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    HOW DEEP IS THE OCEAN

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    [audio wav="https://carvalko.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/HOWDEEPISTHEOCEAN01052020WAVE.wav"][/audio] Overlapping, crisscrossing, waves un-stilled. Roiled! Who kept track, Who kept time, One, two, each second, low, soothing, Lives lived in seconds, Seventy years, eighty years Who kept track, Undulating, crests, peaks, valleys, ups, downs, Joy, ecstasy, heartache, heartbreak, we attacked, life, Every second, Full-bodied, Our hot insides, unfathomably deep, ceaseless repetition, Lapping the shore, Ripples that hardly turned a grain of sand, Now, Out there, the future, stilled...
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    I CLOSE HER EYES

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    I CLOSE HER EYES fires stormed the endless earth spinning us beginnings, no end — a dearth of light, no dark, down, no up, a child cries, no child — weightlessness memory, stark whiteness, the iron-framed bed, all's been said, I close her eyes . . . [audio wav="https://carvalko.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/ICLOSEMYEYES107sp.wav"][/audio]..
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    FINISHING SCHOOL-learning the order of things

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    The peasant, or mechanic, imbibed the useful prejudice that he was advanced to the more dignified profession of arms, in which his rank and reputation would depend on his own valor; and that, although the prowess of a private soldier must often escape the notice of fame, his own behaviour might sometimes confer glory or disgrace on the company, the legion, or even the army, to whose honours he was associated. On his first entrance into the service, an oath was administered to him with every circumstance of solemnity. He promised never to desert his standard, to submit his own will to the comma..
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    A FAIRY TALE- Gulliver Updated

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    At first, the Lilliputians are hospitable to Trump. They are a people who revel in displays of authority and performances of power. Republican senators seem especially so impressed, but are also wary of the threat that his size poses to them. The Lilliputians reveal themselves to be a people who put great emphasis on trivial matters. For example, which end of an egg a person cracks becomes the basis of a deep political rift within that nation, some states turn from red to blue.   But as much as they trifle on the inane, Lilliputians easily ignore that Russia, the nations mortal enemy, act..
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    John F. Kennedy-62 years ago

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    Fifty-six years ago, this weekend, we repeatedly crossed and traveled over a Dallas route with a presidential motorcade that showed President John F. Kennedy’s head unnaturally convulse forward and then jerk backward as slugs from a “lone gunman’s” rifle recoiled to change our lives and the course of world politics with less than a few grains of gun powder. Kennedy died at the Parkman Hospital in Dallas, November 22, 1963. The episode seared itself into our bones. Commissions would convene to investigate, research, marshal facts, debate, hypothesize and never satisfy many of us as to what happ..
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    SEVERING OF THE SPECIES

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    Severing of the Species Implications of Genetic Editing and Artificial Intelligence on the human substrate[1]   Joseph R. Carvalko, Jr. Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, Yale University New Haven, Connecticut, USA carvalko@sbcglobal.net         Abstract—This paper reports on the confluence of current data gathering such as genomic-wide association studies,  related to the heritability and manipulation of traits, and bioengineered processors, which combined have the potential to influence the further development of our species. Specifically addressed are: genetic..
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    PARADOX OF HOPE

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        The bounty of affluence trickles to wet the lips of the have-nots while we applaud ourselves for our generous contemplation, tightly held in clenched white knuckled fists that protect the tokens of our prosperity, that grant fortune to the fortunate upper, that let drip the fluid remains to the tolerated middle, that deposits the soft dung for the bottomed masses who persevere on a desolate patch on a parched plain in the center of an Eden despoiled by the gluttonous interests of despots, politicians, and the high priests of industry whose blindness protects them from their ugly satisfacti..
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    THERE WILL NEVER BE ANOTHER YOU

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    At times the future seemed long in coming, but looking back life passed so fast. If you didn't grab hold, you missed it. I can’t count the times you passed through my mind—What would Bobby think? Mostly when I looked at nature. Maybe because nature embodied freedom, and freedom embodied you.  I regret not going all in, but looking back I tried to stay upright, maintain some kind of balance or perhaps peace. Or because it terrified me to let go. In any case, it makes no sense to think about “what ifs,” if for no other reason than because it takes away from looking ahead.  I do have another regr..
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    WINDOWLESS

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    IMPEACHMENTS bring back memories that I'd long shelved for good reason. Oh, not the reason you may think, i.e., living vicariously through the excising of an affront to our collective sense of how public officials should behave. Although, there is a vicarious part, because, during the Nixon hearing  the summer of 1974, I was taking my first constitutional law class and obsessed with the hearings--, to the degree that I set my cassette tape recorder in front of the radio each morning, making sure I didn't miss a verbal moment. As fate would have it, eight years later, I became friends and partn..
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    21,900 DAYS AGO

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    On this day, 21,900 days ago, a train took a young man in search of his himself, a journey beginning on a rainy and cold October morning on the same planked platform that took his father to war fifteen years earlier. He boarded the train and sat looking out over the small crowd gathered on the platform. He saw the tears glistening in his mother’s eyes. The train jerked forward and then settled into a low,  steady crawl out of the station then crossed a long black trestle that paralleled the Washington Avenue Bridge a few hundred feet to the north. The bridge spanned the oily Pequonoch River co..
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    SEPTEMBER BRINGS ME BACK TO JUNE

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    It was the summer of 1959, I’d just finished my junior year at Central High and needed a job. My uncle Louie, through a family connection found me a job working as a short order cook for Tony Castagnolas, a druggist on the other side of town. I actually had met Tony years earlier, when my old man and I built a wall around his house in the ritzy section of town. Tony was primo to Capo Joe Castagnolas, who lived in the Hollow, the Italian enclave our family was from. In fact Joe’s wife was comadre to my aunt Maggie. While working at the store, from time to time I’d see Tony’s daughter sashay in...
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    Chocolate Martini Novel by Valerie Lee

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    Chapter 1 - Continued   Ensconced in the back seat Malone deposited headphones on her ears and grooved to the euphonic sounds of Deep Forest.    As the car made the voyage downtown, the colors and classes of New York flashed by and everyone, regardless of pigment seemed to morph into each other like a small wave gathering momentum until it was a huge crashing crest of humanity.   Before she knew it, the car pulled to a stop on Greenwich Street in front of The Muffin Spot. A Sistah the color of cashew nuts with ground paprika undertones, sporting starter locks, sat at a table by the window..
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    SHOW SOME HEART

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    [audio mp3="https://carvalko.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/001_FOLDER01_001_Joe_19080815_2019_08_08_19080815.mp3"][/audio] "Government please show some heart, let my parent be free and everyone else."..
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    IN MEMORY OF BILLY BOY

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    My father Billy, whose father was Billy, named me Billy, like America ain’t enough awash in Billy: Joel, Graham, Bob Thornton. But I’m not just any Billy. I’m “Billy,” keyboard drifter, 57th Street, Central Avenue, Route 66, flophouses, roadhouses, whorehouses, the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino along a Las Vegas strip (old town). Now a gray-haired man and his piano, fakebooks for the exotic one-act dancers, the Saturday night comedian at Billy’s Castle, bar rooms, dives and beer halls, no longer playin’ the moneyed high society ballrooms for phony smiles, movers, shakers layin' an oily sheen o..
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    A PORTRAIT OF MELA SUSÉ

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    It’s not the easel red-faced posing bare, It’s the brushes that keep me from daubing A palette of magentas and iridescent blues,   It’s not the swirl and eddy of your contours, It’s that brushes have no bristles to tell The legends scrolled across your brow,   It’s not the blackness of your Native hair, It’s the yellow days the sun reflected off Each strand, the nights caught in hard-bitten rain,   It’s not the chocolate of your Castilian eyes, It’s the wistful tears shed for the poet’s lines, For the pain they have soaked in,   It’s not the redness of your Grecian lips, It..
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    PEPPERMINT LOUNGE-1969

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    I met Clove for the first and last time at the Peppermint Lounge, outside Biloxi, Mississippi. It was a Sunday night. Over a few whiskies she'd told me  she was widowed, living with her grandmother.  She was full Choctaw-- high cheekbones, raven black hair and deep-set brown eyes. She stood at about my height, 5’10” or so, but unlike me, had an hour glass shape. She told me about life up on the “res” in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where she grew up. Two years earlier her husband’s bomb wing had been deployed to U Tapao, Airfield in Thailand, to conduct sorties over North Vietnam.  She'd gone..
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    GOOD MORNING BLUES

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    This is a song, the lyrics which were written by Huddie William Ledbetter, the real name of Lead Belly, an American folk and blues singer, musician and songwriter. The version I perform uses lyrics from a Lead Belly/Lomax version, where I added my own melody. Lead Belly was born January 20, 1888 and died December 6, 1949. He was notable for his strong vocals, virtuosity on the twelve-string guitar, and the folk standards. Good Morning Blues, had material added by his friend Alan Lomax. Lead Belly had been in and out of prison, over this life, and in 1939, Lead Belly once again returned to pris..
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    When America Did Something, Not Because It Was Easy But Because It Was Hard

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        I saw the dark side of the Moon in the company of a few, who like me, were to bear witness to something for the first time in human history.   On August 10, 1966, a daylight meteor was seen in the sky from Utah to Canada. It’s said to be the only known case of a meteor entering the Earth’s atmosphere and leaving it again. It was also on that day, at 2:26 p.m., Eastern time, from Cape Kennedy,  Lunar Orbiter 1, the first spacecraft to orbit the Moon, was launched. Four days later, at 8:43 a.m., Eastern time, the spaceship successfully entered an orbit around the Moon, becoming the..
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    MI CASITA

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    I need but listen to this to imagine what it would be like if I were denied mi casita in NM. I can't help but think about the families that will be whisked away today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxHSQHfdFbM#action=share   Where do I come from, my friend? Qué de donde amiga vengo?, from a little house that I have below the wheat field de una casita que tengo más abajo del trigal from a small house for a pretty woman who wants to accompany me de una casita chiquita para una mujer bonita que me quiera acompañar has a few vines in front tiene al frente unas parras where the cicadas sing..
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    SINCE I FELL FOR YOU BY JOE

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    Was it her chestnut hair or the moon’s rays that leapt off in highlights after downpours in life’s gray rain? Was it the glitter drawn from youth’s eyes, or the ocean of tears shed for the days spent shackled—the suffering they once and again had witnessed? No, it was her lips, vermilion, strong-willed, sensual, and how they moved over the countless poems she murmured to keep us from knowing—She’d faded to blue, into an impassable orb, pirouetting like dust adrift in a shaft, the dance inseparable from the dancer, until the one moved too quickly—One wept. One laughed, shortly before she vanish..
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    ENDERS ISLAND

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    Sound has an uncanny way to take us back in time. I once had the good fortune to spend time on an isolated island off New England.  Mornings, I'd take a secret path that stopped at a seawall. I went to hear the crash of waves, the screech of gulls, while gushing idioms on paper scraps, words marveling over the joy that made for fleeting days, or the nights the islanders sang, or the chapel, where feathers floated through the air as we hailed meandering poets reciting odes and poesy. Strange that I can't find that isle, or remember  the phrases or words we'd crushed into verse, but the melody o..
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    MOONGLOW BY JOE

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    In South Dakota you can drive in nearly a straight line across I-90 for ten hours enveloped in standing corn and well kept farms yielding, if not essentially financial wealth, a wealth of purity wrung from hard work and an abiding faith in the Almighty. As a young man I worked briefly on a ranch, where the nearest town, of 500 people, was 14 miles. I remember going to the high school football game there, Saturday night 6 boys on a team. People in pick ups came from all over. The place put me in mind of the play/movie Picnic, where I felt like Hal Carter, except he was a college dropout, passin..
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    BAGS’ GROOVE

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    As a kid I lived for a time in my grandparent’s house, an old Victorian, across the street from the Blue Moon Bar, smack in the middle of the city’s largest African American neighborhood. In those days music was either played on a juke box or live. On hot summer Saturday nights it was always live. From my second floor bedroom window, I could look into the barroom, where high heels were kicked off and guys swung the gals around like dolls. If I stayed awake long into the early morning, I’d hear the music change over, from a ruckus jump jitterbug or milder swing, to bebop, and a melodic softer b..
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    PIECE OF ME- Not an Obit, but a Reflection.

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    My Dad was born of immigrants, 1921, in Attleboro, Massachusetts. As a kid he lived in New York, during the depression, working on a bakery truck before school. He married at 18, had me,  and at 23 went to war. He saw life, probably not to different from the way young men in his time and place saw it, as something hard. After the war, he returned to Bridgeport, and worked in the same factory for over forty years, lived in the same house until he died, sixty years later. We are cast by genes and shaped in childhood, together channeling how we survive and become “someone” at the same time. Until..
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    NEW PUBLICATION ANNOUNCEMENT

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    I just submitted Sundering of the Species--Conserving Humanity at the Dawn of Posthuman Technology--, to my publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, 400 pp. The challenge I set for myself was to write a creative non-fiction about new science and technology and our changing role in what will prove to be a new order of social and aesthetic engagement. I have researched and thought through the consequences of the recent turns in science that has created two genetically altered humans, and brought us advances in implantable bio-computers, enabling communication between the brain and the digital world. These..
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    PEACE

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    Happy Easter to my Christian friends, happy Pesach to my Jewish friends.  Since Trump is a non-sectarian blight upon the country, I’d like to say a few words that men and women of all faiths might think about. Let me tell you a little about why I feel empowered to say what I am about to. First, I’ve practiced law 40 years, and know something about it. I know what the law is on Obstruction of Justice. I know what the law is on crimes of Attempt, Solicitation and Conspiracy—I spent years defending clients accused of crimes, years traveling to all corners of the world, dodging people who would br..
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    LEXINGTON AVENUE SCENE 1

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    [audio mp3="https://carvalko.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/LexingtonAvenue1946-Scene1.mp3"][/audio]..
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    LEXINGTON AVENUE 1946

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    [audio mp3="https://carvalko.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/LexingtonAvenue1946.mp3"][/audio]..
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    DIANE

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    [audio mp3="https://carvalko.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DIANEVIBES3.mp3"][/audio] "Diane" I'm in heaven when I see you smile Smile for me, my Diane And though everything's dark, all the while I can see you, DianeYou have lighted the road leading home Pray for me (my Diane) when you can (my Diane) But no matter wherever I roam Smile for me, my Diane(Smile for me, my Diane)But no matter wherever I may roam (wherever I roam) Smile for me, my Diane..
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    100TH YEAR REMEMBRANCE OF WWI-3 poems

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      Few of us can say they knew someone who fought in WWI. Tuesday, May 8, 1945, VE Day, when war ended in Europe for the second time in a quarter century, my mother rushed me out of the apartment to join a mass of people, who cheered as soldiers from WWI paraded down Main Street. My grand-uncle George, who fought in WWI and suffered the long effects of being gassed, had recently died. A couple years later our neighbor Mr. White, a WWI vet, France in 1917, gave me his gas mask, jacket and helmet. I still have his jacket; it’s over 100 years old.     NONESMANNESLOND You ask when’d..
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