With apologies to Joe Hill (a poem)

By Bob Boldt

This is my latest poem, my latest attempt to express my outrage at our treatment of the greatest journalist, certainly the bravest journalist who ever drew breath. Of course, the horrific torture of Julian Assange represents not just a crime against one man but an attempt to silence all journalists and publishers and put an end to the troublesome First Amendment as well.

Boldt Words & Images: Caruso in Honduras

By Bob Boldt

[Originally published on December 21, 2019.]










A couple stands by the wind-blown bus sign.
His chin, still fuzzy, merely a boy,
an unstrung guitar string hanging there.
With three strings he begins his song.

Boldt Words & Images: Are we living in a simulation?

By Bob Boldt

[Editor’s Note: This fine essay was submitted over two years ago, but we never got it off the ground. We are prompted to publish it now because of something revealed by a recent book review: “The Novel That Riveted France During Lockdown Arrives in the U.S.” (Roger Cohen, New York Times, November 23):

Yet in the end the double anomaly at the heart of the novel – the upending of time in a world that discovers it is simulated – captured a moment when the pandemic stopped the world and existence veered toward the virtual.]

Are we living in a simulation? And what if we are? A 23-minute documentary film, What If the Earth Does Not Exist?¹, explains what “living in a simulation” means and why the idea is taken seriously as a possibility. The film is imaginatively and descriptively visual. I had seen many of its demonstrations before, but they have been effectively re-imagined here. The film makers spend so much time on the video game series Grand Theft Auto, however, that I suspect coin may have changed hands – maybe I’m just joking with this observation.

Boldt Words & Images: History’s Rhymes 9/11/73

Convergences

By Bob Boldt

[Appeared here originally four years ago today, on November 30, 2017.]

The poem below comes from a portfolio of poems that I submitted during fall semester for the “Poetry Workshop” at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. I hope in the coming months to publish a few more of these poems on Moristotle & Co.
    As a frame for today’s poem, I have adapted from the essay that accompanied the portfolio some hopefully relevant reflections on poetry and a poet.

Boldt Words & Images: Screen Savior

By Bob Boldt

Watching star beams float over and around

mushrooms in a pastel forest of soft, silk soil,

I was, for a second, maybe less, in my parent’s

living room listening to “Captain Midnight”

Boldt Words & Images: Waiting for Thunder

By Bob Boldt

Ages, my ages ago, I lay awake,
feeling Mother’s starched sheets
between thumb and forefinger,
my incredibly distant big toe

imagined the monster beneath my five-year old’s bed.

I understood somewhere between brain and breastbone

the full push of the terrifying, infinite universe.

Boldt Words & Images: Back to Work

By Bob Boldt

“Smartassed kid,”
the foreman grumbled,
throwing his cards down
on the worn, wood plank

Outside the wagon window,
a cloud broken sun awoke
from the rain. A clatter of spades
announced our return to the ditch.

Boldt Words & Images: The Great Jane Mudd Painted My Portrait as It Rained Outside in Columbia, Missouri

By Bob Boldt

Before she turned on the light, the splatter on the studio’s

rain-clattered skylight gave the room the appearance of

an aquarium.

Jane’s quotations from art history were pinned everywhere,

wallpaper clipped from the pages of art magazines and

old postcards from Paris. Vermeer’s maid gazed

on Dora Maar. Picasso ogles a Lautrec dancing

to catch a sidelong glance from Paul Gauguin.

They made the small studio
seem both crowded and vast.

Boldt Words & Images: Good Evening! Good Evening!

By Bob Boldt

Imagine dollars in my hand 

meaningless as November leaves.

Money, like all the precious, leaves first.

None would prefer freezing

over the warmth of the last flaming Bible.

Rudderless, captainless, shipless, wreck,

I wander like Tyrannosaurus before me,

watching his fiery, July 4th, slow-motion descent.

Boldt Words & Images: Calavera Number Six

By Bob Boldt

Artificial skeletons are hardly ever displayed

now in thought or in sight.

Shop windows are voided of all but surgical masks.

Imagine what all the uncut pumpkins

must think of the strange ones this year.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Albert Camus

For MLK Jr Day...

By Moristotle

...we could read Bob Boldt’s April 4, 2018 column, “Boldt Words & Images: Martin Luther King Jr. & Me.”

Boldt Word & Images: I Am Transfixed

By Bob Boldt

I Am Transfixed by a Giant Water Lilies Triptych

by Claude Monet 1995 Chicago.

(after James Wright¹ and Rainer Maria Rilke²)

Four feet in front of me looms a waterscape.

Claude Monet painted scenes of empty air

where even a Rouen Cathedral might float

Boldt Words & Images: A poem

Eliot in 1934,
by Lady Ottoline Morrell

With apologies to TS

By Bob Boldt

Don’t worry. I won’t be leaving the planet without a fight. Old Screwtape will have to pay dearly for this soul.

Boldt Words & Images: The First of Many

Fiction?

By Bob Boldt

[Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this short story appeared on Moristotle & Co. on August 29, 2015. The author has revised it for our world four and a half years later.]

Overhead, bullets whistled past me in the cold dark amid the falling drizzle. Some shells made a complaining, metallic clank as they struck the side of the overturned dumpster I had scrambled into. I was trying to dodge the first barrage that had made the street a sudden killing zone. In the process, I smashed my head on a large hook that protruded out of the side of the damned thing. Doing my best to ignore the stinging pain, I cautiously ran my hand up the side of my face, hoping for the best and dreading the worst. Moisture. Not the wet of the rain, but a thicker substance. Blood? I licked my probing fingers, and the warn, salty, iron taste on my tongue confirmed my fears.

Boldt Words & Images: Coincidentally

Composed on Friday the 13th of March, 2020

By Bob Boldt

[Preamble: If a poem requires explanation, then it is a failure. Of course, even “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” still remains opaque to many (if not most) readers. I had hoped that, if the reader were unable to draw any connection between the images in the poem below, they might at least be entertained by its juxtaposition of images and my take on appearance and reality and how the effigy of a woman’s torso can house a scorpion. I will say, though, that the “Marienbad” reference is to the 1961 film Last Year in Marienbad by Alain Resnais.

Boldt Words & Images: Vampires’ love

Greta Thunberg

A poem

By Bob Boldt

“If the Nuremberg laws were impartially enforced and applied, all thirteen US presidents since FDR should have been hung.” –Noam Chomsky

Boldt Words & Images: Pass Over

Meriwether Lewis

A poem

By Bob Boldt















The last of the Monarchs lights on my window sill,
his orange fluttering as futile a gesture of salvation
as my own. Now the Brazilian hurricanes will take it from here
no longer suffering any Butterfly Effect.

Boldt Words & Images: Other Observations

A golden shovel poem¹

By Bob Boldt

“Since we both share this accommodating hell, and because I know you, like so many others, will never leave, this flaming shade will gladly tell you his confession.”²

Boldt Words & Images: The Frankenstein Monster’s Artificial Intelligence Lecture

The Oxford Union at night

Delivered at the Oxford Union, after Greg Santos’ “Hulk Smash!” poem (Hey, we could start a genre)

By Bob Boldt

Fresh from his eviction from the Arctic melting ice flow, the Frankenstein monster stops by the Oxford Union in Great Britain to express a few opinions on the artificial intelligence controversy….

Boldt Words & Images: Cherries

A poem

By Bob Boldt













Ripe, white cherries fill a 1941 Noritaki bowl
on my kitchen counter as the sun slants,
three days younger than the Autumnal Equinox,
September 23, 2019.