By Seth Lesondak
How can one be happy,
when people die every day
from hunger or war,
when starving and neglected animals
cry out for the love they have never gotten?
One is happy because there is hope.
The hope that is put there by pantry volunteers,
peace corps workers and SPCA rescuers,
religion
and the child that nurses a sick animal back to health.
They give us hope because they are the army
that is fighting for a better future.
A Factory Of Life
By Seth Lesondak
A boy rides his bike past an abandoned factory
Its windows smashed
The door hangs by a solitary screw
Shards of beer bottles litter the front lawn
what ugliness, what filth,what sadness
A reminder of war and hard financial times
……………………………….
Behind an abandoned factory
Vines take in the sun
Bright yellow daffodils sprout from mossy soil
Like a phoenix rising from its ashes
Prairie grasses lighten to beige with with the passing of summer
What beauty, what life, what silence
A reminder of natures loving presence
…………………………………….
Inspired by a painting by Elizabeth Steinhoff
I will be unable to post any new work on this site for a week, since I am taking a vacation to Isle Royale in the upper peninsula. Still, it is always good to appreciate what is already here so please, have a look at my poetry and stories from the past and I will see you next monday.
What a Light, What a Life
By Seth Lesondak
I sit on my velvety brown couch
The cat gazes at me
Her eyes reflecting the dim lamplight
That illuminates the room
A saxophone swings
Dying the air a dark, sad blue
And bringing back precious memories
Of Chicago on starry nights
What a light
What a life
Stuck in Traffic
By Seth Lesondak
Da5id didn’t particularly like the “Cleveland creative writing class.” His teacher, Mr. Eduardo, always lectured them in a strong Latino accent that none of the white kids could understand. Today was no exception. All Da5id caught of Mr. Eduardo’s lecture was: “Por escrito neccesito bueno punctuation. malo punctuation makes for malo escrito!” before he started to drift off, staring at, but not seeing, the obscene carvings in his desk.
An hour later, thirty-two exhausted students formed a queue at the door.
“Excelente work my students. You were all muy bueno chicos today. Hurry along to your next classe now and see you mañana!” said Mr. Eduardo. He stepped over an extension cord and flung open the door. A kid named Derek ran blindly out of it. Everybody else screamed. Derek had smashed into a car and died. There were not supposed to be cars in school, or trees, or roads for that matter. He quickly vanished from sight.
“Dude,” shouted Da5id, “why the crap are we on a highway!?”
“Yo no sey,” replied Mr. Eduardo, “But I think we can figure it out if we pay attention to the details!”
“Dude, shut up,” responded Da5id.
“No, De Verdad! Primera, we can assume that we are in some kind of vehículo, because we are moving, no? Segunda, we can assume that some idiot with muy poco brains pick up our mobile clase and put it on his vehículo, no? Which means we were all cleverly kidnapped by a burro, no?”
“Oh,” said a nonplussed Da5id, “So now what we do?”
“We must try to get free of course. The question is not que but como!”
“Howsabout we’ all rock this classroom so it darn fall off the back of this heres truck,” said some kid named Steve Stevie Stephen Stevenson or SSSS. “Whatsabout y’all say to that thar idear huh?”
“That is bueno idea SSSS! Let’s start rocking. Correr a la izquierda!” shouted Mr. Eduardo and everybody ran to the left. “And now to the dereche!” and everybody ran to the right. And on it went, left to right, right to left. After about fifteen minutes, the plan finally worked. Everybody toppled over off of the moving vehicle along with tons and tons of books, paper, pencils, pens and other random classroom crap.
Beauty in a Small Place
My family has always kept me in close connection with nature; I enjoy nature to its fullest because of this. I take time to go for walks, to boat, and to go to the park. I raise animals, and work on a farm. Nature is my greatest and most open connection to the world.
I started exploring the natural world at age three, with a ski trip to northern Wisconsin. It has become a tradition of family and friends since then and we still go today. We have become good friends with the owner of the cabin at which we stay, and I am a regular violin player at her small café. I appreciate that my first trip into wilderness happened to be the Wisconsin kind, full of brittle pine, ice and lots and lots of powdered sugar snow.
Another outdoor tradition with my family and friends has been the annual trip to the Porcupine Mountains in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It is a backpacking trip into the most untouched place of the Great Lake states. This place brings forth its beauty in the form of old growth forest and stunning sunsets that color the sky over the Lake Superior shoreline a dazzling series of pinks, purples and reds.
Today, I took a trip to the shore of Lake Wingra. I made sure to take the time to look around and appreciate my surroundings. Still, I find it incredible that there could be such raw and untouched nature in such a small place as Madison, Wisconsin.
Freedom of Software
By Seth Lesondak
I strongly believe that the future of software development must lie with open source software. “Why is that?” people ask. The fact is that proprietary software is simply unable to keep up with a fast-paced technological world due to its closed and single minded approach to program development. It is also accurate to state that many people are unhappy with the direction that proprietary software is going, most obvious in people’s reactions to the release of Windows Vista by the Microsoft Corporation.
The process for open source software resembles that of writing a novel. First, a piece of software is coded in a universally standard programming language such as C++. Then, the piece of work, and the code that was used to write it, is placed on the internet. General computer users can download the software to use, and developers can download the source code for their own projects. Once a developer has the source code, they can edit it and repost it on the internet as a project of their own, and the process gets repeated, consistently improving the software to keep it ahead of the competition and up to date. With proprietary software, the whole improving process is skipped, leaving only an internally developed piece of software, which usually takes more time to develop and comes out less refined.
Some people say that they do not use open source software because it is incompatible with hardware. Actually, many hardware companies are beginning to support open source, most notably IBM, who committed $1 billion dollars to developing hardware for open source software in 2001. Also, Dell is currently creating computers for a distribution of Linux called Ubuntu. Most incompatibility issues are, in fact, caused by the people who won’t use open source because of incompatibility issues. In fact, a lot of consumers use open source without even realizing it. For instance, 65 % of all web servers are Apache, a well known commercial open source project, and 14 % are Linux, the most well know and differentiated of the open source projects.
The main proprietary software producer ever is the Microsoft Corporation, founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975. Both effectively treated the open source community as a joke. “There’s free software and then there’s open source,” Gates said once, while explaining that Microsoft gives away its software in developing countries. “There is this thing called the GPL (GNU Public License*[i]), which we disagree with.” He reasons that the open source license makes it “so that nobody can ever improve the software.” Anybody with and understanding of open source knows that the point of open source is to improve software. It is not as if Mr. Gates has bragging rights. Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows Vista, has been dubbed, in effect, a huge and catastrophic flop. People hate Vista because it is hard to use, slow, bloated (containing unnecessary applications that slow it down), incompatible with hardware, and requires constant updates. This alone is enough to prove that proprietary software is not superior to or more compatible than open source.
Proprietary software is failing. Every day it becomes more obvious, with the release of each new patch system patch and product. The alternative is here and I hope that people will see that it is better than Microsoft. Let us insert the patriotic idea of free speech into computer, an ever growing part of our lives.
* This is the license on which open source is based. In effect, it states that if you download source code from an open source application and then develop another application based off of that source code, you must post your source code up for download. For more information and the entire contents of GPL go to http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Rebel Code by Glyn Moody © 2001, Perseus Publishing
Just Say NO to MICROSOFT by Tony Bove © 2005
The Success of Open Source by Steven Weber ©2004
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
This is a story that is open to many interpretations. please be sure to tell me yours.
Guilty of the greatest sin
I walk down a dirt road
A road that goes nowhere
On either side of me I see bits of smashed houses
And dolls with missing limbs
Brown dirt shining crimson in the sunset
All I see on the horizon
Is more endless dirt road
I do not know where I am going
After walking for miles upon miles
I come to a bush, adorned with white flowers
Alone in miles of empty, dirt floored hell
It watches a disturbing scene
A mutated animal bakes in the sun
Not dead, but clinging to a painful, elongated life
A bleached red sky casts light on bloodshot eyes,
Barred yellow teeth
Dry blood covers its face
And a gash in its leg dyes the dirt a murky red
Next to it, its starving offspring moans
Looking for milk that will never come
I ignore them and walk on
For I must go the same way
I must live the nightmare I have created
And the death that I have bred
This poem is inspired by a painting by TL Solien called
The Seduction of Innocence
this is the picture that the poem is based off of
one of my first poems.
A Shady Wonder
By Seth Lesondak
Its bark is rough like fresh dried brick,
carrying the natural,
beautiful ruggedness of a nature trail.
It is a giant octopus,
tentacles swaying,
squirting green leafy ink.
It is a miner, tunneling underground
where I cannot see.
Does it serve me a purpose?
What can I say?
I sit in its shade.
I am a rower myself, and for lack of something better to do, i wrote a short poem on rowing.
hope you enjoy.
Rowing
By Seth Lesondak
I sit up at the catch,
poised to spring,
packed with potential energy.
Then my legs shoot back,
followed by my torso,
then arms.
I take a quick breath
while the boat sweeps forward,
then return to the catch:
Arms, body, legs
ready to begin again.
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Seth Lesondak