The passage of unseeing time has brought me to the place I knew was my inevitable destination. I am no longer able to see well enough to continue, and am therefore closing down Verse-afire with this, my last post, my favorite verse, or poem, as you will. You may decide for yourself which it is. The Passage Of The Dreams is autobiographical in a sense, the story, in verse, of a ten year old boy gazing skyward into a darkness ablaze with the brilliance of a billion stars. The blog was begun in May of 2009 and ends in October 2018. I thank all of my readers, and will always be appreciative of the comments. And so it is time to say goodbye. Or as we used to say in the neighborhood when we were kids, Ave atque vale.

Time is an illusion. Life is a cyclical event that begins and ends with youth.

THE PASSAGE OF THE DREAMS

The grass is cool on moon-dark summer nights
The backyard tree is black against the sky
The house asleep with but a few dim lights
And thoughts and dreams turn back to days gone by
To younger days when stars were still in reach
And star-filled dreams were easy to believe
The ten year old has much that he could teach
His older self if truth he’d but receive
The distant stars are near if you but find
The ten year old who once was lonely you
For travel to the stars takes but the mind
To take you there if you were only you
For time is but the passage of the dreams
The stars lent to that ten year old back then
That drifted with you down life’s winding streams
And now at age you dream of stars again

November elections the Republicans will retain the House and gain seats in the Senate. And the following day, after the votes are counted, comes the reckoning. President Trump will give Mueller 48 hours to produce evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to rig the 2016 election, and that will be the end of that, but not the end of Mueller’s problems since he will be a target of an investigation into the coup attempt to remove a lawfully elected president from office. Attorney General Jeff Sessions will be gone, and in his place an Attorney General who will clean out the Justice Department and the FBI, and appoint a Special Counsel or two to investigate and prosecute the ringleaders of the attempted coup. The names of the ringleaders will be no surprise, except perhaps for one very large name. In addition, the Clinton crime family will finally get a close up of a grand jury investigation into Hillary’s pay to play criminal activity while Secretary of State, as well as selling top secrets to our enemies by leaving highly classified material out in the open on a purposely unsecured server where the classified material could be read, for a price, in real time. The 2020 election cycle will be replete with pictures of Democrats being trundled off to jail. And all the King’s horses and all the King’s men will not even try to put the Democratic Party back together again.

Humpty Dumpty, pantsuit and all
Stole a great fortune but had a great fall
Comey and Mueller and Rosenstein, Strzok
Will find that their rooms have a door with a lock
Yes vengeance is sweet and the hammer will fall
On all of the Humptys who sat on the wall
To strike at a King you must see that he’s dead
For if he is not you will pay with your head
As all the King’s horses and all the King’s men
Will see that you never see sunlight again

At this writing it appears that Judge Brett Kavanaugh will be confirmed for a seat on the United States Supreme Court, despite all the efforts of the Democrats and their willing liar, Christine Blasey Ford, to smear him with a false claim of rape when they were both in high school some thirty-six years ago. I spoke recently with my yet to be born great-great-grandson history professor, and asked him what happened at Ford’s theater. He looked at me quizzically and said, “There hasn’t been anything new since Stanton’s explosive correspondence with Booth was discovered some years ago.” I said, “Not that Ford’s theater, the Christine Blasey Ford’s theater.” “Ah, that,” he said. “That one is still talked about. There was an actual physical assassination in the first for political reasons, and an actual character assassination in the second, also for political reasons. It was ultimately shown that Senators Schumer and Feinstein had searched for many months for an accuser to come forward and destroy whomever President Trump nominated, who turned out to be Judge Kavanaugh. A woman named Ford was chosen and the plan was set in motion, at a time to obtain maximum effect. The effort failed but the Democrats trotted out other women who told their scripted lies to the Washington Post and the New York Times. It was all false, all a hit job, what the Democrats had been doing with every Republican Supreme Court nominee since Bork, and everyone knew it. The plot was ultimately unraveled and people went to jail, and Schumer and Feinstein were removed from the Senate, though many believed they should have been tried for treason or something. It finally ended, but it was great theater while it lasted.”

The theater beholds the play
The walls, the floor, the curtain
The actors, famous in their day
Know that one thing is certain
The play begins and then it ends
But always enters leftist
Is it a hit, well that depends
Who plays his role the deftest
The curtain falls, the stage goes dark
Due to exquisite timing
The losers go where dogs don’t bark
And Dems smile at the sliming
Bork was the first but not the last
Judge Thomas got his lynching
The GOP had held stern fast
With further seats now clinching
And so the future looms before
The New York Times will fool us
E Pluribus is now no more
But @MeToo won’t rule us

A recent study of all female termite colonies has shown that life can exist with only one gender, and radical feminism seems determined to bring this about by removing males from the process if not the planet, It is not clear that the sixties radical feminists had a fifty year plan to destroy the concept of gender and the science of biology, but that seems to be where we are heading. It began, innocently enough, with the demand that newspaper want ads stop listing jobs as male and female, arguing that jobs are neither male nor female and should not be listed as such. It seemed a small thing to most of us, and so it was done. From there the feminist agenda was enacted one salami slice at a time, until we reached the point where the very notion of male and female was scorned and ridiculed as just another humiliation imposed on society by the patriarchy. And so biology must go, since bi means two and everyone knows there is only one gender with 73 pronouns to illuminate the single gender’s unique differences. But what do we call that one gender? And what do the radical feminists call themselves? Certainly not feminists, though the few remaining masculinists among us may persist in calling them that. We do not yet know how this will all turn out, but we do know it will be whatever the feminists determine it will be, for their weapons are scorn and shame, and scorn and shame are lethal weapons to our current liberal male elites. But this is the optimistic view. Scorn and shame may not be enough. It is always possible they truly want to kill us.

To question the divinity
Of Abzug and Friedan
Was not within the power of
Your average mortal man
To do so was to cause all of
The left to be inflamed
And subject you to the torment
Of being scorned and shamed
And so their message gathered steam
And now that’s where we are
Some seven decades later and
We find we’ve come too far
To turn the clock of progress back
To times when men were men
And woman was the reason why
We fell in love, but then
The times have changed it seems for good
And always men are blamed
For masculine obsessions and
Forever scorned and shamed
It turns out genders are passé
We’re one under the skin
With male and female a construct
Not different, just kin
Yet while the women still insist
Male privilege be named
We still must call them ladies or
We’ll be both scorned and shamed
Yes that will do for now, they smile
As wine glasses they fill
To drink a toast to all  us males
Inside the termite hill

Today’s problems, massive seeming as they are to us, will, in time, be as shadows on the restless, shifting sand. Listening to Susan Wise Bauer’s magisterial three volume history of man from earliest myths to the renaissance, I became aware, not for the first time, that everything in the past is like blue shadows dimly seen on an erratically flickering screen. Valentinian’s problems with the Goths in the West and Valens’s sudden and unexpected encounter with the fiercest fighters to enter Europe from the vastness of the endless plains of Central Asia, the Huns, merits a short line or two. The Goths and the Huns are but dim blue shadows against the background of history, as are Valentinian and Valens. And as are we. The world we live in would have been unimaginable to Valentinian, let alone to the Huns, and as the world of a thousand years hence is unimaginable to us, where we too will be as flickering shadows, dimly seen against relentless time.

The Prince, back to the rising dawn
Sees shadow distant stretch
But at the setting, shadow gone
No longer Prince, but wretch
The King, his shadow mighty cast
Encircling the Earth
Will see his shadow dim at last
And circle to his birth
Blue shadows on a flick’ring screen
Erratic motions cease
The instant caster leaves the scene
And enters final peace
And so to all, if King or Prince
Blue shadows tell the tale
Of truth well told before and since
Blue shadow’s not for sale
Not to the Prince or mighty King
To order to expand
For shadows will, like everything
Die in the restless sand

Beautiful beyond imagining, from the dimmest galaxies at the farthest red shift edges to the deepest ocean canyon on planet Earth; from the scream of a hawk to the fragile beating of a butterfly’s wings; from a Beethoven sonata to a sad and wistful Gaelic folksong; to the majestic arc of an upper deck home run to the hysterical laughter of a small child as dad pushes the swing ever higher. We are surrounded by beauty, though some cannot see the stars or hear the subtle music of the passing seasons, crying out, at the end of life, that all was in vain, as yet unaware that an unimaginably greater beauty awaits, should they choose to see it.

A lonely rock strewn shoreline’s end
The smiling face of an old friend
Twin fawns safe by their mama’s side
A laughing child’s first horseback ride
A summer night with stars so low
That woodlands shimmer with their glow
A dusty, winding country road
Past fields so recently been sowed
With seed that burst to life the land
As joyous as a high school band
The gleam of distant Saturn’s rings
The star filled spheres where music sings
Of beauty nested in the folds
Of new mown fields and ancient wolds
We’ve been bequeathed this land we trod
Where God is beauty, beauty God

A quiet movement has arisen among middle and working class White Americans who have for generations voted Democrat, but who have belatedly recognized that the Democratic Party of today is not the Democratic Party of their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, but is now the party of Marx, Engels and Hugo Chavez, and they want nothing to do with it. And so they are walking away, walking because they know now that the current Democratic Party does not love them as they once loved it, recognizing, again belatedly, that the Democrats want to flood the country with illegals from countries having nothing to do with the United States, culturally or historically or linguistically, and are importing these people by the millions who will take their jobs and ultimately take their country that they and their ancestors built. And so they are walking away, in small numbers so far, but the mood and the numbers are growing.

Abandoned, alone, they expect no amends
The party they loved now says let’s just be friends
With sadness and fright they see strangers alight
From the busses near flowered tombs
Of  forebears and parents and all they revered
And watched strangers take all the jobs as they feared
They took much in stride, they had faith they had pride
But they know an election looms
With sadness and anger they’d walk cross the floor
They’d pull the straight lever marked D never more
By party betrayed, the decision was made
Unrequited love leaves dead blooms

In anticipation of a leftist win in 2020, and a return to leftist normality, I have, by a series of clever ruses, come into possession of a top secret Pledge Of Allegiance to be issued by the newly elected Socialist Democrat administration, and which will require, under penalty of law, that every man, woman, child and other shall recite, aloud and with fervor, first thing in the morning, upon awakening, before doing anything else, no matter how bad you have to pee. Out of fear of retribution, I publish it here, in this obscure journal, for your horror and edification.

A PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE

I pledge allegiance to the guys
And to the gals and otherwise
Of any gender who now rules
Because they went to better schools
Where sitting at professors’ knees
Were taught in order they may please
The great unwashed to live in ease
To eat free tater-tots and cheese
I pledge allegiance to our swell
New rulers who like dressing well
In royal purple flowing robes
That look so good with tainted probes
Where royal purple is the hue
Replacing the red, white and blue
I pledge support for fascist thugs
And agencies that plant with bugs
My phones and eavesdrop on my words
And tell me I’m as free as birds
I pledge support for feminists
Who want to put me on their lists
Of white men they will order dead
And offer them my lice-filled head
Support I do democracy
Despite the rank hypocrisy
That permeates the very air
That put me in your tender care
My attitude is quite blasé
Now that elections are passé
I will obey like good men should
And for you pray, as good men would
I know that pronouns do great hurt
And here and now I will assert
That should forgetfully I blurt
A pronoun whether mild or curt
I will confess to the police
That such infractions well must cease
And hie me to a penal farm
Where my sharp pronouns do no harm
I place my hand over my heart
And swear that I shall do my part
To celebrate my being free
But just right now I have to pee

s my support’s on solid ground
My pledge is honest and quite sound
I will obey like good men should
And for you pray, as good men would
I know that pronouns do great hurt
And here and now I will assert
That should forgetfully I blurt
A pronoun whether mild or curt
I will confess to the police
That such infractions well must cease
And hie me to a penal farm
Where my sharp pronouns do no harm
I place my hand over my heart
And swear that I shall do my part
To help my lords rule well and wise
And to not cause a rude surprise
To celebrate my being free
But just right now I have to pee

The Republican majority Senate Judiciary Committee has invited both Judge Kavanaugh and his accuser, Christine Ford, to an open hearing on September 24 to resolve the validity of her accusation that Kavanaugh attempted to rape her 36 years ago when they were both teenagers. She has no contemporaneous police report and no contemporaneous record of medical treatment, and apparently never told anyone of the alleged incident until six years ago when she told her therapist without mentioning any names. She has admitted that she does not remember the year or the address of the house she says she was in, and late Tuesday Senator Diane Feinstein, who started this entire character assassination charade, issued a statement saying that Ms. Ford’s account might not be entirely truthful. We know the history of these very late character assassination tactics by the Democrats who know they have no other shot at defeating the Supreme Court nominee of a Republican president. They lie and smear to the delight of the lapdog press, who print and broadcast every lie and smear as if gospel truth. It worked with Robert Bork, tried and failed to smear Clarence Thomas, and they have trotted out the tactic again. Despite knowing it is all politics by the Democrats, the Republicans have invited her to a hearing where she can tell any story she wants to tell without fear of legal consequence and Judge Kavanaugh must attempt to prove a negative. It is not clear she will show up at the hearing, claiming earlier in the day that she would not appear until after an FBI investigation has been completed. What the Republicans have done is to give the Democrats two bites at the apple. Unable to defeat the nominee in the Judiciary Committee and unable to defeat him in a Senate floor vote, they are now to be given the opportunity to defeat the nominee by lies and smears, all designed to give cover to three Republican Senators – Flake, Collins and Murkowski, who may be disposed to vote no. And if it works two out of three times, there will never be another conservative Supreme Court nominee confirmed. The Republicans are not called the Stupid Party for nothing.

Lies and smears, smears and lies
This is how a country dies
All is power, power’s all
Care not if the country fall
Rule or bust, bust the rules
Get them early in the schools
Teachers lie and liars teach
A generation out of reach
Know history, history no
Just vote for us and all is go
It took us many many years
But in the end it’s lies and smears
We always win, and win all ways
They’re here again, those happy days

The astronomers and cosmologists have now assured us that they have solved the puzzle of the nature of the universe. We are told the universe is composed of 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter, 4.9% protons, neutrons and electrons, 0.1% neutrinos and anti-neutrinos, and 0.008% photons, a quite reassuring degree of exactitude. We are further informed that the galaxies are moving away from each other at a constantly accelerating pace to the point where galaxies now visible to us at the edge of our observable universe will disappear over a notional horizon in very short order, cosmologically speaking, to be replaced on the edge of our vision by the next grouping in line, which will in time also disappear from view, and so on, leaving us, eventually, all alone in a completely empty observable universe. We have all been raised in the notion of an expanding universe, but this latest seems to differ only in the notion that the universe is expanding at an ever accelerating rate, with most of the universe moving away from us, and we from them, at speeds greater than the speed of light. The claim is, because of the ever accelerating speed of expansion the universe is disappearing before our eyes, and there is nothing we can do about it. I confess I have some doubts about all of this, despite the learned opinions of my betters, knowing, as do we all, that until Mr. Hubble came upon a Cepheid variable on piece of film in 1925 it was taught in all university astronomy classes that the Milky Way was all there was.

Firstly, space, like time, is not a thing, it is a void, an emptiness, and therefore it is difficult for a layman such as myself, to think how something that is nothing can expand at all, let alone at warp speed. Nonetheless, I accept as an article of faith, that we live in an expanding universe. But still I wonder, redshift or no. We are told that our observable universe is a sphere with a radius of about 46 billion light years, but because of the speed with which the universe is expanding, we can only see out to about 15 billion light years, with everything beyond that distance moving at speeds greater than light, and therefore invisible to us. Our 46 billion light year radius sphere, we are assured, is just 3% of the universe as a whole. Interesting if true, but since the universe is not an island in a vast sea of nothingness, then the universe is all there is, and therefore is, by definition, infinite, and I for one am pleased to have the size of infinity so easily calculated. In short, consider me skeptical but willing to be convinced. How confident am I that the Earth will not be completely alone sometime in the next two or three hundred billion years or so, the moon, sun, planets and all the stars in the sky having been swept over the notional horizon by a fiercely accelerating emptiness, leaving us freezing in the dark? Confident enough that I’m not going to worry about it.

The universe is all we have
To see it disappearing
Beyond our ken and out of sight
Means end of time is nearing
A time of cleansing of our hearts
Repent of our addiction
To dreams of space-borne empire
And all that other fiction
For nothing in our view is real
It’s all imagination
A book of leaves strewn on the ground
With scattered pagination