FOUR FEATHERS PRESS ONLINE EDITION: DEAD DAYS Send up to three poems on the subject of or at least mentioning the words dead and/or day, totaling up to 150 lines in length, in the body of an email message or attached in a Word file to donkingfishercampbell@gmail.com by 11:59 PM PST on November 15th. No PDF's please. Color artwork is also desired. Please send in JPG form. No late submissions accepted. Poets and artists published in Four Feathers Press Online Edition: Dead Days will be published online and invited to read at the Saturday Afternoon Poetry Zoom meeting on Saturday, November 16th between 3 and 5 pm PST.

Wednesday, November 13, 2024

Terry McCarty

DEAD DAY


it was 1993 in Las Vegas

a day at the Sam Boyd Silver Bowl

where eggs could have fried on seats

and I sat near nonalcoholic Wharf Rats

waiting for the Grateful Dead to appear

but first, there was Sting in black overalls

playing for an hour to a polite audience 

then, after what seemed like another hour,

the Grateful Dead emerged with the welcome 

Deadhead favorites plus the Drums/Space jams

ending with a cover of A Day In The Life


after the experience

(nothing like a Grateful Dead concert)

I returned to the parking lot 

where burritos and homemade jewelry were sold

while some opened their car trunks

to pull out their instant happy nitrous tanks

as the police, rare for them, looked the other way




POST ELECTION DAY


democracy isn’t quite dead

but it’s certainly on life support 


we hope that the ACLU

and, occasionally, congressional Republicans,

can blunt the excesses of Trump 2.0

as centrist Democrats and the national press

look for ways to thread the appeasement needle—

seeming to stand up without doing so




ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE RAMBLE


let your Artificial Intelligence do your thinking and deciding for you 

plus you can put it to work making what Guillermo Del Toro called screensavers 

but you with little background in art appreciation will call it genius pixel painting 

then you can feed your AI old movies and movie star photos to create a 

teaming of dead Alan Ladd and Humphrey Bogart 

boasting it’s better than movies made with real living people 

and after that you can fly to a foreign country 

to not learn the language 

but speak your native linguistics into a translator app 

and, once you’ve returned home, you tell your math teacher 

you don’t need to waste hours proving theorems 

because there’s AI to save the day for you 

as you persist in believing your Artificial Intelligence 

is all the power you need 

with no more reason to read and figure and learn, 

then you’ll find yourself easily led 

and, eventually, easily enslaved\


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