To Be a Superpower or Not To Be a Superpower, That Is Not the Question…

22/52 : Tian an Men
Eric Constantineau – www.ericconstantineau.com / Foter / CC BY-NC

Whether China is or is yet to be, or if it even wants or wants not to be a superpower are not the important questions to me. One way or the other, the answer is or will be yes. An important question for me is, how will China manage its increasingly powerful role in the world while also managing the consumption requirements of its increasingly demanding and aggressive population.

Of course, controlling the flow of information — internet censorship, for example — within and without of the country, will be key to its strategy of ascent to the highest heights of global power. But even censorship and governmental intimidation and societal manipulation will serve little purpose when the country’s water wells run dry from its hyper-industrialization and the ongoing desertification of large swaths of the country. When this happens we can certainly expect an explosive rise in the price of global food commodities. And as we’ve seen in our very recent past, when food prices rise beyond the reach of the least affluent, tempers rise right along with them.

And when tempers rise…

Governments fall.

Resource Wars are inevitable, and I foresee China opening up the first major front in the assault.

Exactly when this will all happen?

Now, that is the question.

~~~~

Look it up, folks. It’s all out there.

Scary stuff, for sure.

But scary as it is, it’s all delectable fodder for the imagination of the author intent on creating a world of horrific dystopian proportions and perfection…

 
 

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Poem Man

Poem Man, the poem

Come hither all ye children
And gather round,
For the Poem Man cometh
To your quaint town.
He’s bringing the most magical, beautiful,
Spectacular sounds…
Sounds that you may have never heard before.

He has the sounds of pinks and yellows
And midnight blues.
You’ll hear rainbows and gumdrops
And morning dew.
Come hither sweet children,
Bring your parents too,
To hear the oceans converse with the shores.

Look, yonder cometh he
From the valley below.
Can you see on his shoulder
His talking, orange crow?
Make haste sweet children.
Get ready for the show,
For the time is drawing near.

He carries his poems
In a large, burlap sack.
Doesn’t it look heavy
Upon his broad back?
In it, not a rhyme is missing—
Not a riddle does it lack.
Be still now sweet children for the Poem Man is here.

~~~~

Well, since the poem Butter was reasonably well-received a day or two ago, it inspired me to create a Poem Man page where I’ve included scans of the original book cover and introduction, as well as a Table of Contents listing all the poems and links to the ones that I’ve already shared online. You can find the new page under the BOOKS heading at the top of the page, or you can just click here.

Enjoy!

There’s something I really need to tell you…

But, in all honesty…

I’m a little scared…

I am afraid that when I tell you about that which lays so heavily on my heart…

You will immediately lose all respect for me…

And end our friendship…

But it’s really something I have to do…

Something I have been yearning to do for some time now…

But society says it’s bad…

That good boys and girls should never, ever do this…

That it’s against “the law”…

The “law”…

Who makes these “laws” anyway…

The pious…

The pedant…

You know, those kind…

The beautiful ones…

The ones oh so righteous

And the ones oh so true…

Just tell me…

Why do these hypocrites have the right to tell me how I should direct my love…

Every single one of them…

Hypocrites…

They, themselves, are constantly doing exactly that which they so fervently condemn…

They don’t think I see them wallowing in their hypocrisy…

But I do…

They, in all their self-righteousness, are no better than me…

Or you…

And yet they think they can, with the stroke of their red pen…

Or with the stinging criticism of their lashing tongue…

Keep us perfectly in our place…

Directly in their control…

Like the little lambs that we are…

The lemmings…

And for so long, they have done just that…

Because I have let them…

I have let them have power over me…

I have suppressed all that I so strongly desired just so I could abide their “laws”…

And reap their favor…

And their praise…

How I longed to not love that which I have loved for so long…

That which was strictly forbidden to me…

But tonight…

Right now…

I revoke their power…

And assume it for myself…

Tonight, right now, I have the power…

And with that power I will openly declare my love for that which they forbid…

That which for centuries has been considered evil and taboo…

Literally, to them, a mortal sin…

But tonight I shall rise up

Tonight I shall break the conventions of normalcy…

Tonight I shall shed the chaffing shackles of oppression and humiliation…

Tonight I shall boldly and unabashedly declare my love and my devotion…

My all and my everything…

To the alluring, the sexy…

The more than a little naughty…

The compulsively and completely addictive…

The one thing that I am happily head over heals for…

And desperately in love with…

The sadly shunned…

The fatuously forsaken…

The miserably misunderstood…

Adverb.

Butter

Butter

Boy, I want you to butter the bread.
And remember, I like it buttery.

But Dad, it’s too hard for me to spread the lard.
Can’t Sister do it instead?

Boy, it’s up to you to butter the toast.
Cuz the only way for you to learn

To do the things that you can’t do
Is to do those things the most.

So every time there is bread to butter
I want you to spread the cream.

And soon you’ll be the best bread butterer
That the world has ever seen.

~~~~

Butter is from Poem Man, a children’s book of poetry that my family and I put together, – literally put together: the poeming, drawing, covering, printing, stapling, etc. – back at the turn of the century.

I must admit, that when my children were young I had aspirations of being the next Shel Silverstein, my favorite poet of all time. While that didn’t quite work out for me, it sure was a lot of fun fooling around with children’s poetry back then when the kids, and the internet, were still young.

It’s hard to believe the original Poem Man website, circa early 2000s, is still out there. Check it out if you’re in the need of a good chuckle.

Guess I was doing Indie before Indie was cool…

Poem Man Website

Almost forgot that I’ve already exploited Poem Man some time ago, tying in a poem, or at least attempting to, called Petey Peter the Garlic Eater with my review of W. Somerset Maugham’s masterpiece Of Human Bondage.

Yeah, I know… but what the heck, right?

 
 

Is it just me or…

Do others get excited for a flash of a second when they think they are reading a splashy headline about the literary giant Milan Kundera and then feel all bummed out when they realize it’s actually about the actor Mila Kunis and then feel even more bummed out when they realize they couldn’t stop themselves from reading the entire vapid article?