

frown lines locked

as if they’ll harden there?

It can feel cathartic,

but you can also feel

unworthy of such grief.

It can bring you closer;

or leave you feeling alone

to be so deeply touched

by something so small.

Small, because that was the last brake left 

holding the floodgates closed.

When the dam

that all those years kept you in control

let go,

and the stoical man

who struck others as guarded and cold

broke down

   . . . showing, for once

real emotion.

They say only humans cry for no reason.

Who knows why evolution

has made us weep.

Is it to bring us together?

Because we know too much?

Or because words 

are sometimes not enough?

It was nothing, really.

No one died

no child suffered,

nothing was lost.

But still, I cried, bawled, sobbed.

Perhaps next time

it will take more

then come more easily.

When I won’t pretend 

there’s something in my eye,

won’t turn away

hide the tears 

or wipe them furtively off.

My beautiful dog Rufus is still strong and healthy in her 11th year. But the signs of age are there. And since the average lifespan of her breed is 10.7 years, I increasingly feel the anticipatory grief of her inevitable death.

So I identified with this story. Especially the opening line of the subheading: I rarely cry. And then identified with what might seem to some the exorbitant grief at the death of an animal — even a beloved one. That is, the some who do not understand this kind of love, thinking that only our fellow humans are worthy of it.

In the poem, it’s something minor that opens the floodgates: all the pent up emotion of a stoical person who doesn’t cry, and the unfamiliar feeling of simply giving in to it.

Evolution doesn’t favour a trait for no reason. So I think humans cry emotional tears because it allows us to grieve together and strengthen community: a form of communication that doesn’t need language. As social animals who depend on each other for survival, little is more important than strong social bonds and tribal solidarity. 

https://globe2go.pressreader.com/article/281754161230869

Forfeiting the Game - Sept 20 2026

 

Forfeiting the Game

Sept 20 2026

I never played pinball.

But I can see the shiny ball bearing

and the flashing lights,

hear the bumpers thwap

and the music bubble

like a calliope on speed.

See the man, eyes intense

bent over the glass-topped box

with his hands gripping the sides,

working the flippers

as if he could alter fate

violate Newton’s laws,

as if their furious waggling 

catching only air

did not remind him

of his own futile striving.

Can hear the legs screech

and table shudder,

see the TILT sign light up.

As if a level playing field

was the least one should expect.

As if a lucky hit

could make up for all the misses,

the way a bad gambler

puts all his chips

on the one sure thing.

As if keeping a ball in the air

a few seconds more

could make everything right;

if not his whole life

then at least the single night

he could call himself a winner.

In short order today, I read a poem entitled Pinballing(I didn’t like it at all, and won’t bother with a link) then — hardly scrolling down — encountered an article called The Pinball President.  Seemed an odd coincidence:  I can’t remember the last time this word appeared to me in any medium. 

I’ve actually never played (believe it or not), but an image came immediately to mind. (Which may or may not be accurate.) I also thought of the intense focus of the player on this ultimately meaningless pursuit. A player who is kind of a loser — who feels powerless, thinks he’s a failure — and has nothing better to do. (Or am I a snob? Am I too judgemental, and there is nothing better?!) Thought about skill vs luck, and the difficulty discerning how much of each. Thought about nights spent searching for something more than mere distraction; and how, nevertheless, small victories are sometimes all we need when life is disappointing. (Especially an aggrieved guy who thinks it’s all rigged: that the playing field is tilted against him, and the game has been pretty much forfeit from the start.) But also how small victories can too easily substitute for the real ones that make a real difference.

It’s refreshing to picture a simple analogue game in an old fashioned arcade in this time of elaborate digital games that come with all the bells and whistles.  No connectivity, no A.I., no multiplayers, no animated screens. Just a physical object in real time and hands on.

Street Smarts - Sept 19 2026

 

Street Smarts

Sept 19 2026

There are dumb animals

with an instinct for survival.

Cunning thugs

getting by on street smarts.

The witless savant

reciting pi

until someone makes him stop.

I’m pretty much average,

although like to flatter myself

perhaps a little above.

But intelligence is many things.

You can do algebra in your head

but be stunted emotionally. 

Can dunk a basketball,

but be incurious

about gravity

and the workings of the hand.

Can be a superhuman machine

that reasons infallibly,

but is immune

to moral constraint.

They call it artificial,

which I assume means man-made.

While we are organic,

either products of nature

or children of God. 

Embodied, not soldered.

In touch with the world

instead of determined by circuits

that either switch from on to off

or ponder

in quantum uncertainty. 

And enmeshed in reality,

instead of fed

a reductionist facsimile.

We know belonging and acceptance

love and loss

grief and death.

Are flawed

and hopelessly subjective.

Aren’t smart enough

to do simple sums in our heads,

or reproduce

the periodic table.

But we know that clutch in the chest

when we stumble on beauty,

the feeling of smallness

when faced with awe.

We are dumb animals

but have somehow carried on

for countless millennia. 

So when artificial intelligence

kills us all

will the machines survive?

Will they flourish?

Will mechanical life find meaning

in a virtual world

where nothing feels hunger

or dreams beneath the stars?

I’ve been reading so much about A.I. — mostly dire warnings of economic collapse and human extinction — and wanted to write about it.  But the temptation for someone like me is to write an essay disguised as a poem: a polemic, a point of view, a logical argument. So I needed a way in that would get me out that categorical and argumentative way of thinking. Nothing about the pros and cons of data centres, the potential stock marker bubble, the alarming cases of A.I. going rogue (incidents its creators euphemistically call “misalignment”), the stunted worldview of the tech bros, or the failure of geriatric politicians — who don’t understand the internet, let alone A.I. — to effectively regulate.

And nothing about the big question that looms over us all:  will the A.I. we have created always be merely instrumental, or will it achieve sentience, a form of consciousness? Might it have already? 

So I thought about types of intelligence. And the natural corollary:  can a machine be called super-intelligent when its intelligence is limited to a single kind? 

The Spider in the Sink - Sept 17 2026

 

The Spider in the Sink

Sept 17 2026

The spider in the sink

is like a marooned man

who somehow survives

on some godforsaken island

all alone.

No food, no web

no way out,

just a bleak terrain of hard white porcelain

and the weight of time.

I’m struck

by how dignified it looks,

planted there, utterly still.

As self-contained

as the wise man on the mountaintop,

sitting cross-legged

and serenely content

gazing out from his ascetic perch.

But, as spiders always are

on high alert.

How did it get there, fully grown?

They once believed

that life begins spontaneously;

that the flies buzzing around the excrement 

arose from it,

as if a restless God

hadn't stopped creating the world

on the 7th day.

And why does it remain

in this barren wasteland,

an ambush predator

where there is no prey?

So still 

and unnaturally calm

it seems as patient as Job.

Even contemplative,

as if meditating 

on the deeper questions

that dog us all,

as if spiders had an inner life

richer than we thought.

I open the faucet,

and from a dead start

8 delicate legs

unleash like loaded springs

as it scurries to higher ground.

High tide

has submerged the island,

a Biblical flood

threatens to cleanse 

its desolate world.

An innocent spider

caught by circumstance.

So I cup it gently in my hand

and ferry it to safety

in a dusty corner of the room.

Because all life is precious,

and this creature is as deserving

as any other. 

Because there’s a nobility

to this harmless spider

I can’t help but admire.

And because I am no almighty God,

sitting in judgement 

and careless with his power.

I seem to repeatedly find new spiders in the sink. How they keep getting there and why, I have no idea.

But I am always struck by how dignified and self-contained they look. How patient and meditative, as if the inner lives of spiders were richer than we think. 

I’ve always had a fondness for harmless spiders:  the good they do; their extraordinary silk; the brilliant webs they spin. I suspect I identify with their solitary nature. 

So I feel supremely guilty if I run the water and ignore them:  as if they were dispensable, didn’t matter, felt nothing. As if life wasn’t precious; and not just the intelligent life we tend to privilege. (Actually, hardly even that. We eat pigs, after all. Never mind how we treat our fellow humans!) 

I can’t help but imagine changing places: as if some higher power or more advanced intelligence were to incidentally glance down, only to let me figuratively wash down the drain before turning back to some minor chore. Doesn’t life often seem that way? Instead of a paternal God who lovingly watches over us, an indifferent God who is careless with his power. (I prefer no God, but for the sake of a poem will happily betray my disbelief!)

Muddling Through - Sept 18 2026

 

Muddling Through

Sept 18 2026



History doesn’t happen like that.

Not how it looks, looking back

 — as if everything that happened 

was inevitable

pre-ordained 

made sense.

Rather, it’s muddling through

contingency

and random events.

Great and little men

who sometimes step up.

That is, just like your own life history

of bad decisions

accidents

and coincidence.

How you’d never have met

if you’d missed that bus,

how the stock went down

instead of up.

How just one

of the billions of sperm and thousands of eggs

crossed paths

by kismet or chance

and turned out to be you,

or was lost

before she ever knew.

They say that while history doesn’t repeat

it often rhymes,

comes close enough 

to be a cautionary tale

of a life misspent,

or exemplify

one well-lived.

But it isn’t done yet,

so who knows 

how they’ll look back and judge.

Whether books will be written

documentaries shown,

or if the crowd scene

where you briefly appeared and had no lines

gets left on the cutting room floor. 

Not inevitable.

Not close to memorable.

And an ending

that doesn’t even rhyme.

As you may have gathered, my utter abhorrence of Donald Trump — someone whom history will remember (if there is any future history in which to do it!) — has become somewhat obsessive. Detestation will do that. So when an Atlantic article about the uncanny similarities between him and Hitler appeared, I couldn’t resist. 

It was the opening line of that piece that gave me this poem. Its actual content I mercifully left out. Because no one wants to read (or write!) poems about despised wannabe autocrats and unredeemed evil. At least not me — I’ll leave that stuff to prose!  So the following excerpt and link are included here just for your interest. 

(Btw — and for any nitpickers reading this —  I took poetic licence with the number of sperm in an ejaculate. Because a number like 500 million (average app. 200 million; high app. 900 million) doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue! And “millions” instead of “billions” didn’t stretch the odds as much.

As well, I apologize for Great and little men. But “men and women”, “human beings”, and “people” also didn’t fit.

Does history repeat itself, or merely rhyme? The historian Timothy W. Ryback has thought about this question a lot. 

   . . . As Joseph Goebbels noted at the time, “The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the means of its own destruction.”

   . . . Ryback’s 53 Days makes no reference to contemporary politics. And yet certain echoes of the 1930s resonate so loudly that it is impossible not to hear them. To cite just a few: Hitler was obsessed with tariffs. Hitler tried to fire his central banker. Hitler was preoccupied with seizing Greenland. Hitler was intent on adding an expensive new wing to the Reich chancellery, part of his grandiose architectural ambitions for the nation’s capital. He attacked and muzzled the press, attempted to purge the civil service of anyone disloyal to him, had a genius for inflaming the populist grievances of his base, and spurred angry young men to take paramilitary action against perceived enemies.

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/09/the-lessons-of-hitlers-rise-for-the-trump-era/688687/?gift=7KKUTeeJruMo0n11oQFrLvbGBcIaCpYCf_COAoahMCM

The Hard Way - Sept 17 2026

 

The Hard Way

Sept 17 2026

I often encounter words

I don’t remember writing.

It’s like encountering your old self;

a younger version

you instantly recognize

but would rather disown.

Would go back

and shake some sense into,

pass on words of wisdom 

you found hard enough to learn.

Like a stern editor

take a red pen to the work

and hope he sees the light.

And words from my future self?

I keep my ears cocked

anxiously waiting to hear.

Not, as you might imagine

hoping for stock tips

or winning lotteries,

but news of who I’ll become.

That change is possible.

That, if not contentment 

I’ll at least find comfort. 

Or just a sentence

of reassuring words

  —  that there’s a future at all

given how things are.

And if he does know the answer

to the existential questions

we all contend with toward the end of life,

that he keep it to himself;

I’d rather learn the hard way,

keep searching on my own.

A rare day when I had no propulsive ideas and felt no compulsion to write. So after a  couple of false starts, I gave up; and instead, opened the blog and reread some recent work. Which I almost never do. 

I’m often initially surprised, but then they mostly do come back to me: the circumstance under which I wrote, the choices I went back and forth on. And, of course, I have to resist revisiting and making some final (as if I can ever be completely satisfied!) tweaks.

Old words I might feel good about, might not remember, or might regret. Which gave me this poem. Or at least its start. Where it eventually went, it did on its own.

(When everything seems to live on the internet forever, regret seems to be a big one; at least with celebrities and job searchers. Especially in this day of cancel culture, virtue signalling, and the ungenerous judgemental milieu of social media. Luckily, I’m not a celebrity, don’t bother with social media, and neither need a real job nor have any intention of seeking office!)

But it was helpful to reread. It kept me acutely aware of my main failing:  too many words, too much complexity. Which I think helped keep this poem both simple and short, just like all the poems I usually like best. 

When they research personal growth and change, they find people have a contradictory view of their past and future self:  looking back, recognizing how much they’ve changed; but looking ahead, figuring they’re pretty much done. In psychology, this has been called the “end-of-history” illusion. Here’s how my AI assistant explains this:

A quite different, empirically grounded sense comes from a 2013 study in Science by Quoidbach, Gilbert, and Wilson. Across more than 19,000 participants of all ages, people recognized they had changed a great deal over the past decade but expected to change relatively little in the next one. As the authors summarized: “Both teenagers and grandparents seem to believe that the pace of personal change has slowed to a crawl and that they have recently become the people they will remain. History, it seems, is always ending today” (BBC Future; original paper, Harvard). The likely cause is motivational: people like who they are now and resist entertaining further change. The practical cost is regrettable decisions — tattooing a current belief on your skin, or overpaying for future access to today’s preferences.

Still Here - Sept 13 2026

 

Still Here

Sept 13 2026



Why do we say sing?

I don’t mean the co-conspirator

informing on his buddies,

or the supplicant

in exchange for his supper.

And not the fat lady

we’re waiting to hear.

I mean birds,

who call and vocalize,

but do not sing for joy

or to feel uplifted.

Who warble, trill, and chirp

crow, cheep, and coo,

but do not invent silly tunes

or serenade,

sing arias

or gather to harmonize.

There are no jingles or protest songs

spirituals

or professions of love,

and little 

we haven’t heard before.

And while they may call with all they have

don’t sing from the heart.

Rather, it’s all about territory

and showing-off,

attracting a mate

asserting dominance; 

instrumental songs

that aren’t lacking just in words.

But, as in everything, we insist on seeing ourselves.

Misread nature

not as tooth and claw

but music to our ears

  — beauty, for beauty’s sake

at any cost.

Yet still, the bird on my roof 

sings in its solitude

when all the others have gone. 

The same few notes

over and over

on the crisp fall air;

the outlier

who doesn’t seem to know

that soon winter will come

and it’s time to go.

I listen to its plaintive song

and feel something unexpected. 

Is this the caged canary

that sings compulsively

just for the sake of it?

Or does it sing

because the sound is pleasing

in and of itself?

Simply sing

to be reassured

that it’s still here?

Consorting With Ghosts - Sept 12 2026

 

Consorting With Ghosts

Sept 12 2026



The hands of the clock circle.

The same 12 hours

repeating for all of time

as if nothing ever changed

nothing ever will.

Just as living day-to-day

feels like my life is nicely settled

and I’m here to stay.

But when I look at the pictures

taken before she left us

I think not of circles, but of lines,

and the long gulf of time

between now and then

hits unexpectedly hard.

Because those eyes gazing out

see nothing

stay fixed,

that young and hopeful face 

has long ago

decomposed in its grave.

So instead of fond reminiscence

I’m struck by the shock

of what’s been lost,

and what should be a treasured possession

becomes a cruel simulacrum instead;

revisiting

too hard to bear.

And for her voice, the same

if not more unnerving.

Because sound is the primal sense,

the first that makes a fetus stir

in her mother’s womb.

Her own words

as if she could return from the grave,

as if the finality of death

was negotiable.

Before technology

acceptance must have been so much easier.

They would have even thought it unnatural, I suspect

to consort with ghosts

by summoning their pictures,

indulge in false hope

by resurrecting the dead.

Let them be, they would have said

as life goes on

and memory fades.

You sent them off, and paid your respects,

now let them rest

just where you left them

less than 12 hours ago.

In that the past has never been more accessible, the last 150 or so years have been exceptional in human history. Photography and sound recording created a very different relationship with our ancestors. As well as recent history.  (Not to mention our younger selves!)

I know that most people treasure the pictures and voices modern technology preserves. I feel differently. I don’t like to listen or look. As the poem says, instead of fond reminiscence, I find them cruel reminders that just make the truth harder to bear.

Of course, there have been other equally exceptional changes. For one, the concept of time itself. In modernity, time is linear:  things change, people move, progress is assumed. (Granted, a sawtooth graph; but we still assume things will get better, that our children will have better lives.) While in the past, time was cyclic:  life didn’t change; people lived as their ancestors had for generations. They rarely even travelled more than a few miles from where they were born.

The poem won’t quite work if young readers can’t picture an analogue clock. Or is this asking too much? Like expecting them to know what a pay phone is, or even an actual floppy disc!

The closing line could be read as me contradicting myself. Because in a changeless world that keeps circling back on itself, the dead are never really gone. While in the modern world — scientific and post-enlightenment — the finality of death has probably become easier to accept, not harder; pictures or not. (The only trouble with this is that science has not made religion and superstition disappear. Many modern people still cleave to a belief in afterlives: reincarnation, heaven, whatever.)  Tribal societies — ancient ones, as well as contemporary nomadic hunter/gathers — often believe their ancestors are still with them: watching, guiding, and judging. They honour, commune with, and even worship them. So even without being able to revisit photos and videos, the dead may be even more present for them than for us.  . . . But then, differently: perhaps not so much in grief and mourning, as in matter-of-factly present in a conscious and vital way.

The Perfect Lawn - Sept 10 2026

 

The Perfect Lawn

Sept 10 2026

I scatter seed

and wait for rain.

If it wasn’t taken for granted 

that in the fullness of time

grass simply appears,

this would seem as miraculous

as water into wine

the loaves and the fishes.

That it eats light, and lives on air

should put us to shame

for our tempestuous lives

incessant greed.

If only we high maintenance creatures

could live so serenely

and with such frugality.

Of course, the lawn is unnatural;

the seed, selected and bred,

the landscape a monoculture.

No wildflowers.

No dandelion, clover, or sedge.

No hardy weeds

that survive drought and neglect

will be permitted to mar 

this temperamental grass.

Instead, the conceit of the perfect lawn,

surrounding our homes 

like a green palisade

as if to defend our notion of order.

As if uniformity

was the highest ideal

and diversity flawed. 

Which is odd, because we are not the same;

eah of us

of mixed blood, uncertain heritage,

with weaknesses and strengths

uniquely our own.

As adaptable

as mongrel dogs

and plants with hybrid vigour.

I take pains

to scatter it evenly,

identical seed

from the palm of my hand

over rich black soil

spread on level ground.

I’m starting to fit the stereotype of an old bourgeois white guy, fussing about my lawn, despairing over the weeds and bare spots. As if it matters. 

But still, I scatter seed. As evenly as I can. And thinking not only about all the miracle of germination and the complex life lying dormant in my hand, but also about my battle against a nature that abhors such uniformity. 

A sobering thought in a political era in which an increasingly prevalent and confident right wing celebrates blood-and-soil citizenship, promotes narrow ethnic nationalism, and promulgates xenophobic anti-immigrant conspiracies. That demonizes otherness. Not to mention their strident homophobia and their myth of a homogeneous past, a lost golden age of prosperity and “family values”. As if diversity was a weakness instead of a strength. As if this isn’t what makes nature so resilient, not to mention the source of her beauty and abundance.

One can only hope that the political and cultural pendulum finds its centre again. (Of course, it never does. It’s a pendulum, after all, and will find its other extreme soon enough.)

The hypocrisy and pointlessness of my manicured lawn (at least my ideal lawn, since the real one never even gets close!) is not lost on me.