Censored:

 

If, and only if, justice, then peace.

Why, war, why?

Carl Rittenhouse Larson

February, 2012

For the record, my poetry, shown above, has been censored.  This is a fact.

Most likely, it was censored by an algorithm, but still.  In a way, it was written by an algorithm.

I’m thinking about getting “Censored poet” tattooed on my chest, maybe in Mandarin.

Expanding on the censored poem

Through the words of this casual, two line poem, I was attempting to communicate, with hyper-efficient language, that justice is a necessary element of peace.  Without peace, there can be no justice.  The way it’s worded, there’s basically an equals sign between the two words.  Much of the poetry I write similarly equates words, as if they were mathematical functions.  I like writing series of linguistic equations.

War is the most serious, complete threat to human existence.  I’m saying that war is equal to injustice.  That feeling you get when someone screws you, and you’re left to clean up the mess.  That feeling, times a thousand, to the exponent of watching it happen to your family, is the root of war.

I ask, as we careen off toward another imperialistic war, why?  Why war?  We could help Iran build the geothermal, electric, and wind technology that our whole world needs to live sustainably.  Problem solved.  We could invest resources to speed the development of electric battery technology, so that we could have a truly electric global transportation infrastructure, complete with renewable, electric freight shipping.  Problem further solved.

Instead of even considering this, we flirt with potentially going into another war about oil, except this time, nukes are involved!

For those of you who are into numerology, I love the number 3 right now.  Triangles are amazing (Larissa Grant helped me realize this, she’s a brilliant artist who often visits the concept of 3 in her art, and whose work watches over me as I write).  The second line in my poem is 3 syllables.  The number of syllables in the first line is 3 multiplied by 3.

Pre-emptive note to quibblers

I’m aware that the poem itself wasn’t the specific target of the demonstrated censorship; rather, it was the image.  However, as it played out, all commentary attached to that image went down like an innocent bystander on a cruise ship suddenly attacked by agressive icebergs.  We were all censored, all of us who posted, liked, or commented on that image.  My poem was silenced, in every way, shape, and form, and if it wasn’t for my future self, and the Command+Shift+4 screenshot function, this poem would’ve sank to the bottom of an icy ocean in eternal silence.

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Here’s another (slightly longer) poem I wrote about peace, called Stillness.