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  Screenslaved is a short story about video gaming, but it's set in a dystopian future world that's not so far from our own.

  On March 15, 2019, a young man attacked the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand and then proceeded to attack the Linwood Isalamic Center. He attempted to livestream the attacks in a twisted effort to encourage others to act violently against Muslims. I did not watch the video, but I couldn't help but compare it to video game livestreaming which is incredibly popular.

  I have two sons and they are kind and wonderful humans, but they do like to game and when they are video gaming, they don't eat for hours, they get "hangry" and they stay up way too late at night. I've shared the story about the Korean couple whose baby starved to death while the parents played a particularly engaging video game, but they play in a group. It's their social time and you can hear them talking about the bosses they are about to destroy or yelling and cursing when their character is killed. I thought this could make a good background for a story about the future of gaming.

  My kids wear earbuds when they are communicating, so I only hear their end of the conversation. Sometimes, I have to ask them to take out their earbuds to talk to them, so I invented new tech called the "eyebud." It's like an Oculus visor but it's got two wireless projectors that mold to your eye sockets. Kids are supposed to take them off between games.

  I wanted to critique the Christchurch killer's motivations in targeting a religion, but I thought I'd better not make the story about Islam, because then I might be encouraging the bad behavior I want to prevent. Instead I invented a religion centered on a messianic figure known as Jebix. In the culture of this future world, Jebix beliefs have fallen out of favor, supplanted by a new, unnamed religion that is both more "woke" and much stricter. This unnamed religion controls the government and it's at war with the Jebix believers.

  I don't want to spoil the ending, but you may have figured out the plot already. I still think you'll find the story fanciful and thought-provoking. I've performed it live and it's a crowd favorite. Things are a little different in the future, for example, the cost of living has gone up quite a bit and they have robots to help perform menial tasks.

  Learn more by reading "Screenslaved" in my book, Capital Disrupt. I played around with the title, until my screen went to sleep and that's when "Screenslaved" came to me. It's a dramatic title, but I think we're learning from social media studies that we all may be a little screenslaved.

Revolution in a Teakettle is part of a long-form poem called Numerology that's morphed into a lyric essay. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a place for it in Flywheels. This poem is about numbers - how they benefit us and how they can be used against us. Maybe it was the dark twist at the end that got this one cut, but in the long-form poem, it has a happier ending. Saved from the cutting room floor, here it is:

  The Lighthouse of Maracaibo was selected for The Elevation Review's National Poetry Month issue in 2022. It's one of my favorite poems to read because of it's rhythm and colorful imagery. Maracaibo is the busiest port in South America and there's a reason why.

  A peculiar combination of geological features generates intense weather. Lake Maracaibo is huge and warm, so there's lots of evaporation, plus there's moisture blowing in off the ocean. When that warm, humid air hits the cool Andes mountains, it condenses and clouds form. By afternoon, it's quite often raining.

  The Catatumbo River is known as "The River of Fire" because of the lightning that strikes near its mouth, where it pours into Lake Maracaibo. Where the Catatumbo flows into the lake, there's a bog. As storms roil over the bog, lightning begins to strike, up to 280 times per hour and it can persist for more than ten hours.

  Lightning makes a good backdrop for a love poem, but it creates some drama. I wanted an arc from chaos to calm. A phrase from Mary Oliver's poem, How I go into the Woods resonated with me, "If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much." I remixed it in maritime style, "If you've ever gone down to the sea with me..."

  I needed a word for the sound of the non-stop thunder and found gabble - to talk incessantly. I needed sea monsters, so like Homer's Odyssey, we sail between monsters Scylla and Charybdis, but the power of love calms them and keeps them at bay - I chose an old word, abeyant, meaning a state of suspension.

  Chaos is one kind of freedom. I'd been thinking about freedom of speech and recalling the censorship portrayed in Milan Kundera's book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I kept thinking that Lightness is inevitable, so I remixed it as The Inevitable Lightness of Being, an unstoppable process by which we all end up rising.

  I combined that with a quote I'd read from Stephen Hawking, ""If we discover a theory of everything, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason, for then we would truly know the mind of God." Surely if we could know the mind of God, then we would realize the inevitable lightness of being.

  I'd heard a line in a local reading that stuck in my head. It was about sailing at night, with the stars in the sky reflected in the water. As a young man, I sailed Lake Superior on a two-masted ship, out of Duluth's harbor. I remembered a night when the water sparkled with light, "Stars above, stars below."

  To be alone with my love, I needed to drop the crew off, so I looked for a nearby port and found Baranquilla. The poem resolves with the ship adrift in calm seas, holding space for the lovers.

  Lake Maracaibo formed more than twenty million years ago, so the phenomenon of frequent lightning storms may have a long history. The ozone produced by the strikes helps protect us from the sun's UV light. Explorer Amerigo Vespucci noted the lightning in his journals and by 1841 it had been christened "The Lighthouse of Maracaibo" because of its visibility at night, beckoning sailors to Maracaibo's port, which is today, as I mentioned, South America's busiest port.

  You can read The Lighthouse of Maracaibo in Flywheels, page 34.

  Resilience is art that celebrates the environment. It was created for the 20th Annual Environmental Art Show at Standing Rock Cultural Arts in Kent, OH. Fred presented poems from his chapbook, Gospel of the Flowers, including O Great Mother and My Triumphant Return from the Virtual. Let's let Fred tell you more about the artwork:

  "This digital collage started with photos of Calla lilies, to which I added birds, frogs and butterflies. I call this the base layer. As I work I"m thinking about color and the position of items in the visual space.

  "Next I looked for a constrasting image - something with very different colors. I was thinking about land vs. sea and thought the reds and yellows in the base layer would contrast well with a picture of the ocean. I looked for photos of waves and found one that I thought might work.

  "While working on a collage, I try hard to be respectful of the original images. I use my own photos whenever possible but collage, as an art form, is about borrowing images and recombining them to create something new. When I borrow a photo, I crop it carefully to the object I'm seeking to collage in, then I alter the dimension, color and orientation of the image to differentiate it from the original.

  "In the end, collage is about creating line and shape out of diverse objects. In this case, I used a masking technique to allow the base layer to come through in concentric waves. I like to saturate the color before printing because print color space is smaller than video color space. It's the difference between reflective color and projective color.

  "I was very pleased with the color contrasts. You can see the foam patterns in the ocean wave, interspersed with a beautiful rainforest panorama. I printed the image to canvas fabric and mounted the canvas on a curved board, creating extra dimension for the viewer."

  Resilience is about how we stand up to climate catastrophe and how we learn to cooperate for mutual benefit. It's a call to action to preserve the natural world and keep our oceans pollution-free. Here's the original image:"

Resilience by Fred Pierre (2020)

  bark! is about growing old. It's about my dog, Eeva. My mother-in-law brought us a puppy in 2007. Cute and cuddly, she quickly grew into a giant - a gentle giant. She was kind to everyone, never bit and seldom barked.

  Eeva loved to run on the field. She ran so fast, there was no way to keep up with her. She ran figure eights and sometimes spun in a circle. Her joy was infectious.

  At age 14, she wasn't so energetic. Our walks got slower and shorter. Her hips bothered her, then she dislocated her shoulder. She couldn't walk. She lay in her bed, moaning with pain. We gave her gabapentin, which helped her relax.

  I talked to my kids about putting her down. I asked for a vote. No one wanted to put her down, so we cared for her, gave her a diaper and cleaned up after her when she peed and pooped. It was hard work. She got a grin when we brought her a bowl of food and she'd prop herself up to eat it. We helped her turn from one side to the other, which was painful for her, but it helped her sleep.

  I thought a lot about a phrase I'd heard at the poetry reading, "Be a Love Dog." It was something that local, Kent poet Maj Ragain used to say. He wrote poems about it. The way I interpreted it was that I am the dog and Love is the master. Even in her pain, when I came in the room, Eeva wagged her tail. She was a love dog, for sure.

  Polio paralyzed Maj at age 10, but he didn't let that stop him from teaching English at Kent State, where he encouraged young poets to write and perform. He loved talking to people and learning about their lives. He wrote heartfelt poetry with an Ohio flavor.

  As Maj aged, he lost his mobility. The chair was harder to wheel around - he needed more help - but when he looked a young person in the eye and smiled his Maj Ragain smile, he forgot all about his own troubles and he became their enthusiastic supporter. He was a love dog.

  After Maj passed, Kent local poet R.C. Wilson put together a book of poems to honor him, and to celebrate the dedication of Kent State's poetry park to Maj. I had written and performed this poem a few years earlier, so I submitted it to the collection and it was accepted. It was part of a chapbook I called "Poems for Parvati," now it's part of Dear Maj.

  The poem is about me, growing older, it's about Eeva and about Maj, who would have loved to be able to walk again. It's about limitations, but also about overcoming them. They key is to bark! And be a love dog.

bark!
It's not so easy
getting older.
I want to run on the field,
I want to play all day.
I don't want all these aches and pains
stealing my strength.
I want to walk again,
I want to fly.
When you're a love dog,
it's not so easy
to let
go of life.

  After three months bedridden, Eeva stood up. Her shoulder had healed. She couldn't walk very well, but she could go up and down the front stairs, sideways. She could make it out to the front lawn, in the cold, wet winter. As the Spring arrived, she got a spring in her step and tried walking to the backyard, where she collapsed and couldn't be moved for hours. I put a blanket over her while she rested and eventually we got her back inside the house.

  As the bluebonnets began to bloom and flowers were everywhere, Eeva went down the front stairs and lay in the grass. It was a beautiful day, but I noticed she couldn't raise her head and her eyes looked glazed. I called my family together and we each placed a hand on her as she stopped breathing and left her life.

  It's incredibly sad to lose a dog like that - a love dog - but you couldn't pick a nicer way to go.

  If you're ever in Kent, Ohio, take a moment to visit the Maj Ragain Poetry Park which hosts a fanciful sculpture by artist Robert Wick.

A Thousand Stories Inform our Dreams is about telling stories. It plays on the theme of 1,001 Arabian nights' whose main character, Scheherazade, composed a story each night for more than a thousand nights.

Her stories include "The Adventures of Bulukiya", where the protagonist's quest for the herb of immortality leads him to journey to the Garden of Eden and, eventually, travel across the cosmos where he encounters djinns, mermaids, talking trees and other forms of life. Another popular story recounts the seven journeys of Sinbad the Sailor.

This poem concludes the section of Flywheels called "My Dark Branches" which honors Night. The last line is about bringing the magic of dreams into our daily life.

  Finding Pandora arose from my dissatisfaction with the traditional myth of Pandora's Box. I often heard the story told this way — Pandora received a box from Zeus and she was told not to open it, but it looked like a fancy gift box and she thought it might have some goodies inside it, so she opened it. Out of the box flew a host of evil spirits like death and disease and so she doomed mankind. It's both a "curiosity killed the cat" story and a misogynist warning that women can't be trusted. I found both those ideas repulsive.

  In researching the myth further, the first thing I discovered is that an ancient Greek storyteller changed the word pithos to pyxis. What Pandora opened wasn't a box, it was a jar. Pithos were used to store water or food, partially submerged in the earth to stay cool. I started to wonder if some of other traditional interpretations were equally misguided.

  I soon learned that Pandora wasn't just any woman, she was the first woman. Her name means "Giving All" and she had many talents to share with the world. Pandora is a Mother Earth figure, depicted on ancient vases and jars. You can imagine her teaching beekeeping or plant medicine. As a longtime symbol of giving and fertility, how could she become the wretched figure who released evil on the world? We can blame Zeus, who loved causing trouble for humans, or we can imagine another way to read the story of Pandora's Box. All it takes is a little reframing.

  What if Hesiod read the text wrong and it wasn't death and disease she released? Let's say that they were, in fact, in the jar. What do they represent? It's submerged in the Earth, so that's the subconscious. Pandora is looking into the darkness, exploring her shadow self. She can't face the suffering of the world, so she turns within and finds courage in darkness. Maybe she even climbs into the jar. Maybe she buries herself. When she emerges, she's no longer afraid, she knows it's not her responsibility to save everyone. Maybe she doesn't have to Give All, all the time.

  She returns from the darkness, from the cold, dark earth holding the one thing no one can take from her — Hope — and so she shares hope with the world.

  Once you read it this way, the other version sounds trite. Read Finding Pandora on page 95 of Flywheels.