The larger world is darkness intensified, from Muslims beheading captives to Christians dismembering babies and selling their parts. I think about these things during the daylight hours, but in the stillness of the deepest dark, I often listen to the soft four footed tread of others who cannot sleep as they walk stealthily through the woods outside my kitchen window, and wonder what they would think if they could know what a superior lifeform was doing to itself.

My kitchen window is the door
Into another world
A world of birdsong and what’s more
A world quite deeply squirreled
Sometimes at night in deepest dark
When lit by silver moon
I hear my neighbor’s hound dog bark
He likes not that raccoon
And yet I’m sure I’ve never heard
Of raccoons being burned
Alive by furry beast or bird
That’s something they’ve not learned
Some distance off a tom meows
He wanders, like my verse
A sound that sets off hound dog growls
But silence can be worse
My friends outside give not a thought
To who is knight or knave
They know that life cannot be brought
Back from the silent grave
My world is quiet late at night
The kitchen dark and still
The birds sit waiting for the light
To sit upon my sill
This morning though a raven black
Laughed through his cackling call
And stared me down as I stared back
And said, Let’s kill them all
The Muslims and beyond the pale
The women with black hearts
Arranging for the final sale
Of murdered baby parts

Why does summer seem to slide by so effortlessly, almost without notice? You wake up one morning and it’s Memorial Day, and the next morning it’s Labor Day. Where did it go? Winter isn’t like that. Winter is a cold, miserable slog lasting not weeks or months but eons, eras. There is no interval between everlasting winter and evanescent summer, and only Labor Day separates the evanescent summer from winter’s eternal snow and sleet and cold, biting wind.

Yes children love the falling snow
But when it gets to ten below
The blood congeals, reflexes slow
So man invented naps
The days creep by as cold winds blow
And on the windows crystals grow
While newsmen spin their tales of woe
And show us on their maps
And then one day we see a bird
As from a tree a call is heard
And suddenly, without a word
The winter season snaps
And in its place the sky once gray
Turns blue and kids come out to play
And fields turn green with corn and hay
And summer’s here, perhaps
You turn your head as if to say
I don’t remember leaving May
And when you look it’s Labor Day
With summer Nature’s lapse
Then suddenly there’s falling snow
With banshee shrieks the cold winds blow
And up the stairs I slowly go
Thank goodness for the schnapps

Fair Dinkum is Australian for “Good, genuine, for real”. Thus all the bad news you hear on your telly is not fair dinkum, for most television news is neither good, genuine or for real. What we are told as being really bad news is not as bad as you may think. Really bad news is the disappearance forever in 1177BC of every advanced civilization of the Eastern Mediterranean, and no one knows why. Invaders? Plague? Space Aliens? In the 15^th and 16^th centuries Ottoman galleys roamed the Mediterranean unmolested, raiding coastal villages of Europe, selling the women and children into slavery and chaining the men to the galley rowing benches where the only release was death. Bubonic, pneumonic and unnamed plagues. Constant warfare. Death by sword, death by disease, death by the ineffable will of God. Things are better now. Muslims are still killing, raping and enslaving, but we could do something now we couldn’t do then, and that is kill all the neo-Ottomans any time we decide to do so. So I prefer to enjoy the good news, which is that summer is over and football is back.

Compared to ages past the news
Today is much too shallow
The churches all have empty pews
The moral mind lies fallow
No longer do the galleys raid
And take the kids and wenches
In rows dead men untimely laid
Survivors chained to benches
It’s better now, we do not die
Of hemorrhagic fevers
Though still the politicians lie
We still elect deceivers
A rising tide will lift all boats
A falling tide will sink ‘em
And with the sinking bad news floats
Away and all’s fair dinkum

Six thousand years ago Babylonian astronomers announced there was a large planet named Nibiru lurking unseen behind the sun. Modern astronomers have said there is no such planet, that the motions of the sun are unperturbed by any unseen body. I’m not so sure. The Babylonians were hardly ever wrong in these matters, and Nibiru is simply likely to be their name for Nemesis, and is, indeed, unseen behind the unperturbed and uncaring sun, even now drifting slowly and quietly, entering on its destined and imminent collision course with Earth. I spoke to a Babylonian astronomer recently, and he was not sanguine about our chances of surviving the encounter.

His name was Akidnu, occupation a scribe
He charted the heavens each night
He proudly belonged to the Chaldean tribe
And noted for keenness of sight
Nibiru, he said, is unseen as of yet
In thrall to the Sun god is he
According to classified email I get
He longs to break loose and be free
Clay tablets arrive in my server each noon
Encrypted cuneiform text
Nibiru will crush inner planets quite soon
And after that you will be next
The sky was once filled with the fast moving gods
You’ll notice the purposeful trends
They vanished in time much despite all the odds
And now beyond Saturn it ends
Nibiru has entered the world that we know
Demolishing all in its wake
But mighty god Sun has now caused it to slow
But however much time it may take
Nibiru will surely complete its set task
Destruction of all you hold dear
For destiny does whatever gods ask
And shortly Nibiru will near
And thus be the end of this phase of the world
Nibiru is what you call Time
And Timeness and Space are in tension and curled
For gods are all reason and rhyme

People say Hillary made a mistake by scrubbing her server, but she was around during the Nixon years and heard the moans of the Nixon loyalists that Nixon should have destroyed the tapes, and she realizes that if he had he would still be president today. Acting upon the Nixon experience, Hillary very cleverly destroyed the evidence, and defies anyone to prove anything, knowing that for the Clintons it’s either you’ve got the goods or you don’t. With the Clintons it’s all about the evidence.

I’ve never heard a voice ring with such fervor
As that which shrilly cries that it’s her server
And she can do with it as she desires
And you can squeeze her nipples with sharp pliers
She screams what people say just makes her bristle
That server now is cleaner than a whistle
There’s nothing left to see, what does it matter
This talk of classified stuff’s idle chatter
You cannot stop a Clinton that’s for certain
You tried to take my husband down for flirtin’
We always win, I’ll get this nomination
And cement in our total domination
By winning in a landslide this election
And then we’ll see us take a new direction
Utopia for all and for forever
And all because that scrubbing was so clever

The science and technology of war has leaped beyond the boundaries of the possible into the world of the fantastic. Stealthy missiles, invisible bombers, pilotless fighter planes superior to anything with a human pilot, guided by a pilot sitting a thousand miles away in a darkened room, gazing into a computer screen. There are those who say that the day of the fighter pilot is gone, but I don’t think so. Technology is fine, but it takes a man to win a war. Fighter pilots will always be with us, and it all began with stick and canvas biplanes taking off from grass fields in France at dawn.

The dew kissed grass, the dawn lit sky
The SE5s trembling to fly
The chocks removed, the goggles down
Beyond the trees the tiny town
Awoke to hear the dawn-break roar
Of fighters climbing off to war
Into the sun they sped at height
The spear-tip of a nations might
The sun now up, the sky soft blue
No Huns in sight, as on they flew
They did not see the future pass
The Merlin and high octane gas
The Hurricane, the 262
Or owed by many to so few
The missile, radar, atoms lit
While fighters fought as pilots sit
In offices in front of screens
With war for some soft painted scenes
Below the SE5s the war
Had scarred the land and farms and more
The scar-line trenches hove in view
Into the sun the spear-tip flew

Bismarck once famously said that if war comes it will be because of some damn fool thing in the Balkans. War came in 1914, and we are now re-running the movie, this time because of some damn fool thing in the Middle East. Only the damn fool thing in the Middle East was done by President Barack Obama when he deliberately changed victory to defeat in Iraq and created chaos by pulling down dictators who were doing us no harm and replacing them with Islamic killers determined to destroy us and all our works. And so we shall have nuclear war as Obama’s secret deals with Iran have put them on the path to nuclear weapons and Israel defends itself. All are drawn in as city after city foes up in towering clouds of turbulence and black smoke, as Vera Lynn sings the closing song from Dr. Strangelove,  We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when…..

This movie we have seen before
The script is brief and calls for war
And all because behind the door
Lurk monsters in the dark
The secret deal, the shaded wink
Will save us all, or so some think
Believing other guys will blink
But secret dogs still bark
Events will shape the world not men
As seen before, now seen again
There is no If but only When
And life comes grim and stark
The children cry and women mourn
As lives and land alike are torn
As on winged hooves black death is borne
When tinder flashes spark

Donald Trump has a commanding lead, though it is early yet, in the polls among Republican primary voters, particularly in the critical swing states of Ohio and Florida, despite his raving rants against Fox News and Megyn Kelly. Trump, a long-time registered Democrat, a man who espouses every article of the Progressive agenda, supports Obamacare, hires thousands of illegal aliens for their cheap labor, and who has contributed to Hillary’s campaigns, is now running for the Republican nomination for president and who threatens a Third Party run if not nominated. Has Trump recently traveled the Damascus Road and now sees the light? Has he done a complete pirouette and has now renounced his progressive past, or is this a planned Perotette. a rerun of the Ross Perot campaign in 1992 that delivered the presidency to Hillary’s husband. If Trump gets Hillary elected president, then the country is doomed to Third World status and one party Socialist utopian rule far into the future.

The Donald, now, leads in the polls
The darling of the downtrod proles
For Hillary he’ll grease the skids
With votes from those with closed eyelids
A Clinton White House, oh what joy
The country the Dem Party’s toy
The health care system bites the dust
Death panels economic must
With Huma the First Lady now
And all the crazies yelling WOW!

She lay in her coffin, unmoving and unseeing, the smell of bronze and silk strong in the closed, tiny space, the sounds of the receding drums growing dimmer, until finally she could hear them no more. In their stead, she heard a bird, calling to someone, instantly answered, heard the sound of everyday traffic on the nearby road. She would wait, for what, she did not know, but she would wait. She settled in, comfortable in her cramped surroundings, aware of life outside her bronze home, life above and beneath the surface of the earth. She marveled at the industrious sound of burrowing earthworms, intent on going only they knew where, of winged insects delicately making love to willing flowers, of gentle rain lightly brushing the cool, green grass. Yes, she thought, I shall wait.

Who was she, the young man asked
Who indeed, the old man said
I knew her well in my own youth
‘Tis Lady Liberty who is now dead
What is Liberty, the young man frowned
I do recall I’ve heard the word
But that was oh so long ago
But much since then must have occurred
The people changed, the old man sighed
Who took the checks gave up his soul
And grievance came to rule the land
And now She’s lying in that hole
Well, said the young man, Liberty
Could not have meant so very much
To give it up for circus bread
At the first brush of tyrant’s touch
So slow it came, the old man sighed
We never saw the moment when
And now She’s gone, by our own hand
Perhaps in time She’ll live again

People are wondering how the presidential election will turn out, wondering how the Hispanics will vote, and wondering if the Dems will bus massive numbers of illegal alien non-citizens to the polls like they always do. I spoke to an illegal alien just arrived from Mexico the other day and asked how he was going to vote and he said it was always well to rely on how other undocumented illegal alien non-citizens were voting.

He said he likes the stronger horse
Just like in Mexico
An open question though of course
Depending on the show
He thought the Donald spiteful, mean
Though otherwise all right
The choices though must all be seen
To quite enjoy the fight
He heard of Jeb who married well
A Latin girl he heard
But Rubio he could not tell
He’s Cuban is the word
Now Walker seemingly enjoys
A tussle now and then
And so I’d say of those four boys
They’re good but I like Ben
He paused and looked me in the eye
And said in muted voice
You fellows really really try
And think you have a choice
It matters not on whom you dote
The vote’s already in
In Mexico I cast my vote
For Hillary to win