Vijay Nair
The Candle
Tallow wax in slender
Rare corpulent in shapes
Peppy she a burning bright
The way of spreading light
Her moments are in delight
Never knew the plight
Grief no for the life span
Brief than an hour;
Her fleeting existence
Is no one’s concern
Since, she melts to cast the shadow,
To show her celestial beauty
Before she dies without sorrow
The Torture and Death You Brought About
They are the Rohingyas
They are the Muslims
They live in Rakhine of Myanmar
You, the armed forces,
You, the angry mobs and the hungry Buddhists
What have you made to do such monstrosities?
I hear the sound of cries and pains still now floating on the wind
I can still see the sight of torture and death on the screen
I can see the fully naked women tightly tied in a tree with ropes
The screaming, howling and growling with pain touches my heart
Sinks into darkness
Animals have also the rules to prey
More furious than they living in the darkness of forest or jungles
You, the killers play the role of demons
When I see the cutting of legs and hands of a living woman
Before blowing the knife on her throat and separating her head
Keep it on her hip
My eyes lose its power to see any more
When I see a man sitting on a stone fixing his hands and legs
Standing three with their black head from back
Suddenly started to blow the knife on his throat
Separating his body from head leave the track with the head
Numbs my body in the silent morning after rising the sun
When I see the boys and girls are mangled
with the axes in their mouths and foreheads
Immediately the land is flooded with blood
How can I keep my eyes open to the blue and rainbow sky?
When I see the children are held hard and beaten with sticks and rods
And shoot and cut the bodies and hung to the wall
How can I take my breath?
When I see the human bodies are lying on the ground
And the armed forces and mobs are beating and chopping them to death
How can I sound any more?
When I see the young official play with a young lady in the jeep
And tear her breast and vagina with weapons
Laying her flat on the road jump on her body
How can the world be silent?
When I see the live persons are burned to death by petrol
Pouring on their bodies
How should the green be the green?
When the houses are burning with the dark smoke
And the people are running to escape themselves
People of all ages; children, young and the old
Rush to Bangladesh crossing the river Naf
The water of the river has been red, the red blood
It is groaning with rage
Hundreds and thousands of dead bodies are floating on the river
The Rakhine land has already been cultivated with the seeds in this way
the so many silent dead bodies
Genocide! Overcomes all the savagery in the history of the world
O Aung San Suu Kyi, what will be your answer before our Creator
When along with them you will again open your eyes
to the Judgment’s day?
Would it be able to save you your prestigious certificate?
The Nobel Peace Prize?
Does it bear any more the honor you achieved?
Dragon Knows Dragon
(after the painting by Shiryu Morita)
Only a dragon knows another like itself
the brutal heart of it
beating to the rhythm of the same taiko
and sharing vengeful memories of villages
pillaged, burned and laid to ground.
Each can see in each other’s eyes
a murderous intent
and knows the purpose of their tongues
and flaming breath
red with the malevolence of their resolve.
A dragon knows another
as it knows itself
a soldier fighting for its kind
with its sword and lashing tail
like a flag
caught in the winds of war.
Welcome to July’s issue of Synchronized Chaos Magazine. This month’s theme is Ways of Being Human. We’re exploring different ideas of how to be a person in our world.
First, there’s the basic question of why many of us choose to stick around and try to make the most of this life.
Inspiration and motivation
Where do we find our inspiration, and what can that motivate us to accomplish? Different contributors point to different personal and global sources of inspiration.
Christopher Bernard exults in spring, dancing along with Schumann in an exuberant symphony of nature’s regrowth.
Mahbub pays tribute to his poetry’s various ‘muses’: nature, romantic love, artwork, and his own thoughts and ideas. Bursts of rainfall, paintings, and lost or idealized love can all come through and blossom into poems.
Joan Beebe writes of love and nurturing, from metaphorical beams of light illuminating the world and from the hardworking hands of a caring mother figure.
Even J.J. Campbell, our regular poet of angst, emptiness and alienation, allows glimpses of hope and beauty to penetrate his pieces this month, through rays of sunlight and stained glass.
Once we get motivated, we can move forward in life in various ways.
Chimezie Ihekuna’s play The Success Story presents a college student who leaves his promising engineering career to follow his true passion and become an author.
Elizabeth Hughes, in her monthly Book Periscope column, reviews titles about protagonists who take great personal risks to resist injustice. Arthur Cantrell’s The Flight of the Valkyrie concerns black operations and military intelligence efforts against the Nazis, and Frederick Malphurs’ A Day in the Life of Dr. Fox presents a Mexican surgeon and his twin brother and their fight for justice against drug lords who killed their sister.
Margi Garcia’s poetry shares her journey out of a violent relationship and her efforts to rebuild her life, as she finds comfort in family and friends, especially her children, for whom she desires to build a better life.
Small individuals, big world – or vice versa?
How do we relate to the world around us, to a universe that’s not at human scale? How can we, how have we, made sense of where we fit in a world that’s both much larger and much smaller than ourselves?
Gary Glauber portrays very human characters: guardian angels who love earthly pleasures such as Jeopardy, people who lose love out of foolish pride, old friends who enjoy reconnecting, exuberant vacationers. He contrasts the warmth of a personal conversation in a coffeeshop with the loss of privacy and feeling of being trapped and stared at that he feels when people he knows get approached or propositioned by strangers in the vast confusing world of the Internet.
My review of San Francisco State University’s annual Personalized Medicine conference presents a more optimistic view of computer technology. Ironically, impersonal processing of patients’ medical data and analysis of lab results through artificial intelligence allows us the processing power to understand health on a more individual basis and identify patterns on a deep enough level to provide personalized care based on a person’s genetics.
Doug Hawley writes of a hypothetical future terrorist attack in a story that starts out sounding so over the top that it could be humorous, then turns dark as the attack gets carried out and vast numbers of people die. His piece shows at once the vulnerability of the powerful, the ubiquity of nameless evil, the difficulty of fighting an enemy we can’t even identify, and what happens when large segments of the world are left feeling powerless.
In a more humorous vein, Jeff Bagato gives us a character who’s quite large. His body, his belongings, his self-concept – everything about him is defiantly big. This serves as a commentary on some cultures’ relentless drive to expand and grow, on the idea that ‘bigger is better.’
Storytelling and light humor
We explain our world to each other, and to ourselves, through stories. We also use storytelling to entertain ourselves and to appreciate and remember the world around us. Several pieces here illustrate how this narration is a vital part of the human experience.
Norman Olson gives us a travel essay with observations and detailed running commentary on his recent trip to the Netherlands.
J.D. DeHart sends us a fresh set of words and thoughts. Several pieces probe the creative and writing process itself, drawing upon the human imagination and finding amusement in the written word.
Ryan Quinn Flanagan contributes poetry somewhat reminiscent of DeHart’s, although with an even stronger narrative component. His work incorporates vignettes that find humor through the unexpected, the strange, and the slightly grotesque: drunk neighbors who talk of caterpillars, heartbroken friends not even ready to let houseplants into their lives, people who approach pro basketball in a cultish way.
The unusual, and the awkward, is a part of our human experience, though – just as much as the beautiful, the delightful, and the inspirational. We hope that as you read this issue, you enjoy these commentaries on our human existence.
my hand is big (supersized me)
my hand is big
my foot is big
my leg is big
my waist is big
my shoe is big
my pants are big
my shirt is 6XL
my DVD is big
my hamburger is big
my fries are big
my cereal box is big
my bowl is big
my plate is big
my fork is big
my table is big
my car is big
my lawn is big
my satellite dish is big
Vacation Adventure
Show us the wild kingdom
& let this paid king’s ransom
hold us captive one more day.
Let us be owls flying at night,
shouting judgments & formulae,
random truths of sorry subsistence.
This is the noise trees make
when no one is there to listen:
curt crunch & crackle
of solid dead fall, amazeballs
with a four-star review on
our favorite travel site.
Stone fireplace in drafty mansion
stirs the wind of ancestral doom;
we go for a stroll near sunset.
Hear our important footfall,
the approach of muffled outrage
through discarded thickets,
branches & limbs who lost
when gravity came a’callin’.
Now we all pine for fancy crafts
lost to time & tradition,
artisan carpenters of legend
who once whittled soft existence
into heirloom lives worth living.