RKS Literature: Who are these People from Nantucket? (Herman Melville)

“The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships, to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than a moon would be to an Earthsman.”  

Herman Melville, “Moby Dick”, 1851.

RKS Literature: Christians Both Wicked and Miserable (Herman Melville)

“But, alas! The practices of whaleman soon convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked; infinitely more so, than all his father’s heathens. Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor: and seeing what the sailors did there, and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost. Thought he, it’s a wicked world in all meridians; I’ll die a pagan.”

Herman Melville, “Moby Dick”, 1851.

RKS 2026 Wines of Portugal: Churchill’s Grafite 2021 From the Douro

40% Touriga Nacional, 30% Tinta Roriz and 30% Tinta Francesca which 30% was aged for 12 months in both new and used French oak the remainder kept in stainless steel vats.

Aroma: Superhero black fruit particularly blackberry with pomegranate, blueberry, dark chocolate and just a hint of stewed rhubarb and blackball candy. Hint of some juiciness to come?

Palate: Absolutely no annoyance or distraction. Pure and solid black fruit. Rather Port like without the 19.5% alcohol. Perfect harmony with acids and tannins to the extent they are inextricably part of the wine not identifiable components. A smidge of juiciness.

Personality: I am a terrific Douro ambassador but not politically correct as I am unabashedly superior to so many non-Douro red wines. Solid. True. Honest. Douro typical.

Food Match: Venison or wild boar.

Cellarbility: Not meant for cellaring but enjoy up to 2027-year end.  

Price: $22 CDN.

RKS Wines of Portugal Rating: 90/100. Wine Align 88.

(Grafite Tinto Douro 2021, Douro DOC, Churchill Graham, V.N. Gaia, Portugal, 750 mL, 13.5%).

RKS Poetry Anthology (All We Get Are The Coffee Grinds):”Reflections on THE CONVENTION”

Reflections on THE CONVENTION

Could be in Singapore, Hong Kong or even North Bergen, New Jersey!

Identical airwaves

Sandwiched between “networking breaks”

Not even blushingly

Inept bilingually

Majestically Christinically present

36,000 starving Ethiopians

Beg sickly, Bibles hidden

Struggling with the desire to brandish

Meanwhile the political arena presents chinless wonders

Cheered on by funeral supply salesmen

With mistresses in mink ex-wives in trailer parks

All guzzling pilsner

Dancing with the wrong WASP beat

And bare breasted skeletons sway

Emaciated and ready to collapse without the $19.99 diet drink

The sun gleams off the bones white as miracle toothpaste

Here in our own tropical destitution

The cat ravaged pigeon limps at 30 below

The cancer riddled janitor

Tosses in his urine-soaked bed

The woman twitches uncontrollably people attempting not to gawk

And the Bible failed them

SO EXPORT IT!

And you tell me now is the opportune time to be an optimist

Well

At least the cockroaches agree with a grin

And you don’t require a microscope to view

Robert K. Stephen

RKS Poetry Anthology (All We Get Are The Coffee Grinds): “Vladimir Pooping”

Vladimir Pooping

The little low ranked KGB Vlad the butcher of Bucha

Murdered rivals and opposition silenced through tasty plutonium tea

Or

“falling out of windows”

Pussy Riot isn’t in your good books

For you and your oligarch crooks

No confusion on your part with the idolatry Stalin or Catherine the Great

Transforms corruption into convenient Ukrainian hate

You talentless wiggling swine

Innate weakness bolstered by your threats of nuclear end of time

Your ass and feet postered like in a Turkish toilet

Your shit plops down

Finally looking promising you’ll be adorned with the Tsar crown

You vicious little Rogaine deprived clown

Robert K. Stephen

RKS Poetry Anthology (All We Get Are The Coffee Grinds): “Optical Illusion Oasis”

Optical Illusion Oasis

People sitting under the great Canadian fright

Drinking heavily in the village of neon light

Pretensions of affairs being outta sight

Really nothing more than a herd of the uptight

Things actually aren’t really alright

Such a pathetic sight

Strongest on a Saturday night

People with nothing to do

Except playing cool fools

Floundering in the human cesspool

Death should be superior

Come join me tomorrow

For you’re in fact already dead

What can you do in life I tell you

Like the pieces of gum

The black suited monsters

Crush without pity on the way to the paper colonies

Refusing the cries of the crushed innocent are needless superfluous

Come join me in the land of the insane

Everyday does not end in a futile game

Soulless butchered minds craving dead maggots

That’s what we are

No schools of respectability

Only dens of perverse sadistic crazed nobility

Souls of the living cry to join us

Yes

I’m Lucifer but which hell is better

Yours or mine

You’ll find out in due course of time

Robert K. Stephen

RKS Poetry Anthology (All We Get Are The Coffee Grinds): “Piggies and politics”

Piggies and politics

Look at all the little piggies

Guzzling off the through

Left piggies

          Centre piggies

                                          Right piggies

But all the same

Echoes of belches

Similar but of the same intensity

What the hell

They all wallow in the same slop

A fecal paradise

And but a few enter the slaughterhouse at re-election time

The rest

Devise menus for the apathetic innocent

Robert K. Stephen

RKS Literature: The Pulpit as the Prow of a Whaling Ship (Herman Melville)

“What could be more full of meaning? -For the pulpit is ever this earth’s foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God’s quick wrath is first decried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favourable winds. Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.”

Herman Melville, “Moby Dick”, 1851.

RKS Literature: The Women of New Bedford and Salem (Herman Melville)

“And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match the bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands.”

Herman Melville, “Moby Dick”, 1851.

RKS Literature: The Gold Rush of Whaling in New Bedford (Herman Melville)

“There weekly arrive in this town scores of Green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery. They are mostly young, of stalwart frames; fellows who have felled forests and now seek to drop the axe and snatch the whale-lance. Many are green as the Green Mountains whence they came. In some things you would think them but a few hours old.

Herman Melville, “Moby Dick”, 1851.