The Indictment:
Poetry Most Critical
by Duane Robert Pierson
Integritas Publishing
Will be released early November, 2008
Our wonderful friend and the great artist Robert Solotaire died in early October, age 78.
Here is Duane Robert Pierson’s poem commemorating him:
Death of the Artist
by Duane Robert Pierson
They all die, everyone does
However, some walk special
Just like you my compassionate friend,
gracing the streets with your presence,
illuminating the world with your art.
You have left a corporeal vacancy
and a rich wonderful residuum,
great fine art, the immortal gift,
a long lifetime of effortless kindness.
Memories of a wonderful person,
our tenacious task to cherish and keep
We will miss you, yet we have you
to Bob Solotaire
October 2008
A New Poem by Duane Robert Pierson, September 2008
Already gaining traction with the stock trading crowd
The Algorithm Blues
Got them algorithm blues
Thumping technological news
Squirming little parasites upon
the fleas that bite the dog
Billions of bytes of data
and me, and you, just bits,
corpuscles in the body economic
Thousands of math geeks,
their pasty fingers upon buttons,
feed and churn every possible fleck
into massive copulating equations
that strip away our nonobjectivity,
depreciating nuance, voiding humanity
Empiricism rules, inseminating
the gangling computer models
Humans reduced to data pods
Thoughts dreams ideas converted
into utilitarian statistical mush
A black hole that sucks in privacy
converting it to market feed
It crushes our layered simulacra
into a singular utilitarian form,
fertilizing the insatiable marketplace
Ah the incessant electrical humming
of those sad algorithm blues that
shake freedom's willful essence
where even tears are collected,
registered, processed and projected
A New Poem by Duane Robert Pierson, June 2008
Annullo
Walk about knowing
they are there everywhere
mechanisms of transmission
cell phones, radios, satellites
dutifully emanating electrons
all pulsating and emitting
digital and analog formats
flitting about and streaming by
The trite and the meaningful,
intimate conversations impact
and we cannot feel or hear
We know they fill the air
swirling around and through,
invisible gusts of verbiage
descending somewhere into
an instrument of reception
Venture to Plato's cave
guided by sage Socrates
blind one's thinking self
experience another reality,
listen to the shadows on the wall
Practice secular aniconism,
shun the graphic image
They are truly there,
these hypothetical waves,
free in Aristotle's ether,
what he thought was something
but it is nothing but nothing
Now see the unseen
shift the polarity of reality
We are engulfed within
spatial spirals and convolutions
winding about us like endless
black strands of spaghetti
composed of electric ions
They striate the infinite ether
randomly bounce and careen
converting to fixed rhythms
Flip a cosmic circuit
break the connectives,
the bits flutter and fall
a lifeless black snow
of no purposeful utility,
all of cognition neutralized
into nonfunctional particles
The electron defeated,
a cyber catastrophe
No sound but silence
except when the expanding
cosmos hisses and roars
A New Poem by Duane Robert Pierson, June 2008
From an actual event on a neighbor’s farm remembered by the poet from his boyhood
The Wreck in the Meadow
A liquor delivery truck
failed the sharp turn
by Sherrill's lush meadow
early one spring morning.
That a quiet sleepy place
with a tiny meandering brook
rife with frogs and watercress.
Scattering across the wet green
flew bottles of every brand.
Heifers grazed undisturbed
looking on with bovine disdain.
A morning shift of workers
commuting to a nearby mill
gazed in credulous wonder,
awed by this dream come true.
Sherrill finished morning milking
ready to accept whatever event,
anything to disrupt a farmer's day.
His a primitive farm, ancient machines,
iron wheeled wagons, and draft horses.
He scratched a hard living from
patches of green on thin soil
beneath limestone escarpments.
The shaken truck driver waits
with hands on his head,
this not to be his best day.
Eagerly entreated by opportunists
declaring this indeed a blessed event,
he reconciles to inherent affability,
telling all to help themselves.
Thus does destiny sway and turn
The sleepy meadow soon picked clean,
songbirds and damsel flies flit about.
The mill’s day shift is soon sent home,
their drunken revelry a legend born.
Sherrill too harvests this bounteous crop
gathering arm loads of bottles to
cache in dusty nooks and crannies,
behind beams, in hay lofts and feed bins,
through the rambling old red barn.
As a farmer’s work is never done
he had never tasted demon rum.
Now with opportunity presented
a latent thirst was awakened.
A wary righteous wife stood guard
diligently alert to evil inherent
from such easy dubious bounty.
Nevertheless, he imbibed regularly
sampling from this ample reserve.
She never knew to pull a cord
hanging from the water trough
attached to a bottle deep within.
Old age crept in like an autumn frost
while tired joints and muscles
were ritually lubricated by a gift,
tonic delivered unexpectedly
on a long ago spring morn.
In a joyous postscript,
we tore down that old barn
many years, aye decades, hence.
We found dusty remainders
and will attest that if anything,
those brews improved with age.
We hoisted a drink, or two, to ole Sherrill,
a tired farmer and a damned good man.
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