April 5 Poem - Washington Monument

April 5 poem on a landmark


Washington Monument

Tall needle of democracy, impales all cloud

the industrialist bedlam ensues, thunder complains aloud

The ozone thins, the sun rays pelt, in all this heat

Greenland and the polar ice caps melt.

P.S. I hate this one.

April 4 poem - oh Please, A little armor

My poem for April 4th - the prompt was to pick an animal:

oh please, a little armor

Armadillo of my envy
waddles on with leathery grace
and when alarmed, curls to himself
in fetal retreat. Turtle, my other idol
moves at a such slow deliberate pace
and when the world is too engaging
withdraws his head and hides his face.

--Mistryel Walker

April 3 Poem - Canine Compromise

This is another poem I wrote during the poem a day April 2009 challenge - this poem was fir April 3: It's really about how mis-adapted we are for our modern lives....

Canine Compromise

The problem with dogs is underemployment.
Eons of DNA for running the tireless patrol,
cooperative hunting for fun and profit,
the upper-handed snarl, or deep-den digging
dirt-flying intensity or gnawing elk femurs,
or marking or sniffing out the latest odorous map.

All this reduced to a 20-minute walk, and a half-
hour yard run, two antique humans, one with
no sense of humor, a chair under the window, and
a horrid selfish cat who bits dog toes, ears, lips
anything to secure the sun-spot on the rug.
Ah well, waiting for the mailman will have to do

-- Mistryel Walker

http://www.youtube.com/v/KU6qpVz_KGM&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999

Vote Bots hit my youtube channel overnight

Amazing stuff. Automated votebots attacked my wee-little brand new channel overnight and most of my videos went from five stars to one star overnight. Some had less the ten views but had been rated as many as 34 times. I did have the foresight to disable ratings on My Escape from Christianity which seemed like an obvious target.

April 1 Poem, Poem-a-day in April Challenge "Out of the Muck"

This and all the poem a day entries are back dated. I wrote and posted them all to the Poem A Day Writer's Digest blog during april. It took me a while to post them here..)

The prompt was "origins"

Origin

Out of the muck we come
over-adrenalized and peevish
Muscled, toothed, furious to survive

Out of night, into the cave,
firelight dancing, igniting imaginings
of more-than-muck, and we

Out of our minds, with fire-born charcoal,
into the cavern carve a vast sprawling hunt
that we have made: gazelle, mammoth, man

men, together, ready for more than muck.

--- Mistryel Walker

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I closed one, opened two more Youtube Channels

Following the example of someone else I know, I closed my old YouTube channel, PuzzledDragonVideo. I had so many videos of other people reading poetry, it just didn't look like my channel anymore. I took all the videos from WNPS or of other poets reading and put them on a channel called PoetsAndTheirPoems. Its URL is http://YouTube.com/PoetsAndTheirPoems I also added the infamous Dueling Cameras video to this channel where six folks from Wednesday Night Poetry go to the Blue Coloney Diner afterwards. There is also a playlist with two videos of Anne Marie on that channel. One is on the channel itself; the other is on her slam-team mate Sean Gallager's site. It's a little blury but still funny.

My own brand new channel has the same title as my original blog here (I've moved as you can see) - the Puzzled Dragon at http://YouTube.com/thePuzzledDragon This channel is now home to my poems, stories, odd notes, weird videos, artwork videos. I really culled the material to be put up there so there is absolutely no material that I did not create myself. The classical singing from my recital in 2006 will go up on a channel of its own at a later time. Though I might include the spoof video of Ernani Involami

Ademdum: The classical channel is http://YouTube.com/AlmostSang

Living Model Of Basic Units Of Human Brain Created

- A process under development may enable the modeling of the human brain in a living representation, according to an article in Science Daily.

Using cells originally from a tumor which have been 'reprogrammed' to stop multiplying, along with a natural molecule used by the body to stimulate cellular development, the cells are turned into a "co-culture" of nerve cells and astrocytes - which the article calls "the most basic units of the human brain." According to the article, this line of research could lead to improved treatments for Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases.

As someone who feels fairly numb at the moment, heavy with all the folks who have died in the last year, I can't help but wonder if this living model could contain joy..... so elusive right now. So I'm engaging in a little art therapy trying to make a co-culture of renewed vision, shed some grief by the polishing the rice bowl method of doing something, namely sculpting a little. (pictured above) Not working so far. Taking out trashing didn't work either. Nor a blog post. But each little action propells forward into the future. That's really all one can do. Go forward.

Go to the article -- in ScienceDaily.com (2009-03-22):