craigalish.com

Looking out at these pictures weaving
in shades of blue in the harbor

I remember it a nightmare, sweet delicacies cast aside
blown horrible, the memory of her face empty
like the face on a mirror wrapped in sackcloth

Each day dawning like the sun on a murderer
tied down to die by the sun
I say a prison — as an island is a prison
and no man is an island

Ships chasing the wakes of ships
worn ships tired after clawing from foreign lands
drawn to shore by the pointing of mothers and children
I say a lodestone — sailors bounced sea to sea
shackled by constellations in stormy seas

A cold spark from that same loneliness
shivering in us all, nights where
her shivering roared down the empty corridors
roaring still as the sea lapped it.
Nights and wine from clay jugs
until wine and clay lost their ceremony

Stars shine the brighter
reflected in deep ocean pools,
pulling tides to celestial whim

and delirious mariners
trapped by the wave’s bittersweet song of drowning
cast their eyes endlessly starward
vainly to unravel the majesty of water

Far easier to plot a fateful course through futures unseen,
divine the nature of two souls
battered and bound in love and broken by oceans
than to hold the sea
in your arms.

There is only my love for the sea

I wake washed ashore from fathomless sea dreams
dazed and disorientated
not knowing and
not wanting know to know
to what land have I drifted

mine is a flat white with honey. thanks

walking round the waterfront. warm in the sun. best to avoid the shade.

i had a dream
i was making you a coffee
your daughter was there
we’ve been on holiday in jamaica
she said
the trees outside
are not as green as
jamaica
i kept grinding the coffee

its good to see you
i said, we talked about sailing
and holidays
we were in a ships galley
sailing over green hills

i woke up in my dream
and you were gone
it had been good
to see you

i woke up from my dream
it was a blissful dream
i woke up feeling blissful
if i could dream of
making you coffee every night
all my mornings
would be such sunlight

i was just hunting around to get an idea of the population of iraq, and to try and get an idea of the effects of the war on the people of iraq. wiki states the current population at a little under 27 million, a few of the hits in my searches mentioned a massive influx on people into iraq. comparing the population of iraq and its growth over the period prior to the first ‘gulf war’, thanks to the université du sherbrooke, we can see that the population of iraq was in the order of 24 million in 1999 (9 years after the first bombs dropped) and was growing at around 3 percent per year. now 17 years since the war the population is around what it would have been in 2003.

check these pages out:

• the telling price of war on the growth a nation
• who deemed it profitable enough to get involved in
• accounts of atrocities from inside iraq

watched the transformers the other day. the big righteous robots from my childhood return full of subtle social engineering and american propaganda. the first obvious WTF?!?!? reaction happens just after the movie begins; the transformers, the robots in disguise movie kicks off in iraq. woah../// here we go… is someone trying to make a point here? is this going to be one of those movies?

in these initial scenes in iraq and, throughout the film, we get this great sense of the power and sophistication of the US military industrial complex; this becomes quite a central theme (though perhaps meme is more on the money).

in the opening few minutes this iraqi kid (i can but suppose we are suppose to assume his nationality) runs up to the american GI (supporting actors) at their base. my first reaction: ‘ah! a suicide bomber’ then immediately ‘uh gee - that’s not cool for a family movie’. the kid is not a suicice bomber. of course not. instead the kid is all happy faced to hang with the US troops. there is some icky sense of big american brotherhood. its a scouts moment.

hang on. hasn’t the last 17 odd years seen the continuous bombing of iraq by america? if this kid was an iraqi wouldn’t he have had close members of his family and friends blown to bits by the US air force, or riddled by bullets from american ground forces. chances are he’d probably seen members of his family, or his friends, killed in front of him; probably his school, or the local hospital, or his home, or all of the above, is just rubble and body parts and the kind of memories than you can’t escape even over a whole lifetime. the happy kid really got to me. i don’t think there are many kids in iraq who would be happy to see a GI. but i’m on the other side on the world - i wouldn’t really know

there is this whole ‘bring the troops back home’ theme that runs thru the the transformers. there are great examples of a hostile government (’homeland security’ -ish) task force abducting citizens with threats and force and without explanation, this is very telling. it sends important messages, and for me is both funny and disturbing, but somehow the other scene i got stuck on is the whole morse code thing. it appears in so many movies and it might even be because of its frequency that i reckon it has some freudian baseline. its a message that is consistently reinforced.

its so generic its cliché: first all other communications are hacked, intercepted, jammed, down, whatever. someone comes up with a bright idea. morse code. that thing that everybody knows. the techie character, generally armed only with a screwdriver and acerbic dialogue, jury rigs some moorse code transmitter out of a zippo lighter and an digital watch. then (cut to scene) there is some army guy listening on the other end of a shortwave radio or, better yet, a morse code receiver. the army communications guy immediately recognises, believes (’we have some morse code blipping in - my god its from the general’), and translates the morse code on a handy notepad

do the army really still maintain these systems. what is the real message there? what secret irrational fear does is stimulate in deep within us? what is the meme it reinforces?

i’m going to have to think on that…

i live in a little suburb in a little city in the south pacific. recently while walking about the burb and driving about the town, i’ve noticed all these new traffic lights. lots of them. really. lots. they’ve just been springing up all over the place. not just in the little burb i play in, but just down the road from it, and in and around the city, and probably outside the city - but i haven’t been out there to check.

at first i thought it was a great move of some urban safety initiative from the council to back the research they had been carrying out on why pedestrians cross roads without waiting for the cross signal or, without even walking to a designated cross location. but then i realised that adding more traffic lights wasn’t going to make people cross at them, unless the pavements were littered with them, but even then it wouldn’t make people wait for the green man, and you’d need to climb over them to cross the road.

so then i had this council conspiracy; councilor invests in traffic light company, sales of traffic lights to council triple! or something like that. there seemed a while back to be a roundabout infestation; any road that meet another road, no matter how casually, had to have a roundabout on it. roundabouts seemed the birth control of intersections. i had smelled a hint of conspiracy there, but thought that there was probably just some money left in the budget, and roundabouts were cool somewhere in the world that urban planners paid attention to.

then i released the truth. the traffic lights contain little green men and the roundabouts are their spaceships. nuff said.