An Innaugural Address

AMONG the vicissitudes incident to life no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the 14th day of the present month. On the one hand, I was summoned by my country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love. On the other hand, the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. In this conflict of emotions all I dare aver is that it has been my faithful study to collect my duty from a just appreciation of every circumstance by which it might be affected. All I dare hope is that if, in executing this task, I have been too much swayed by a grateful remembrance of former instances, or by an affectionate sensibility to this transcendent proof of the confidence of my fellow-citizens, and have thence too little consulted my incapacity as well as disinclination for the weighty and untried cares before me, my error will be palliated by the motives which mislead me, and its consequences be judged by my country with some share of the partiality in which they originated. Besides the ordinary objects submitted to your care, it will remain with your judgment to decide how far an exercise of the occasional power is rendered expedient at the present juncture by the nature of objections which have been urged against the system, or by the degree of inquietude which has given birth to them. Instead of undertaking particular recommendations on this subject, in which I could be guided by no lights derived from official opportunities, I shall again give way to my entire confidence in your discernment and pursuit of the public good; for I assure myself that whilst you carefully avoid every alteration which might endanger the benefits of an united and effective government, or which ought to await the future lessons of experience, a reverence for the characteristic rights of freemen and a regard for the public harmony will sufficiently influence your deliberations on the question how far the former can be impregnably fortified or the latter be safely and advantageously promoted.

After The Opening of the Field

First there is the light emitted from the corner as if to control the shadow. Drawn lines multiply their imperfection until each blade moves as if caught in the current of breeze. Lately, money can buy love off the clearance rack, but why buy when you can steal for free. Outside the coffee shop the sun is done playing good cop. Time to brace for the severity of Fall. October is the cruelest month. We're shouting our criticisms because the last piece of the puzzle doesn't fit. "I'm not coming back until we get a cleaning service in here," she said. The grinder grumbles an answer, but we can't make it out over the steam. We drink iced coffee to practice coldness in waterless air, but we must be careful not to take the edges for granted, leap out of the fishbowl. Fall-back will arrive two weeks later so that we can grasp the energy a bit longer. Often I Am Permitted To Return To A Meadow as if it were a scene made up by the mind. Hanging on the wall, but opening the stone. The Eye of the Needle is a trail cut between large rocks. I Miss the Rockies, their redwoods so tall they could extinguish the light of day. It seems I'm always looking for a forest in the least likely places. Crease the page until the paper takes shape, ever finding phylum: its lively limbs. If you blink you might miss the most amazing transformations. Leaves bending over your ear, "Look closer and see. See into the trees. Find the girl….if you can."

John Bruce Stump Speech #4: Darkness on the Edge of Town

You better get it straight, darlin'. By the end of Darkness, I'd found my adult voice. Poor man wanna be rich. Rich man wanna be linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to use the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart. Songs like the Animal's "It's My Life" and "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" were infused with class consciousness. You're born into this life paying for the sins of somebody else's past indignations, and I know that many of them are sitting in front of me. The country seems to have lain down and shrugged off something as serious as Laos, just as we calmly shrugged off the loss of 700,000 lives in Pakistan, the so-called greatest disaster of all times.

I had a reaction to my own good fortune. I asked myself new questions. I felt a sense of accountability to the people I'd grown up alongside of. I began to wonder how to address that feeling. And I tore into the guts of something in the night. We're born with nothing and better off wiping away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission, to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbarous war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and the fear that have driven this country these last 10 years and more and so when, in 30 years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.

I was searching for a tone somewhere between spiritual hopefulness and 70's cynicism. She says, "Baby, if you wanna be wild, you've got a lot to learn." For ending such a war, I have personally advocated that this is the best procedure. It is a traditional rather classic procedure of how to end a war that could be called a stalemate, that neither side apparently has the capacity to end by military victory, and which apparently is going to go on for a long time. The possibility of transcendence or any sort of personal redemption felt a lot harder to come by.

From the fire roads to the interstate, some guys they just give up living and start dying little by little, pieces in the record, and someone who actually does something, so that they can recognize it in an election, if they are interested. This was the tone I wanted to sustain. 'Cause they understand if I could take one moment into my hands of Vietnam, someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."

I intentionally steered away from any hint of escapism and set my characters down in the middle of a community under siege. And you better believe, boy, somebody's gonna get hurt tonight. And will our children and grandchildren ever live in a world as safe and secure as the world in which we grew up? Weeks, even months went by before I had something that felt right. 'Cause in the darkness I hear somebody call my name and when you realize how they tricked you this time. And it's all lies but I'm strung out on the taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals with turned up power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies.

Darkness on the Edge of Town dealt with the idea that the setting for personal transformation is often found at the end your rope. I've been working real hard trying to get my hands to clean the mucous out of his tube and he suffocated to death. If you don't do that your characters ring hollow and you're left with rhetoric, words without meaning. Everybody's got a secret, sonny, something they just can't face with a very sickening situation in this country, because there is no moral indignation and, if there is, it comes from people who are almost exhausted by their past indignations.I was twenty-seven and the product of Top 40 radio.

John Bruce Stump Speech #3: Born to Run

In '70's New Jersey, the car was still a powerful image. All the redemption I can offer is beneath this dirty hood with a chance to make it. That somehow resolutions and failed inspections would make this world a more peaceful place. He was hoping we'd turn away. But now I was appreciating their craft and power.

I walked into a Tenth Avenue freeze without Saddam Hussein. At first I thought it was the name of a movie or something I'd seen on a car spinning around the Circuit, but I couldn't be certain. And the world is busting at its seams and you're just a prisoner of your American dream. And if we did that, we'd have more consumption ability in America, which is what we need right now in order to kick our economy into gear. I liked the phrase because it suggested a cinematic drama I thought would work with the music I was hearing in my head. At night sometimes it seemed you could hear the whole damn city crying. Blame it on the lies that were killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq.

And here's what she wrote to you, "That gave me an opportunity to feel out the arrangement. Baby, this town rips the bones from your back, it's a death trap, a suicide." Some 27 percent have tried, and they try because they come back to this country and they have to face what they did in Vietnam, and then they come back and find the indifference of a country that doesn't really care, that doesn't really care. Born to Run was released in a post-Vietnam America. And tonight you'll try just one more time to leave it all behind and break. We fought using weapons against "oriental human beings" with quotation marks around that. We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using.

Were we fighting in the European theater? People were contemplating a country that was finite, where resources and life had limits. And the word's been passed this would increase the chances of the U.S. being hit by another 9/11-type terrorist attack. Slowly, the dread that I had managed to keep out of Rosalita squeezed its way into the lives of the people. Outside, the street's on fire in a real death waltz between what's flesh and what's fantasy. And the poets down here don't write nothing at all. They just stand back and let it all be. And in the quick of a knife they reach for their moment. But I want to come back to where I began, on homeland security. When the screen door slams on Thunder Road you're not necessarily on the Jersey shore anymore. You could be anywhere in America.

Schnitzel

Oh god, it still embarrasses her, not because she was wearing a dirndl under her wool jacket, with her black tennis shoes, not even because he was the Libertarian candidate. The man was a fool, a complete fool, uneducated and ignorant. He ran for governor and the state gave him a solid 10% of the vote.

But it was a beautiful afternoon anyway, and the polling place was just down the block from her apartment. She brought her lease and she brought her driver’s license and, because she wasn’t sure, she brought her passport and her social security card (even though her middle name was misspelled on it). And afterwards, she wore the sticker, proud, and jumped on the 30 bus downtown, to the German restaurant she worked at.

Ultimate Frisbee

To be fair, she’d never found him that good looking, but he was popular, sort of, and an Ultimate Frisbee sensation. He had bad taste in movies and music and he played video games too often, his pants were always too short, he was pigeon-toed and he had a faint hairlip.

But all that was only clear twn years later, when she heard he married some petite Malasian girl. Back when she was 17, she was just so grateful that he paid her attention, that he liked her, and it hurt so much when he didn’t any longer that she thought she would never recover, so she joined an Ultimate Frisbee team, though she hated running fast, and found she actually had a pretty decent forehand, but the team was awful and it lost every single game it played that season, several months after he broke her heart.

She quit before long. She never liked sprinting.

John Bruce Stump Speech #2: The Wild, The Innocent, the E-Street Shuffle

The opening cut, "The E-Street Shuffle," is a reflection of a community that was partly imagined and partly real. Sparks fly on E-Street when the boy prophets walk it handsome and hot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

I wanted to describe a neighborhood, a way of life, and I wanted to invent a dance with no exact steps. Forcin' a light into all those stoney faces left stranded on this warm July. More in September than in August. And now we see beheadings. And we got weapons of mass destruction crossing the border every single day, and they're blowing people up. And we don't have enough troops there. It was just the dance you did every day and every night to get by. And there hasn't been a talley since Sally left the alley, issued a memorandum from the Defense Department saying, "If you weren't with us in the war, don't bother applying for any construction." That's not a way to invite people. I watched the town suffer some pretty serious race rioting and slowly begin to close down. And circus town's on the short, waved them off and said, "No, no, no, no. The word of the president of the United States is good enough for me."

Just when you thought the song was over, you'd be surprised by another section, taking the music higher. But they sighed "Johnny it falls apart so easy and you know hearts these days are cheap" – none of which were true. It was, in spirit what I'd taken from the finales of the great soul revues. You don't need to call me Lieutenant, Rosie, and I don't want to be your person who could be a commander in chief who could get your kids home and get the job done and win the peace. When you left the stage after performing one of these, you'd worked to be remembered. Together they're gonna boogaloo down Broadway and come back home with the executive who looted it, who bailed out on a golden parachute. America can do better. And help is on the way. Not that it would all BE funny but that it would all SEEM funny. That would come later.

John Bruce Stump Speech #1: Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ

There wasn't a lot of interest in hearing original music, which is what I mainly played. Madman drummers, bummers and Indians in the summer with teenage diplomatic efforts under way. They just decided the time for diplomacy is over and rushed to war without planning for what happens afterwards. I was sitting on the front steps. He shouted through the car window that he was going up to New York City.

I'd been going through some hard times in New Jersey for a while, and I planned, once again to leave the state. The hit-and-run plead sanctuary, 'neath a holy stone they hide around the world. We don't need mass armies anymore. One of the things we've done is we've taken the – we're beginning to transform our military."Mary, my queen, your soft hulk is reviving the economy." I had heard plenty of promises before – Broadway, Joan Fontaine, advertiser downtown training money – $1 billion was cut. They only added a little bit back this year because it's an election year. So I left that day telling Mike I was interested, but without making a commitment.

That Christmas, Tinker and I drove cross country to California in Volkswagen vans with full running boards dragging great anchors of this country, and we're going to free ourselves from this dependency. So it was, back home, for me. You wouldn't even give me time to cover my tracks and make this system operate effectively. I know that the idea of working within the system has been used so much, and many people have lost confidence that it can be done. They wish to destroy the system, to start all over, but I don't think in the history of human experience that those destructions of systems work. They usually destroy everything good as well as bad, and you have an awful lot of doing to recreate the good part and to get started again. The songs required too much attention for a crowded bar on a Saturday night. Oh you don't know what they can do to the younger generation- and I am certainly getting at the end of my generation because I have been here an awfully long time- but that you younger people can find it possible to accept the system and try to make it work because I can't at the moment think of a better one given the conditions that we have in this country and the great complexity and diversity.

I really believe if we can stop this war- I certainly expect to do everything I can. I combed my hair till it was just right and commanded the night brigades of students and people, young and old, who took time to travel, time off from work, their own vacation time, to work in states far and wide. They braved the hot days of summer and the cold days of the fall and the winter to knock on doors because they were determined to open the doors of opportunity to all Americans. I have done all I can with all my limitations. I worked to find something that was indelibly mine. Them gasoline boys downtown sure talk "integrity, integrity, integrity." Those are the three words that she left me with. I never wrote in that style again.

 

Seven Escapes: Concluding Remarks

Seven Escapes: Concluding Remarks

A scintillating saga, these seven escapes, sending spirits soaring, defying depression, promote possibilities for incarcerated imaginations, a sponge for sodden souls and spirits, appropriate advice for artless adolescents, suitable suggestions for superannuated sourpusses.

Curmudgeons who can count might cry, "Seven, swindler? The sum stands at six!"

Silence simpletons, for Sister Archipelago's supreme seventh son, jaunty Jehudiel, bettered his brothers, effecting an exhaustive escape, transcending the terminus of this text, for not even confabulation could confine him.

Seven Escapes: Sealtiel's Breakout

Sealtiel sat in his cell and sulked, believing a break-out like his brethrens' to be beyond his begetter as adept attorneys had advised police to prohibit packages with perilous perishables and thus Sealtiel, so ceaselessly smart and subtle, hardly held any hope.

Heedful of hindrances like the victual veto, the man's mother mailed him a mild monograph, a tame tome causing no controversy amongst cops for the text's tedious title aroused no apprehension, for Critical Applied Linguistics sounded stuffy, stodgy, stale, and subdued.

Sealtiel wolfed down words, reveling in reader, finding faculty in phraseology, might in morphemes, power in portmanteaus, and commenced to communicate to his captors in insipid institutional idioms, prison parlance, the lexicon of law, judges' jargon, warden wording, police patois.

Baffled, befuddled, and bewildered by the rhetorical rampage, the confused custodians conjectured they had caught a cop, withheld a watchman, locked up a lawman, detained a deputy, and with abounding apologies, set Sealtiel free.

Insomnia vs. Dream Imagery (Random Thoughts Filtered Through Grammatical Structures Makes the Poem)

Paper plates! Boxing a beer wing of ponging dream scones, purpled with acid washes and licked with tumbling lights. It would have searched for the apex, sporting a wise green jacket, had not the hermetic snowman have spliced his carrot dick of free associations for the likely bimbos.

Story Created by Taking Random Screen-Shot from Wikipedia, Scribbling Over Text in Photoshop Makes the Poem

"W is the most S on the web, period."
--USA DONATE

Connecting reciprocating connects piston to the crank or cranks, connecting when a Muslim invent-engine craftsman, the king of Turkish Art, one of any motion to motion was made ROD, which in the Book of K, acting reciprocal pump would motion its others the wood combustion engines, compound rods, N.

Story Composed of Consecutive Words in Each Story Pool Story Makes the Poem

Aside Warden's trust-bus:

PICK-UP TRAP

--Authorities

In being the "At That," he, when Christ, forces "can-a-ble" - something chopped at in movie meteor - but deep now, about "h--e--to-oth" spoken house take is "you all" stick words, teach lightning baptism, I-LOOKS, being voted this fall.

Stage Directions for Anti-Corporate Ad Concepts Using Pre-Existing Advertisement Slogans Makes the Poem

Aside made by soldier in SLOW KILL ZONE after nuclear blast, observing the remnants of U.S. Army recruiting poster:

"An army of one."

Interjection by foreman of unidentified foreign sweatshop after child worker makes comment about chemical irritants burning her skin:

"Just Do It!"

Comment by physician to smoker after issuing recurrent treatment for lung cancer:

"You've come a long way, baby."

Humorous exchange between Japanese businessmen viewing presentation on the collapse of U.S. auto market:

"Have you driven a Ford lately?"

Seven Escapes: Barachiel's Breakout

Worried wardens wilted while worrying about how to contain convicts conceived by canny creators, for Sister Archipelago continually connived and contrived and saw her sons set free, so they set in solitary her bastard boy Barachiel, preventing all pleasures, save certain self-published paperbacks and parcels procured by post.

Barachiel, mindful that mailed munitions would wind up with the warden, guffawed greatly upon emptying envelopes from his forbearer, finding not firearms, flamethrowers, nor files, but a plethora of prepackaged peanuts, and rapidly ripped them from their wrappers.

The clever criminal clambered on his cot and doused the ducts with dust, putting the peanut powder in the pipeline, ground the goober grit through the grates, and patiently paused as the particles promulgated throughout the penitentiary.

Sister Archipelago had ascertained that acute allergies afflicted all attendants surveilling her son, and since anaphylaxis acts apace, Barachile gave ear to garbled groans and strangled squalls as airpipes astringed six seconds after cell doors had been unsecured for Sunday night supper.

trust

I don’t trust anything that bleeds for a week and doesn’t die
(Every time it happens, I think I’m going to die)

I don’t trust anything with two testicles.
(They say it only has one (an accident))

I don’t trust anything that has two eyes for watching or blinking
(Too much staring and I become nervous)

I don’t trust anything that walks on two legs
(We’ve started to crawl again)

I don’t trust anything named Todd
(Actually, it’s short for “Toddeus”)

I don’t trust anything that is not codependent
(What is the point if I’m not needed?)

I don’t trust anything with a third-person slogan
(Sally says that Sally prefers the third-person because it makes her feel as though
she truly knows herself)

ugly faces

Up, onto the bus, a little wobbly, but certain that this is what he has to say:

"Man, there are some ugly faces on this bus. God must have been in bad shape to make all of you so ugly."

The old man isn't sure he heard that right.

"Hey, old timer," the wobbly calls out.

The old man looks from left to right, as though surely, surely he isn't the one.

Prime Number Sequence Superimposed on UPS InfoNotice Slip Makes the Poem

UPS! notice: "twelve to pick-up"

Attempt, second, final, leave...
packages back...

"A" is sender delivery:
Minimum years amount are, unless...

"Make not bank try: 10:30-2:00"...

Random Cuts in a Piece of Paper, Superimposed Upon a Story Pool Blog Makes the Poem

Break, The Author




E.R. Archipelago!

Chin Uriel, from BESTIAL BOOBY-TRAP!
To beneath, to breach-able prison palace!
*Designs in the dirt, having sed [sic]!
**Uri, depicts her auspicious shanks!
(reverb near, he fleetly found his groan)
& gay hed [sic]
& open out

From,

Me

Seven Escapes: Uriel's Breakout

Three for three in thwarting the authorities, Sister Archipelago then set about unfettering her unpardonable urchin Uriel from his penal predicament by blueprinting another bestial booby-trap, to bring about befuddlement by breaking in from beneath, to breach the bottom bulwark of the presumed impenetrable prison palace.

Within the yard walls, Uriel decumbently drew designs in the dirt with his dusty digits, depicting dreams of deliverance, having heard of his brother's auspicious abdication, when he sensed shaking in his shanks, reverb near his rear, trembling beneath his tuckus, and he fleetly found his feet.

The ground groaned and gave way to an O-shaped hole, outstretched and open as Uriel's own orifice, revealing a roustabout from furry familia Talpidae, a sedulous scamp, a mole most marvelous, mammoth in magnitude and burly from boundless burrowing.

Sensing the scenario's significance, Uriel pirouetted into the pit and followed the faithful fellow for four fatiguing fortnights, eating only earthworms, eschewing pursuers in twisting tunnels carved through the core of our terrestrial sphere, until alighting in the French and Southern Antarctic Lands on the far side of the globe, bought a small bungalow, and lazed on the beach slurping drinks with umbrellas.

The Spirit of Quetzalsinsina

Professor Randy Redaris earned dueling degrees in sociology and anthropology from Southwest North Dakota State, earned a third online in amateur archaeology from the Community College of Mainland Maine, and downloaded a Certificate in Conjuration from a school in Kazbekistan, an oft-overlooked former Soviet state, after answering 15 of 20 correctly on an online quiz. With credentials tucked under arm, he boarded a boat in New Iberia bound for Belize.

Redaris wished to summon the spirit of Quetzalsinsina, goddess of mint tea and superfluous nipples, whose glistening tears could increase male virility tenfold. Redaris learned of the goddess through an ex-lover who was one-third Belizean and two-thirds bipolar, a woman he colonized with the best of intentions, but it ended all badly when she broke his Burmese bassoon after he failed to properly cover her couscous before reheating. Redaris successfully expunged her name from his brain, but how could he forget Quetzalsinsina?

Deep in the jungle near Benque Viejo, Redaris drew a chalk circle on the forest floor then stood in its center, and began with his chanting, enjoining the spirit to flow forth so she might cry in his phial, to bawl in his bottle. His plan? To package her plight in pill form to sell on poorly produced infomercials on late night TV.

Poor Redaris. Perhaps he misspoke the words of the witchery, or his fractional Belizean deliberately deceived him with syntax most suspect, for Quetzalsinsina never materialized; he did, however, unintentionally invoke Ixtab, the prestigious psychopomp from the Mayan pantheon. Seeing that her summoning singer was not yet dead (a prerequisite for their postmortem pilgrimage) Ixtab lent him a hand by splitting his skull in twain.

The moral, you ask? Remember, dear reader, that although you may possess twice the knowledge of the stooge sitting beside you, it may be half what you need in times of crises; that, and beware of partial Belizeans who are adroit in the bedroom but loath to take lithium.

Raphael's Breakout (sans alliteration)

Lane Hall wrote:

One of the pleasures of being your professor is making you do extra work. I assign this obstruction to you, regarding your most recent Storypool post.

Obstruction: rewrite the piece ("Raphael's Breakout") and be as consistent to diction/description/syntax as possible while avoiding any hint of alliteration.

Raphael's Breakout (sans alliteration) (original here)

Cautious wardens prevented the former sister's visitations but she, the deceitful mother of foul children, continued her scheming, watching for any breaks in the walls confining her boys, until her keen eyes studied on the open-aired yard, where inmates played basketball under wide-open skies.

She mailed Raphael a silver outfit of reflective scales and instructions diagramming how to wear the suit, for tightening the cowl, for securing the hood on his cranium, to fasten the suit tight to his neck, zipped to his mouth and, when absolutely dressed, he should squirm and wiggle high up in the air.

The former sister hid nearby and upon sighting her boy through binoculars in his outfit of glimmering scales, she unhooded a gigantic eagle, a remarkable she-falcon, an bird of preposterous dimensions acquired in Talkeetna, Alaska, and whose sharp eyes found the most gargantuan fish she had ever seen.

She flew over razor-wire, swooped inside the walls and, as the guards' maws opened, snatched up the man with her talons, nails capped with rubber tips (Raphael thanked his mother's astute planning) and conjointly they soared back to Talkeetna, where he made a fine living selling dried moose meat to tourists.

I thought he loved me once but he didn't and I did

If I'd waited another minute, he wouldn't have seen me at all. But I didn't and he did and the world didn't end. Quite. I thought it might. His eyes followed me and maybe he would too, but when I looked back, he didn't. I couldn't have waited to see him, not another minute.

when he runs

on the other hand, looks
rather than wound in
the middle that it makes
lovely orbs of a steady
source, of holes of escape
so weeping under the storm
over and blows, listen and
something, the effect dramatic
rather than puncture, look
to gilded fruit, to dotted mold

where he hardly went

he doesn’t understand
a language because she said
with a pretty committee
he hardly wanted to come
these hosts have the same
climate, share the same
candy, take the same tests

Leo's prayer

I knew I had to get rid of this guy. I noticed that when I talked to my
folks or when I read something he wouldn’t come out. So, I focused on school when
I could go. I made the honor roll a couple of times, too. Who would have thought it.
Yeah, the teachers at Lindblom were shocked at Leo Sinkowski making honor roll.
Things were good, then junior year, I got a job from a guy who used to come to the
electric shop at school. I apprenticed under him for two years and had my electrician’s
license by the time I was eighteen. I got into the Union, met Margaret and things were
good. Pop died and I got Mom into a duplex on the same block where I lived. We were rolling.
Then I had a w-w-w-eak moment, and he came back. It’s true. He came back and talked
me into s-s-s-som-s-so-something r-r-real bad.
I will tell this!!! You can’t stop me!
My head is splitting!
I gotta do this now or die!! It’s me or you, and I can’t tell you now, you sonofabitch,
it ain’t gonna be me!
It was a great plan, but the devil himself created it. To this day, the Board of Education
thinks it was an accident. Well, that’s the story they gave the news boys. I had a great alibi
because I had told them the switches in the boiler room of that school needed replacing and
that the wiring was rotten. They dragged their feet because they didn’t want to spend money to
replace them. So, when he came to me with the idea, I knew I couldn’t lose. God, my head is
splitting, but I’m tired. I gotta tell this.
“What about the kids,” I said.
“What about the fire,” he came back with. “Don’t think about the kids. Besides, fire is pure.
It’s good for them. Cleans them up. Just think of all the fun you’ll have.”
I knew he had me. I went on to the school. The switches were in bad shape, but they never woulda started a fire like that on their own. I had an nitrogen tank I was using for welding, and took it to the school. It was issued by the same company that supplied the Public Schools, so that was the cover up if they happened to find it. I loosened the knob a little and flicked the switches off and on, building up static. The last time I flicked the switch off, I could hear that little click, and I knew the next one would be it. I positioned myself halfway out the back door of the place and turned the lights on.
“Kerfloom!”
It was something to see. They said half the first floor became a fire tunnel. Three classrooms and the lunchroom went up.
I was okay for a while. For three years, I didn’t think about it at all. Until we had Leo Junior,
then I thought about it all the time. I could see the kids’ faces, all crispy and charred, following
me around. That’s why I started drinking. I never talked about it to anyone but this sonofabitch who says he knows about truth. Well, I’m too tired to go on. I can’t carry him around anymore. I don’t give a damn if I die. I got nothing to lose.
So, I’m glad I had the chance to tell you this story. I know you didn’t come in here for all
this. You just wanted a cup of coffee and a newspaper. But I’ve been watching you. You one of
my favorite people. I wish people saw folks like you more often. They would say different things
about Chicago police officers. You are truly one of Chicago’s finest. And that’s why I know you’ll
do the right thing and take me in. And when they put you on the stand, I want you to tell them to give me the ‘chair’.
I mean, it’s only fair, isn’t it?

Leo's confession

So, this sonofabitch comes to talk to you about truth and sincerity and Jesus Christ, but he
tells you I got the restraining order against me because I went to my wife’s house. That’s a
frigging lie. I apologize for cursing earlier. It’s got to stop. It must stop. Anyway, he’s
framing me just like he did that day, tricking me into going over there. Don’t believe a damn
word he says. He wouldn’t know the truth if he stepped right in a big pile of it. And then he
names it “Leo’s Last Word.” I ought to know when my last stand is. I’ll tell you all of it.
I have always had a difficult life. My parents came from Poland with the shirt on their
backs and dirt on their hands. They sacrificed everything for me and never let me forget it.
It was eight years in a two room apartment before they had me. My mother always talks about how I never cried, never made a sound when I was a baby. They say I was always aware of my responsibilities. My mother said I didn’t want to add to their problems by crying. I don’t know what it was, but I know that by the time I was six, I realized there wasn’t a damn thing to cry about, since crying didn’t change anything.
My folks didn’t need me crying but working, so I started working when I was eight years old.
Pop had had a stroke and was laid up. I took on the chin at school, and that’s when my head started hurting all the time. I took all kinds of work—shoveling snow, toting, painting, cleaning out people’s garages. A guy paid me fifty bucks one time to set his car on fire. I did it and took the money home, and our rent was paid for three months.
I loved watching the car burning. The fire was so red and so forceful. I know I sound like a fruit, but there is no other way, after all these years, to describe it. It was a gas! I loved smelling the rubber from the tires burn. My eyelashes got singed from the heat when the car exploded, but I knew I was on to something. That was also the first time he showed up. I know he was trouble because he goaded me, always talking about setting something on fire. I’d be gone for half an hour and I’d end up sitting in my car with a sack of matches and a full can of gasoline. I-I-I s-s-set fire to a d-d-d-dog I found in a park because he told me it was half-
dead and needed to be put out of its misery. Even then I knew it was a lie, but I didn’t care because I wanted to see it burn. I heard it scream.
I st-st-st-till do.

Wound Management

Consider the laceration.

Consider how, with time, open wounds attempt to close themselves through internal forces. Inflammation is a gathering of healing ingredients, a war chest, a preparation phase for the battle, when fibroblasts proliferate and position themselves for collagen synthesis. A network of capillaries and nerves rewire themselves. Turnover within the wound continues indefinitely.

Consider your scar: not a blemish but a steady reminder that the impulse of the universe is to heal.

while he speaks

seal the border, halt
for any to use to check
most would self deport
then we can turn the clock
check the box and find
five years earlier that she
also stole, that they laughed
that she might look younger
falling apart, nothing but black
in a complement to her

while he sleeps

stop tormenting of helen!
waitress and witness, meteor
shower the obstruction:
a boy with higher
resolution, be able to read
on the image and retain
what he sees to make sense
the epitaph more solid
in graphite, a water
in the night in many ways
because it was stable
and holding him back

when he is frightened

even if the page is blank
especially at night, if only
because there was anyone
able to pinpoint something
either about herself, that’s
nearly accomplishing
the way he had started to feel
fear itself let the rot spread
was built in the mirror
running through before
he anchors in the air
before his fingers curled
the sills mounted as the
original parts rebuilt

Waiting

The phone rings only as often as you ask it to, I thought, eyes on my cell. Ten sentences, chopped, were all I could manage. My worlds and words mangled without the phone call. The same ten sentences circling in my head, the answerless worries. I spun the cell, round and round, on the table, spinning like the idea of a call spun me. I’d tell you what those sentences were, but the words disintegrated further each time, giving meaning to the phrase, distant memories. Each word slipped into my past, a moment that blended with the need for the call, a lost word that couldn’t be turned into an answer, when, if, it finally rang. I’d be rendered into two simple answers, yes and no, the only recourse I’d have by the time the cell buzzed. I stared and spun.

Stella Artois

The train chugs peacefully through the mountaintops, steam wafting into the wind. The curves and bends of the train cut at angles to the curves and bends of the mountain itself. One can almost hear the rattling, but it’s oh so pretty that it doesn’t matter. We’re not on the train anyways, we’re in the crowd down below, watching and waiting for the previews. Inside the comfy wooden snackcar, a bartender’s hand attempts to fill a bell shaped pint class. His hands appear steady, but are not. The train rattles them. Fizz pours over the side of the pint glass. The customer does not care, but the bartender suffers grave annoyance, harrumphing and washing the fizz away. He tries again, to no avail. The lone customer shuffles his feet, out of sync with the train’s rhythm. He suffers from the same annoyance as the bartender now. The man, however, would probably not mind a little fizz in his drink, he is on a train and can look out and be pacified by the scenery afterall. The bartender disappears. All rattling stops. The man does not know why the train no longer seems to be moving, but he can now enjoy his drink in perfection. The bartender sighs, a job well done.

Fruit, then Death

Cantaloupes are lovely orbs of pleasure and death, holding on to gilded softness until they are hurled at someone’s orbiting skull in the middle of a fight late at night in their apartment when the only thing in reach is the semi-softening fruit kept on the counter. (The knife block is several steps away, and something is needed more for the dramatic effect rather than a puncture wound in the pancreas). Listen to the thup that it makes as it hits the head right on the head; instead of cantaloupe bits spraying this way and that, it falls to the floor in perfect symmetry, simple halves flashing their orange flesh, dotted with mold. Their head will be fine; the cantaloupe, on the other hand, looks past its prime.

helen's campaign office

Helened Part 2

You may remember the obstruction: a boy from Korea with Asperger's trying to train (and set up a campaign office) for Helen, our cat. I wish I had a scanner that could scan with higher resolution, but maybe you'll be able to read some of this, especially if you double-click on the image. You can see how he sees and retains advertising and what he sees on the news and tries to synthesize it to make sense of his world. Here's "Helen's NEW TReaSURY of movie, helen at 'Catch Movie' is make sense by helen can make"... 

my favorite lines: 

- stop tormenting of helen! Jobs? no!

- alone? helen package send golden stars, you got chip!

- helen don't have coin! 

- no matters begained! 

Never Love In Syndey

Stray sidereal material wipes out Wendy’s in Sydney. Luckier than Lindy, waitress and witness, Cindy from Windy City, survives eleventh hour meteor shower on managerial smoke break. Later etches epitaph in graphite: Amur, my cook and kitchen paramour, my laughing neophyte, you lost your life to starlight more solid than ethereal.

Accounts

Library fines were holding him back. He was positively addicted to books. The fines were lower than the rates on his credit cards but that didn’t make him feel much better. They added up. And up and up and up. Video rental stores got rid of the fines if you complained enough, but not libraries. Libraries were tough. They knew him by name when he went in their now, the pretty librarian, the sassy librarian, the music librarian. He wondered what nicknames they had for him. There were lots of people he hadn’t paid back, in many ways, but only the library really bothered him, because it was stable.

Blackbirds and trying to be like Craig

From the roof, I can see the sea. Where the blue of the sky hangs over water during the day, there is a black deep as a hole in the night, something I wish I could reach through to the other side even though I know there won’t be anything else there until I have created it. Some days I want to reach anyway.
Those are the days when I can’t seem to move past the fact that I ate a sandwich for breakfast and then stared at the blank white space for an hour, for two hours, for three until the page started to swim like it already had the words trapped within it. Why couldn’t I find the right ones? They were already there somewhere.
When we had picnics in the part, my mother would pretend to scare away the ants because I was always so afraid of them. That stayed with me. Sometimes I cannot create anything because I am nervous there is a whole line of ants marching up and down the wall behind my head and I can’t see them only because I am not looking.
With my eyes closed, I can still smell the salt that drips from the air. I constantly feel like I am covered in a layer of it, but the sensation does not bother me as it once did. Instead of showering constantly, in a series of attempts to stay clear and focus on things besides the physicalness of me in the chair feeling coated in salt, I pretend that it doesn’t matter.
Like it doesn’t matter that I haven’t been able to get out these words before. Even though the message has been in my head for months and I keep trying and keep ending up nowhere or lost or lost in the middle of nowhere.
I like it best, even I am lost while driving my car, to find illegal places to make u-turns. Better, busy places where I can make three-point turns. This way, even though I am lost, I feel like I have accomplished something by getting away with it.
I always used to get caught. But once I started being less obvious, I got away with a lot more. It was a nice feeling.
The most used key on the board is the delete. Uncreating is almost as good as actually creating. I am saving the world from all the crap that it doesn’t need to see. So even if the page is blank at the end of the day, I’ve accomplished the filling of it and the erasing of what was making it full. That’s nearly like accomplishing two things when I set out only for one.
I used to spend a lot more time on the roof. Especially at night, when I could sneak up there without anyone knowing. I was allowed up there, if only because there was no one to stop me. But something about being up there, that much closer to the sky, without anyone really being able to pinpoint where I was made me feel free.
Someone once gave me a sleeve of cds that were nothing but mix upon mix of Elliott Smith songs. I liked each one better than the last until the last one. Then I started to feel sad and thought about the way he had killed himself and wondered if the person who had given me the cds was trying to tell me something either about myself or about herself. I never asked; actually, I never saw her again.
The things I keep coming back to are this same file in the computer, the way the salt clings to me and the air, the ants my mother is no longer here to scare off, fear itself, and the way the delete key has started to wear away in the middle from all the times I’v

Weep Holes

The man fixing my windows was a boat-builder until his fingers curled up and his arms got too weak to portage on dry land. Now he’s taking apart my sash, plaining the edges, hammering a thin sheet of steel that whistles in the air before he anchors it to the wood.

Boatbuilding, he says, is a hard business.

He explains the mechanics of the window, how the sills and the frames are made at the same time and mounted as one piece. It’s always best to keep the original parts together. You can rebuild, he says, but it it’ll never be the same.

When I ask him where he lives he says, “forty miles from here.”

My grandparent’s house was built by a boat-builder. You would see the floor if you tried to look in the mirror hanging on the dining room wall. My grandmother swore there was a keel running through the center of the house.

Don’t ever let the rot spread from the sills.

When he looks outside he sees the brick upon brick of my neighbor’s house, old oak trees in the yard, the swing-set my children don’t use any more, a six-foot tall fence. Lake Michigan is just beyond here, but too far off to see.

Don't ever get a bend in your keel or you'll never sail straight again.

We don’t have a basement. When it rains in the spring I sometimes imagine my house coming loose off its moorings and drifting away from here, leaving the neighbors, the trees, the swing-set and the fence far behind.

Well aren’t you lucky, he says.

He shoves his screwdriver into a hole under the storm window, leans over and blows the dust away. Not many houses have them, he explains. You've got weep holes so nothing can build up. You've got a steady source of escape.

 He wasn't talking about the house. 

Filet Mignon

His father made it for her. She thought it was a bit soon to meet his parents, not that she wasn’t flattered and happy about it. He was leaving for a few weeks, on a cross country trip, driving, and really it was more about consolidating obligations than introducing her into his family.
He asked if she would be uncomfortable at their house for dinner.
“Would you?” she wondered.
“It’s hard to make me uncomfortable.”
His father was a cook, by hobby, and a bus driver for special needs students in his retirement after 30 years with the Department of Corrections. He was an excellent cook, and the steak was tender and better than anything she’d eaten in many months. There were also crab legs.
His parents drank a lot, Miller Lite. They were loose and fun and they didn’t ask her many questions, which was nice.

Sidewalk

She told the doctor not to touch her. “I’m going to bite you!” she cried through her clenched teeth.
Later, when her boyfriend noticed the scar on under the left side of her jaw, he asked, “How did your parents handle it?”
“What do you mean?” she said. “They took me to urgent care.”
“No, I mean, were they upset.”
They weren’t. They were never upset outwardly. She demanded their calm, hysterical as she was.
“I was the opposite,” he said. “My mom would cry and I’d have to tell her, ‘It’s all right, I’m going to be fine.’”
The doctor managed to cut away the stitches on her jaw without her attack. It was a bike accident, training wheels and all. One wheel caught in the grass, pushing against the edge of the sidewalk as she tried to move forward. A silent moment of shock and then the high wails of an otherwise shy child.

Mary Janes

It was in one of her molars, in the back of her mouth. Metal, because that’s what they used back then. Her first few would later be replaced– tooth colored.
Afterwards, her mother took her shopping for new shoes, the pretty ones with the buckles she’d liked so much, but she was woozy from the experience (not the Novocain, but the memory of the needle pushing into her gums, of the dentist holding it there, holding), and her legs felt light and wobbly. Her mother told her that if she were brave, if she got through it, she’d get a present. It would be wrong, of course, to fault the girl for her sweet tooth with her mother parked nightly on the couch with a bag of Maple Nut Goodies.
It was a word the girl didn’t like, ‘goodies,’ and would never like, thought the candies were pretty good.

polyconfusion

If you told me I was meant to be a polygamist, what would I say?

I would say you were fucking crazy, that’s what I would say. I am not meant to share marriages or domestic responsibilities. Nor am I meant to have lots of children who will swing from my hip and cry all day as I shuffle around grocery stores in long, denim skirts (no slits, not even for proper movement). I don’t want to move to a compound where I can’t swig a bottle of Coca-Cola even if my throat is so parched that a tumbleweed comes bouncing out instead of words. Not that you were going to let me talk anyways, even with my tongues. Even if I went to the store and pointed to the Westmalle behind the cage, telling the clerk “yes, that’s the one,” you wouldn’t let me drink it. You’d rip it from my hands and yell, “devil, devil, devil!”
Always the devil: any man with long hair, the smokers out on the sidewalk, dogs with dark fur, the tumbleweed which rustles, bristles dryly because it is not rolling towards Joseph Smith.

election day post

I posted on D2L as well. Under discussions>workshops

Shiva Leaving

When the time came for leaving, I clung on at the elbow in the lamp light to the words she had just spoken, a few random words, but spoken in sweet whispers as she led me away. Through the sweeping streets in the sloping maze of churches and palm boulevards, down dark and ominous alleys, along cool stone walls, through silent shadows in the ambit of the bell tower under its eaves and red clay roofs. A distant musician plucked his guitar and the sounds tickled me with a strange anxiety as if all the people asleep in their beds were dead. Her voice had killed them. Her soft voice. Shiva was talking and had not seen me or this place. Now I could no longer deny that I loved her and why did it take so long, such an impossible time.

If You're Going to Preach, At Least Take a Shower--Leo's Last Word

It’s a shame, some people.
I'll have to take over now, because Leo isn't feeling well. I know what he told you I was at his ex-wife's house and got a restraining order against him. That's not true. He did that. I actually was there to keep him from hurting somebody. He owes me. I saved his life. So, I'll tell you this last part of the story because Leo doesn't really know how to tell it.
Now, he's arguing with me, saying there are some details I don't know, so I'll just let him tell the story with me. Or will I?
It's a shame, these kids today, with all their electronic little gadgets. Listen, Leo admits he doesn’t know a whole lot about much of the stuff out there. We have a cellular phone, a cd player, a computer. We get on the internet when we need to look stuff up, but we don’t think any of that crap is the key to anything. A guy can be just as happy without it. Anyway, a couple of days ago, some kid came into the store. Probably about legal age or a couple of years older. He had his cell phone and a briefcase, not a nice briefcase, but we thought he was making his point by carrying a briefcase at all. You know, “I’m important! Look at me!” That kind of thing. He had on a button-down shirt and slacks, but he was kind of dirty. Well, his shirt was wrinkled and his hair looked really greasy. He picked out a couple of donuts and poured a small cup of coffee. The whole time he’s walking around being real vocal, speaking to everybody—
“Hey, how’s it going? How’re you doing today?” We knew he was going to say something crazy to me. So he comes up to the checkout counter. “How’s it going, there,” he says. His breath smelled like shit. Oh, excuse us—We're not cursing anymore. Feces. It smelled like feces. His nails were dirty, too. We felt sorry for him, really. Poor kid. He asks us if I’d seen any good movies lately. He said he’d seen the movie that told him the truth about life. Go to the MOVIES, he says, to find out the TRUTH about God.
He kept saying, ‘Religion is ridiculous,’ or something. Like the movie changed his life. He said something that some other guy who gets up and shaves every morning just like him taught him the truth about God. He said people who believe in God are idiots, and that Jesus was a con-man. We couldn’t believe it. He said our Lord and Savior was a con-man. We don’t know if you’re a praying man or anything, but we ask you, how in the hell—excuse us, how in the world can a guy who gets whipped and spat on and nailed to a cross by his hands and feet be a con-man? Isn’t the purpose of being a con to get something out of the deal, to
get over on people?
It goes back to what we said earlier. The key to being found after being lost is to admit that
you don’t know anything. Seems like whoever made that ridiculous movie is pretty lost, himself. We didn’t say anything to the guy. We wanted to punch him in the nose. We knew if we said anything, it would end with him picking himself up off the floor. So we kept silent. That’s another thing we’ve learned too—how to pick my battles. No, we didn’t say anything to the kid. We just wanted him to leave. We figured this kid would learn soon enough the TRUTH about lies. So, he tried to pay with a debit card, which was declined. We took back the donuts and coffee. He left. We kept thinking about what he said: going to the MOVIES taught him the TRUTH about GOD, about LIFE. He hadn’t made his truth look all that appealing to me. We figure if you’re going to preach, at least take a damned shower. He had a cell phone but couldn’t pay for two donuts and a cup of coffee. For the moment, that was his truth.

Leo Takes a Stand

I don't know what that son-of-a-bitch told you about me. I don't even know the guy really.
He just shows up sometimes, saying he knows what I need. Talking about he's gonna take care of me. Don't listen to him. Then again, he is pretty straight-forward. I think he'd give his life for me. I definitely have to say I trust him. Still, I don't know. He just showed up at my ex-wife's house one day, crying. Begging her to take him back. Like he knew her or something. I mean, I'm Leo. Wouldn't I be the one to beg her to take me back? Why would he beg her to take him back? To go 'back' to something, don't you gotta be there in the first place? I show up, and my wife is standing there looking at me, asking these stupid questions.
"You alright," she says.
What the fuck are you talking about, I say. Of course I'm alright.
My son Leo, he's Junior, says, "Pop, get the hell out of here, 'til you straighten up."
I'm going, "What the hell are you fucking fucks talking about? I'm straight! I just came by to say 'hello.'"
So, that guy messed it up, where I gotta stay about 150 feet away from my wife at all times.
I don't care what the courts say, she's still my wife. So, that guy screwed that up for me. Still, he's been there for me in some tight pinches. Taking over when my head starts hurting.

Okay, I'll tell you this before he comes back. I definitely believe there are just as many bad people in the world as there are good. Before this job, I was a licensed electrician. For about nineteen years I worked with the City, then with Com Ed (that’s Commonwealth Edison to
you non-Chicagoans). I knew a lot of people and made really good money. Then my head started hurting all the time, and I screwed up. I hit the booze. Things got pretty bad. I lost my family, my license. I was even in a shelter for about ten days. So I know what it’s like to be lost. And I know how to come back from that, too. I guess I could have gone back on the job, back to working with the Union, but I think that’s what got me in trouble in the first place—stress. My head would be pounding. Anyway, my son Leo and I have finally gotten to be pretty good friends, and we talk sometimes about how things were when I was drinking. He was just a kid, and God knows I wasn’t a great father then. He says the scariest thing for him was
that he might end up like me. You gotta respect that. Who wants to be like that? I never hit my wife or kid or nothing, but I broke furniture, crashed the car, yelled at them all the time, showed up at work drunk. When things were at their worst, I felt out of control, but in the beginning of it, I felt like I was a king. Like I had the world in a jug and the stopper in my hand. Like I knew everything. Which brings me back to my point about working this job and knowing how to come back from being lost. The key is for a man to admit that he doesn’t know a damned thing.

Okay, this fucker's coming back. I'll talk to you when the coast is clear.

Is Obama the death of Flarf?

Gary Sullivan thinks, "maybe, yeah."

What do we do with a President who can talk, run a decent campaign, and be so damn hard to demography? Will we have to look to Canada for redneck government leaders?

Before We Get Too Smug

Senators Delay and Nay, is that some kind of a joke? Or maybe it’s spelled, Neigh, as in winnie. I wish Mr. Ed were here. He would know what to do. Is it possible, you great bunch of loveable fools called The American People, have actually voted to elect a Senator Delay and a Senator Nay/Neigh? Who’s next, Senator Jack Ass? Congressman Bill Pass? Dick Army? Is Congress now a Restoration Comedy? Has it all gone so much to shit that when we draw the curtain on civic responsibility such a sad sense of the absurd overcomes us that DUTY is shed for a cheap chuckle? I hear it was different in the 60s. Well, the late 60’s. Well specifically, August 12-15, 1969. But I wonder, despite knowing a semi-reliable eye-witness, namely my half-sister who claims to have been a topless waitress to whole spectacle of ‘youth culture’ that briefly bloomed over a weekend in Bethel, NY, one weekend aforemented, 1969. She says, “Yes, it’s true, I cared once. Briefly.”

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My election day post is elsewhere...

I posted my narrative on the d2l site under "workshop readings" because it is too long for the blog.

A Litmus Test

It was the morning of November4, 2008, and I must admit that was quite excited. Being the progeny of African slaves brought to the New World, particularly to Barbados, Jamaica, and Panama, I have been Black all my life and I have enjoyed it just as long. So, as this was the day that I would vote for Barak Obama as President of the United States, I must say I felt like I might take off running with glee. I walked up the the moderately long line of voters that had formed outside the polling place. A white gentleman came up behind me, nice enough fellow, holding his cup of gourmet coffee and his Onion newspaper. I wasn't reading a thing at all. I had on a t-shirt, emblazoned with my sorority's letters, the pink and green fresh and clean like I like it.
I could tell he wanted to say something to me, but I didn't feel like talking, didn't want the rhetoric to begin so soon. I guess he couldn't take it any more, so he began.
"What does 'AKA' stand for?"
"It's my sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, Incorporated," I replied.
"That's wonderful! I've heard of it." He waited, giving me a chance to respond. I didn't. It was nothing personal. I honestly just didn't feel like talking.
He turned around, watching the line of waiting voters and smiled. It was coming, I could feel it.
"So, this is a great day," he said. Ooh! There it was. "I'm just so excited about the direction this country is taking."
I didn't bother to tell him about the four hundred years of work Black people in this country have been making, risking their lives, dying in many cases, striving for a better day they would never see. I didn't bother t talk about the fact that Martin Luther King and Malcolm X talked truths year ago, had lived and died, and racism is still the second principle, behind classism, in this country. I didn't even bother to remind him of the outrage the media expressed when Rev. Jeremiah Wright said what he said about this country's foundation. The truth about that was, if anyone had bothered to ask Black people what they thought about Wright's comments, they all would have said, 'He hasn't lied yet!'
I just waited for him to continue. And he did.
"I am just so excited about finally having a Black president.
Ha! I thought. I can't let this pass!
"What first Black president," I asked. " Don't you know we've had six already?"
What do you mean, was his incredulous reply.
"Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Calvin Coolidge, , Warren G. Harding, and Dwight D. Eisenhower were Black. I mean look at their pictures. Can't you tell?"
"No, I can't actually. They look like anybody in my family, and we're not Black."
"Dr. Auset Bakuhfu wrote a book about it. He's an anthropologist. I'ts common knowledge among many Black people in America." I kept nodding, because I don't think he wanted to believe me. I had to go for the jugular. "Kind of makes you wonder what roots are strengthening your family tree, doesn't it?"
He turned back to his Onion and guzzled his coffee.

Helened

The goal: 

- to train a cat named Helen 

The obstructions: 

- Helen can't read

- the trainer is only 6

- the trainer's first language is Korean

- the trainer has mild Asperger's syndrome

"Children with Asperger's make much use of phrases they have memorized, although they may not be used in the right context."

Two share fondness for Oreos

Christianist organist courts sin on mission to Borneo. Inner Romeo reborn at Horny-a-go-go. Alpha & omega ditched for Alfa Romeo but when three way spree leads to back seat track meet feelings get hurt and curt words unnerve Ralph, who flees la falta knee deep in alfalfa far from curb.

On a Trip with Euro Sponge #10

A sponge is a sponge.

The Euro sponge takes issue with such a claim. It has been traversing the difficult terrain of your disgustingly uncultured kitchen and must point out that in one simple sweep of the bread crumbs on the counter, it managed to teach your browning bananas several words of Swedish, whereas before, they were simply going to be sacrificed to make a banana split, or be massacred in the blender.
The Euro sponge is a member of the EU. It is worldly, and far superior to your 1970s plastic faux-granite countertops and colorless eggshell tiled floors. Nonetheless, it feels the need to protect your kitchen against communist aggressors, also known as the fruit flies. Since the best offense is a good defense, the Euro sponge will rid the kitchen of popular fruit fly terror cell hiding places: moldy bits of food caught in the sink drain, decaying fruit, problematic garbage storage. The Euro sponge is so effective in its cleanliness, it will even manage a total lifestyle makeover. Your slovenly studio in Wichita will be transformed into a lush loft on la Rue Saint-Honoré. You will no longer wear stretch-waist sweatpants everyday. You will become European.

After a tour of duty, your Euro Sponge is dishwasher safe, so you can refresh it again and again (it prefers being splashed with Evian, despite plastic water bottles waning in popularity). Does not disinfect surfaces. Rinse thoroughly before and after use. May be sterilized by boiling.

Wal-mart Nights

It was Wal-Mart we went to when drunk. Target’s air of newness, of dusty hipness left us feeling like we should buy clothes for work while they were on sale. Walgreens was dark, dank, as if they couldn’t afford lighting. TJ Maxx wasn’t open 24 hours.

Wal-Mart had the toys. The children’s aisle that we wandered to after weaving through the kitchen goods, the best lit aisle in the store. We didn’t like lighting. We liked erecting monuments of toys, from toys. We built skyscrapers and pyramids of toys and talking animals and read children’s books aloud to celebrate, joyous. We were ecstatic and leaving our mark. We talked circles around the toys.

We were not bothered. We were not thieves. We never went near the frozen food aisle, the cookie aisle, the candy aisle, the aisles that would have given us, staggering, away. The cops and workers and the clientele left us alone. We never bought anything, it goes without saying. But we left glorious messes, messes of cuteness. We sometimes left notes for those who had to clean it up and we usually got to our own work in the morning on time.

when he loses ground

after predicting the existence
after the mirror and wishes, starring
at her, when he puts a hand
over, when the talons capped
before the sound, before soaring
when precedence would cost more
than the future, when his
mother visits, before the scar
before the baptism
when they curl and
he is ready

the first election

What was my experience with this election? How do I answer this question? I have been assigned this question, and have asked it of my own students. As a teacher, I decided to share this writing with my students, and as a student, I know my classmates will read it. My own electoral experiences are framed by the first presidential election I voted in. I had just turned eighteen, which is approximately where my students are now. There is the before and after of that first election, my own personal drama of the last weeks, the personal events in my life of the last two years. There is the fact that I cannot tell my students my own political affiliation. So where do I start? If I start with that first election, I would have to tell about boarding school, about my political activism (but not the issue), about moving to San Diego to work on the campaign and being sacked within weeks. Apparently, I am not a good fundraiser. After the summer I went back east, back to the neighborhood my parents still lived in, and started working for the campaign again, this time in voter educator, which was a bit more successful. I really believed I was making a difference. Is that enough to start? OK, here we go.
On the morning of November 4, 1992 I had to work. This was my “real” job, in other words the one I did for money. I was not volunteering at the polls. Honestly, I can’t remember why. No, I’ll make this a story without doubts. I could not volunteer at the polls because I had to go to my mother’s house. That is an easy reason; she is sick and at that point I was taking care of her, so I am sure she needed something. The truth? Neither answer above; the organization I worked for was afraid of violence, so we didn’t have anyone at the polls that day. I went to vote after stopping at my mother’s house, so I was driving the old blue Aries K station wagon. That car was a total lemon. I was so excited to finally vote, and then frightened because there was no traffic at all as I drove on the small residential street to my polling place. Where was everyone? I passed a cop, strange in this neighborhood. And then, out of nowhere, a man on a bicycle shot out from behind a parked truck. I slammed on my brakes and tapped his wheel, but he wasn’t hurt. Of course, the cop was right there, lights flashing and ready to give me a ticket. But he was kind, and I was weeping. I was so excited and distracted by my own politics I had almost killed a man, or at least that is how I saw it. Really, I had just run a stop sign, which was blocked by that same illegally parked truck, So the cop said he would write me the ticket but support me if I appealed it since he believed me. I suppose the real tears also helped.
And then I voted. Still full of adrenaline and fear from my incident with the bicycle, terrified that there weren’t many people at the polls, believing I had fought for something true and good and overwhelmed with anxiety at the possibility we would lose. We didn’t lose, and I still feel that rush of pride and anxiety every time I vote. The fear? Well, 15 years later a ballot in Wisconsin asked me if believed my fathers had the right to marry, and I stood there for a 5 full minutes unable to write down that yes, I do have a family, no matter what you call it. For the record, I can’t tell you how I actually voted on that one either.
What happened on November 4, 2008? On that morning, 547 days after my grandmother died, 1 day after Barack Obama’s grandmother died, and 9 days after my doctors announced I might have cancer, I slept late. Well, to be more precise, the painkillers I took after the biopsy were still making my drowsy, but not doing anything for the actual pain. And I still hadn’t registered. I had to get it together enough to find my proof of residence, stand in line (would there be lines this time?) and vote. That was my job on Tuesday, vote and wait for the doctor to call. And miss my grandmother.
When I asked my students to write the story of November 4, they wanted to know if they should include what they did, what they ate, if they watched television or went out with their friends. Of course, I said no, I wanted the story of the election, which is more than those simple facts. I didn’t eat anything at all; I can’t eat when I am really scared. I did bake 50 cupcakes; somehow, baking is comforting, even when it comes from a box. And I did think about our grandmothers. All of them.
I used to say I couldn’t get married, because my grandmother was waiting for my wedding so she could die happy. I know she died believing the United States was a hundred years away from electing a black man to the white house. She was a teacher too, at a high school in Harlem in the thirties. A girl’s school, all black of course, being that it was segregated. The grade you earned in my grandmother’s class determined whether of not you would got training to be a secretary or if you would be relegated to “domestic” work for the rest of your life. She never lost the understanding that her own actions always, somehow, implicated her in what she saw as the racist structure of our society. She never lost he belief that she could change things. And she never say November 4, 2008. Neither did President-elect Obama’s grandmother, but maybe that’s ok, because maybe she believed it could happen.
One of my students objected to this assignment, saying there was nothing to tell, that we don’t know anything yet. Maybe he’s right; we can start here. This is the first election. My friends ate the cupcakes, I don’t have cancer, our grandmothers are gone. We waited in line and we voted, and I know 40 eighteen year-olds who are excited and frightened and waiting to see what comes next.

All the unicorns care about is who's going to be President

They gave me a pencil this time. Someone will inevitably erase my line and put down whatever they wish.
Write-in candidate: Magical Unicorn, The Unicorn Power Party
Platforms: Expanding magical forests, using special horn power for good, not
Evil


The man standing next to me looks on to the ballot of the man next to him. “So, do we, like, have to vote for all of these people or whatever?’ He points to the ballot.
“Maybe.”
“Shit, man, I don’t know. All I fucking care about is the President.”


Write-in candidate: Who cares? It’s all the same.
Platform: Local politics don’t matter. The TV/the wasp buzzing in my windowsill/my grandfather/the dog down the block barking demonic phrases/the leaves chattering in the street/the men fighting on the corner told me who to vote for.

You know who I’M voting for?
Who?
Joan Baez! I saw her and she gave me the message. PEACE! That was it! The drumming started and I got it. I totally got it.

Write-in candidate: Jada the Siamese cat mix
Platform: Single issue: string

Alexander is packing his bags, ready to leave for Germany if needed. He says they have beautiful white asparagus there. The Green Party is very strong. Everyone under 45 speaks English better than we do. How lovely.

The machine is beeping at me to hurry up and load the goddamn ballot already.

The man says I have to let it go.

Nov 4, 2008

Tears, tears. Millions of people crying. Are they tears of joy? Tears of sadness? I don’t think this is quite so. I cry watching television. I cry at the people crying, who cry at the talking, who cry at my crying, cry at the thoughts they are thinking, the feelings being felt. But are they tears of joy or tears of sadness? I don’t think so. Millions of people are crying. Altogether now, our people are crying. A nation is crying. We come together in small groups and it’s only a moment before some long held tear wets a cheek. In parks more than one million people gather. They are streaming in, streaming down, why so many crying? Are they crying for a document called The Constitution? Do they brace their eyes and turn away because old institutions have nosed back in line with older ideals? I don’t think so. Tears for our torn history, collective tears for our horrible suppressed and silent past. Tears for letting go. What escapes through these tiny tears? What evaporates with this wailing? Tears of exhaustion, tears of relief. Beg the criers, please, to their torturers, let us go. Tears of love, tears of thanks, for this bit of mercy. Tears we cry to be at last forgiven? Tears for starting over? I think so.

Someone else's opinion

Having cast my vote – the first time I’ve ever voted - I thought I’d contact the most (and practically only) conservative friend I have, an American who teaches in Poland - the type of friend who would never be a friend if we hadn’t met overseas – to ask who he was voting for, and why, not to persuade him out of his opinions, but to hear them out….

He says….

Voted for the Constitution Party/Chuck Baldwin, he's a preacher, I think a bit of a holy roller but the closest candidate to a Ron Paul type of philosophy.

I guess to summarize why I won't vote for McCain and why I really wouldn't vote for Obama is the following:

The three wars which Bush and Dems have both inflicted upon the US, massive third world Immigration which is changing the whole foundation of our nation, Imperialism - trying to democratize third world hell holes which is Utopian insanity and crazy expensive and Indebtedness - to pay for all these peace keeping, democratizing projects overseas and the hopeless task of educating, medicating, housing all these third world immigrants, asylum seekers, refugees etc. we are putting ourselves in hawk to the communist Chinese, Arab oil sheiks and whoever else will lend us the money. We have a 10 trillion dollar debt now? My grandchildren will still be paying that off.

I'm at the fringes of the republican right wing. I'm probably more of an American Firster than any kind of Republican. I like Pat Buchanan's saying - A Republic not an Empire.

If I was in charge as President I would:

Pull out of Nato

Pull out of the UN and force them out of NYC, let Pyong Yang or Tehran host them.

Pull our troops out of Iraq, Afhganistan, and also Germany, S.Korea, Japan – they’re rich countries they can defend themselves.

Seal the border with Mexico with US troops,

Halt nearly all forms of immigration - guest worker programs, family reunification/serial migration, Green card diversity lottery, refugee asylum seekers

Felony charges for any business hiring illegal immigrants, a federal electronic verification system that all employers would have to use to check if a worker is legal to work in the US.

Most illegals would self deport based on the above laws, ICE would round up the rest.

Eliminate the federal dept. of education and HUD, and dept of homeland security.

Legalize all drugs then we can get rid of the DEA and a massive amount of state and city police work.

Anyway, I could go on and on its kind of fun, but you get my point. I’d like to turn the clock back to a time that Calvin Coolidge would appreciate.

Your Prof will probably think you’re friends with a nut job crypto-fascist but really I'm just an old fashioned nationalist/American firster.