Haikus for the distinguished.....

Three cheers for your red
white and blue plastic Jesus
hope you have cancer


There is not enough
hellfire to punish your ass
let's start HERE and NOW!


We just can't forget
the black stench of burning shit
die in the latrine.


always one more tree
and a chump to work for less
don't drink the water.

The bell

Here it is. The end of Summer. The time, for us, when our oldest, our five year old enters the System. I wasn't there for the drop off, but I did go and pick her up. I was told to wait outside a set of steel mesh gates while the teacher escorted the group down a series of halls in formation. After they reached the exit, the teacher dutifully waited for each one of her charges to be picked up by a parent.
This whole process was understandably a huge deal. Still, I felt kind of embarrassed for giving my little ape a big hug and picking her up. That was until I noticed that a lot of the parents were there with huge camera rigs and some of them even had flowers. I looked at the faces of the little kids after the first day of school and a couple of them looked really tired but they all had a kind of exuberance that kids have when they meet a challenge and come out ok. Some of the hovering moms looked like they'd been crying for days. A lot of these young, soft parents had a look of almost guilt that they'd put their little darlngs in the belly of the beast. It was kind of weird.
I am glad,though, that we spent a day and all night waiting in line to get her transferred to this
school. This is a group of parents that, for all their faults, are going to be deeply engaged in helping their kids squeeze every drop of knowledge and fun that they can from their first years of education. I guess we all have a little growing up to do.

slumber

pity the unloved
they cannot ever miss
what they are missing
knowing only the feeling
of an empty ache
like some cold fibrous
shrapnel
that never works its way out
of a wound...
instead it grows larger and more
urgently heavy
first the pit of the stomach
and then the heart
and it makes its way to the
suburbs of the limbs
shoring itself up with bones
that turn to icy lead
and then it makes its way
behind the eyes
there it nests
and kills desire before it
can glow its way into
the brain or makes music
weak and broken, irrelevant
there it grows until
no thaw, no sun, can
undo the grey, icy mud.
Years from now the unloved
corpse will shit the bed after decades of toil
and neglect,
reverting to its pre-determined state.

free range americans

I'm at the beach, so I'm busy trying to keep the offspring from drowning and distracted by the shake and bake sand batter on all things delicate and sensitive.
What I just thought of today is that we are running out of free range Americans. Nobody is born at home anymore, like my Mom and Dad were and nobody damn sure dies there. There is something sad about that. I don't mean to romanticize poverty, but there was a time when we knew where we came from and we knew what we were eating and we saw each other for more than a few minutes at a time.
The people I see here at the beach are good enough. They are heavier than they should be, just like me, but they are active and they love each other. I just don't feel like these are the people who could fight off a commanche or keep floodwaters at bay with shovels all night.
They....we...are the people who are most likely to stand on our roofs in the baking sun waiting for helicopters that no longer exist. We always say, "somebody needs to do something about all this shit...." but we never mean for that somebody to be US. I miss the free range American. Perhaps they are just beneath the surface in each one of us, just beneath the XXXL polo shirt, the sunscreen and the flab.

Diplomacy

Let the respectable men take
their places and let the rest
of us look on until something more
interesting,
nudges us along.
It's when they open their dry
and polished lips
and talk of death and fire
like common household
cleaners or minor league
sports results,
that I wish we could demand
they step out on the sand
with nets and tridents or just
plain knives
and let the pulsing spray
decide who lives
and dies.

Nightmare in Ossetia

There is terrible news from a distant land. Most people never heard of Ossetia until 2004 when Chechen rebels took over a school and held all the children, teachers, and parents hostage. The siege ended in a massive storming of the school in which over 385 people where killed. That was in North Ossetia, which is an autonomous part of the Russian Federation.
South Ossetia is home to about 70,000 people, most of whom are Russified and most of whom carry Russian passports. The Ossetians embraced Christianity in the 9th century. After that, they found themselves faced with formidable enemies like the Mongols and the Chechens, Tatars, and Ingush...these latter groups were devout muslims and attacked the ossetians relentlessly. In the end of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th, they found a useful ally in the Russian empire. Large numbers of Chechens and Ingush were deported during and after WWII by the soviets because of their collaboration with the nazis.Later on, they tried to return to their original homes and began re-establishing their old enclaves.

Now we have Georgia, an ancient country (christian too) that is at the crossroads between east and west. They tried to take Ossetia in 1991 sensing weakness in the Russians. Now, there is a big problem between Russia and Georgia. DO NOT BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU HEAR AND READ ABOUT THIS CONFLICT! That includes my own efforts. But this is not black and white, good guy bad guy. Americans love that shit, but this is not one of those situations. This is a situation involving oil and strategic control. Be warned, reports of atrocities and attempts to destroy oil pipelines need to be taken with a whole damn bag of salt.

HNIC

I would rather write about aliens with crab lice or archery instead of politics. However, it seems like my next story involves a former president who retreats to his south american lair to do various acts of nastiness and evil. This story is in development because the president in question has bought a vast tract of land in Ecuador recently. File that under "no, really,no shit".
W has also told everybody that anyone who subpoenas anyone the white house should just roll that piece of paper up and shove it up their own ass for all the good it will do them. A brave stance. A real man of principles.

He has also said " the constitution is just a goddamned piece of paper". Hell yeah.



Well, scene one is in a vast south american villa. Exterior , gleaming white walls, red tile. broken bottles on top of thick fortifications. There is a perfectly manicured expanse of green lawn with little hillocks breaking the smooth surface. There is a sign in spanish and english in the foreground with a skull and crossbones in the foreground that reminds the viewer to turn off the minefield before doing any outside maintainence. Pan over the whole scene. There are guards lounging around in black BDU's with super modern bullpup assault rifles.

Interior scene. This is a room decorated in a mixture of splendor and disarray like the home of a successful pirate. There are three bigscreen tv's and works of art that have been shot through and or vandalized with sharpies. on he center of a long mahogany table there is a huge golden cup with a longhorn logo on it. in heavy silver letters on the big rim it reads "HNIC"

Enter the President, he is wearing khakis and a brilliant white wifebeater shirt. on his feet, he has flip flops. His hair is tousled. He has a bottle of scotch in his hand. He has a bluetooth earpiece and he is talking to someone on the phone. He is flustered and keeps bringing the bottle up to take a drink and then he gets irritated by the person on the other end and lowers it.

Pres: " Hey...I know what you're going through...but...no just give it to them and
do what you can.... NO NO NO!!! Stop thinking like a bitch. It's fucking plutonium,
..as far as they know."

He puts his hand up and shuts of the phone. He takes a little sip of the scotch.
enter dick cheney on an electric scooter wheelchair. He has an oxygen tube in his nose.

Pres: (happy to see him) Pops! what the hell. You need to stay in bed.
Dick: No, I'm fine. The people here live clean and I can really feel the difference.
Pres: Shit man, I ought to start selling hearts on the open market.
Dick: I'll order a dozen...as needed.

Dick turns on the big screen with his remote.
Jerry Springer is on..

( to be continued)

dusty gum.

Sometimes love is unexpected,
and so there are no cards for
this quaint occasion
when you feel the warm stare on the back
of your neck or you are sure a
special one leans in just
a bit more than necessary and puts
that hand on your arm
to speak softly, to stay
and now arrives the moment
when you are thinking about those eyes
that you pass by a store window
or tie your shoe by a fountain you
never saw before
and see just how frail you have
become in the skin over your knuckles
or how the
lines of your striking frame have
gone more oboe than clarinet.....
No, love is unexpected and the
dumbest, saddest,
clown in town.