N.D.E. By Brian37 (AKA Brian James Rational Poet on FB/META and Brianrrs37 on Twitter)

Tis the switch
On the set
On to off
Last tiny white dot

The eight millimeter
Has jumped the reel
The filament
In the bulb

Has popped
Into the bright white
Only to shrink
And disappear

The reel
Brings us family
Memories
Of rotations past

From the toys
We played with
To the spouses
We marry

Our sisters and brothers
Our mothers
Our grandparents
Our fathers

Our shortfalls
Our successes
All on this reel
An illusion

Sometimes
Pulled back
We are and wake up
Sometimes not

In every case
Such enticing illusions
Are just that
Illusions

It is the last
Desperate action
Of the brain
To find comfort

A mere spasm
A product of evolution
In which we replace
With placebo superstition.
(end)

This is another old poem of mine. It is a criticism of claims of “Near Death Experiences”. No you did not die, thus “near”, there is no beyond and coming back. Once your brain dies, you die.

If you come out of your undetectable state, it does not mean you were permanently dead, it merely means vitals could not be found. If you come out of that it means you were still in that survivable window. The lack of detection could be a misdiagnoses by the doctor or nurse.

The “white light” everyone talks about or seeing their lives flashing before their eyes, isn’t real people you are seeing almost being in heaven. It is your memory files in your neurons all being dumped at once, just like if you went into an office and pulled out all the file drawers and dumped them out.

There is no surviving permanent death. Funny how nobody who has ever been decapitated has come back to report their “N.D.E.”

Piety, By Brian37 (AKA Brian James Rational Poet on FB/META and @Brianrrs37 on Twitter)

Oh grand Phallus
You live in a palace
Wearing your phony crown

But atoms and quarks
Defy your remarks
For in the end we lose all sound

The sun will expand
Making coal of the land
And with it too, the myth you spew

Impressed not the least
With your strut
Impoverished player,
Reality guts

In gaps you fill
With magical spells
Wane through generations,
Morphing into newer fables

Beseeching is reason
You can’t hold hostage
Free from your shackles
My mind grasps knowledge

Transparent friends
Fall prey to the truth
Your God is not needed
And neither are you.
(end)

I always like to make it clear this is not an attack on human rights, but a criticism of bad use of logic. Holy people only have the power over you that you allow them. Not believing in a God is not a license to be lawless or hurt others. It just means one can be capable of doing good and being good without assigning it to a god or God or gods.

This poem I wrote I believe back in 2007 on Christmas day walking back from the gas station.

Adrift, By Brian37 (AKA Brian James Rational Poet on FB/META and @Brianrrs37 on Twitter)

The serene
Glassy water
Flat smooth
Deceptively calm
On a rickety
Makeshift raft
Reflecting
The cotton
Dotted sky
The occupants
Dehydrated cry
For to land
A last ditch
Paddle
They try.
(end)

Use your imagination. This poem was inspired by a poem by a fellow Twitter poet and her poem about a picture of a makeshift raft of wood that was beached.

Note To My Fellow Atheists, By Brian37 (AKA Brian James Rational Poet on FB/META and @Brianrrs37 on Twitter)

Upon rare occasion, in other’s argumentation
With what may be good intention, they say
“Gods don’t exist, I am my own god”

If you are right to claim that such are fiction
Then you are in fact saying you are fiction
Can you see the confusion, in that argumentation?

I understand your intention, you are saying
There is no one upstairs helping us, and we
Are responsible for ourselves, masters of our own destiny

My response would be, not even we can be
That which you know to be fiction
I don’t want that argument made on my behalf

Humans cannot be gods, because gods do not exist
There are even happenstance, in life’s dance
Even when we do our best, randomness, chaos

Can disrupt us, set us back, knock us down
We are no more masters than slaves , nuance
We can have knowledge without arrogance

I don’t want to be arrogant, like the biblical God
I don’t want to be your master, nor his slave
I don’t want to bully anyone , or put them in a grave

In John’s song “Imagine” there being no binary choices
Among the stars , or brimstone fires below
Lennon was one to glow, Katharine Hepburn in the know

Sagan’s kindness all can show. Spinning, revolving
This tiny speck we live on, like us, is temporary as well
In the future the sun will swell , earth engulfed

No humans to tell our tale.

Of Allegories, By Brian37 (AKA Brian James Rational Poet on FB/META and @Brianrrs37 on Twitter)

If not to question social norms
Ones eons old, of dark skies
Before we learned to use fire
Curiosity our desire

Of times when we thought our blood pump
Was the seat of our intellect, our passions, emotions
Of times we thought epilepsy was demon possession
Of times when menopause was hysteria

If not to question social norms
Ones eons old, of dark skies
Before we knew the heliocentric relationship
Between terra firma and the giant hydrogen ball

Of times of fangs in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungry
In other times it was rumored that Countess Bathroy
Would bath in her victim’s blood
In her vanity to keep her beauty

Of times of half falcon half man
Of times of half horse half man
Of times two men with wings of wax
Daedalus and Icarus flew too close to the sun

Plato, Plato, what have you done
Your idea of “essence” Dawkins shuns
It intwined politics, religion, under the gun
Chasing utopias until we’re gone

If not to question social norms
Ones eons old, of shadows
On cave walls, what academia calls
Calls us to do , always, always

Will I question you.
(end)

“If our species never question social norms our species never would have left the caves”, <– Brian James Rational Poet.

Notes on this poem:

Richard Dawkins in his book, “The Greatest Show On Earth” in the preface he makes the bold claim that Plato’s idea of “essence” was deeply flawed and lead people to chase for that perfect thing. And we all know there is no such thing as perfect. In that striving for perfection it infected critical social structures such as philosophy, politics and religions.

“Things are not what they seem” is the theme of “The Allegory Of The Cave” an that there is a bigger world outside the cave with a different view or a bigger perspective. But Plato unfortunately did not have the modern benefit of the principle of scientific method as we know it today with the principles of falsification, replication and peer review.

So to me Plato was only half right. He was right to question, and he did value that. But to me, that morphed into religion as an excuse to not seek answers but fish for excuses to cling to what you feel is true.

So when you hear a religious apologist say “Go ahead ask me some questions” what they are really doing, is inviting you to listen to their sales pitch. They are not interested in you really kicking the tires or checking the engine. They are not interested in you asking if you can hand their claims over to independent sources they have no control over.

DISCLIAMER: Full disclosure, I could not get past the preface into the nitty gritty science of the kingdom phylum classification, it was like reading hieroglyphics.

But I do understand the simple concept of DNA in the 4 amino acids Adenine , Thymine, and Guanine, Cytosine.

If you want to think of the diversity of life you can think of it like all the graphics and programming you see on your computer stemming from two choices, zero’s and ones called machine language. Now imagine that much more diversity is coming from not two choices, but four choices. Or two base pairs Adenine + Thymine and Guanine + Cytosine.

You can think of the chimp human cousin relationship a lot like you can consider Twitter and Facebook don’t look alike, but are both in the class of “social media” just like chimps and humans are in the class of “ape”. But even your laptop is related to a toaster because both are “electronic” which would be less related “DNA” because there was more evolution between the first toaster and a laptop. The electricity is the four choices(amino acids) DNA all electronics share, and the toaster and laptop are simply different outcomes of the evolution of electronics. I hope that is a satisfactory metaphor on my part.

But it is why we can see that grass although not a palm tree, are related. Why a tiger and domestic house cat are related. As incredible as it may seem theists, it is absolutely true, like it or not, you are related to cockroaches too, but fortunately not that closely related. Point being ALL LIFE has the 4 amino acids Adenine, Thymine, Guanine and Cytosine.

Richard Dawkins has in the past basically said that it is a mistake to think of DNA as “mixing paint” but rather “shuffling a deck of cards”. If I am remembering correctly, he said that the uniform back of the deck is the DNA that all life shares, and the face of the card are the slight differences over long periods of time.

Before someone says, “You are talking about science but you didn’t get through the book”. Well one can know how to drive a car even though they can’t build one from scratch. I still understand the overall concept.

Last Utterance, By Brian37 (AKA Brian James Rational Poet on FB/META and @Brianrrs37 on Twitter)

On our deathbeds, they will claim
Off our tongue, we’ll call his name
That of our denial will be all in vein

They’ve claimed of Darwin
And Einstein too, the realization
The Bible was true

Your existence was their truth
These revisionists know its not true
It is done out of the desperation
To stay relevant for their convenience

As of for my death, which will come due
Don’t hold my last utterance as true
I could be drugged as to not be lucid

I could have damage to matters of my grey
Care not of what I say in such a case
That will not be me, I’ve lost my place

That incarnation, last manifestation
That utterance could be confusion
A mental decline of broken pathways

Value only what I say now
For now I am of sound mind
So do be kind, don’t lie about me

On my deathbed.

We Are The “Nones” By Brian37 (AKA Brian James Rational Poet on FB/META and @Brianrrs37 on Twitter)

Or channel is simply off
Outside that commonality
We skeptics are a variety
Of politics, status and education

We come from every nation
We come in every color
We’ve left every religion
We are your brother, your sister, your mother

We will be that bindweed
Our trumpets sound indeed
Thorns to to get you to see
Of a God you do not need.
(End)

What Of This Existence, By Brian37 (AKA Brian James Rational Poet on FB/META and Brianrrs37 on Twitter)

What lies after is of no consequence
It is the strife of now that befalls more pain
But the exit is another property
A process, a portal, a window

States of America in lower latitude
An observance, a convention, avifauna
Flock from frostbite to palm fronds
Yet many abstain from this migration with fortitude

Shriver, a name plate, to scribe
Antipathetic stale crust of scraps
Our prescription pending these blizzards
We retreat to the warmth of home.
(end)

Another ode poem. BUT WAIT, NO, this time it wasn’t Anne or Sylvia. But Emily Dickinson’s poem “Tis Not The Dying That Hurts Us So”

https://allpoetry.com/’Tis-not-that-Dying-hurts-us-so

Manifest Destiny, By Brian37 (AKA Brian James Rational Poet on FB/META and @Brianrrs37 on Twitter)

Oh how they sanitize history
Calling them “Settlers”
When they were invaders
Raiders

Andrew Jackson
Trail Of Tears
60 thousand displaced
From 1830 to 1850 years

“Indian Removal Act”
Was Jackson’s genocide pact
“White Europeans can
God said steal their land “

Under the Almighty’s command
They claimed had a divine plan
Justified calling them “savages”
Death marches became their passages

Native’s Holocaust
All those lives lost
1492 that of Columbus well
Sanitized story sells

The white man brought disease
Small pox blankets please
Divine entitlement
Calling it “settlement”

Atrocities that arise
History’s silenced cries
Facts the ignorant despise
They cant burry their lies

Manifest Destiny
Was a failure of humanity
Our species self entitlement
Brought Natives cruel misery.
(end)

I went to the wiki Article about “Manifest Destiny” and it still uses the sanitized word “settlers”. It was human ignorance and the idea that God gave white Europeans the right to steal property and kill humans to expand.

Now of course there are going to be MAGA assholes saying “I wasn’t around, I didn’t do that”. Which isn’t the fucking reason we need to remember the treatment of Native Americans. Sugar coating a brutal reality only serves to a future where the same thing happens to another group.

White Europeans, and our Government were shitty to Native Americans and blacks and women. All of that history matters as ugly as it may be to many. If you are making excuses as to ignore it, then you do deserve to be blamed for any future atrocities you set the climate for by your own ignorance.

But if you accept it, and teach it, you are helping build a more safe and secure future for more of your fellow humans. Don’t ignore what we did to Natives. Don’t try to hide it. Don’t sanitize it. The story of Native Americans is the story of blacks, is the story of Jews. To forget, ignore or burry out of hate, next time it could be you.

Rejection, By Brian37 (AKA Brian James Rational Poet on FB/META and @Brianrrs37 on Twitter)

Frigid under my inadequate sheet
I, a sad sight
Ruinous dreams in dark of night

Fleeting in the pitch black sky
Pin prick dots twinkle white
Speeds through the calendar

From the chalky suspended satellite
My significant other’s two orbs
Petrify me like the Pharaoh’s heart

Medusa’s serpents were not so
Though my other did not know
This thistle minimal, still hurt them so

Unexpected was was the flame
Raging temperature rising again
As translucent as an all powerful deity

Wanting to assert their authority
Escape to where? I had no cover
Scorching summer or Siberian winter

At dawn’s due, a cycle strewn
Destine for endless repetition
Snuffing out the sparkle of the twilight

A gilded cage in the coalmine
Sings no songs gives no warnings
Listless canary will see no midday flight

I know that stare,
That arbiter
Of ominous obsession

It is a break
To be made clean and quick
And to never look back.
(end)

Another ode poem, inspired by Sylvia Plath’s poem “To A Jilted Lover”.

https://allpoetry.com/To-A-Jilted-Lover

I am talking poetic license for my meaning to be slightly different.

I believe her poem is talking about wanting her lover to see the pain she is in for being left.

My poem is about physical abuse in that you should never put up with it.