(For the MFP Ladies)
First, make an agreement with your wife that you will press snooze once and only once, even if your wife does not respond.
Second, do not fight the darkness—keep your eyes as closed as safety permits
while you gather socks, belt, pants, etc., from the warm chamber of woman and dog
that you now must leave.
Third, do not allow yourself to be seduced by the shower,
that siren of ease,
first cousin to the snooze button,
the sleight of hand that inevitably
casts you out into the suddenly frigid hallway.
Fourth, do not check email to find:
old friends’ blues or joys
that will cause you to tarry to soothe or celebrate;
the rejections from the dried up vampire editors of the world;
the spam promising flavors that life should never have.
Fifth, close your eyes with your hand on the front door’s knob,
and with that coldness beneath your fingers,
dream the warmth of pens moving fast under hands.
In your darkness, imagine the smiles of the teenagers beneath ball caps,
in orange jumpsuits in the tank,
the smiles of hard-living women with hungry hope,
in pajamas and leather jackets, too,
sheltered
around a table at the close of the teaching day,
when darkness has fallen again.
Open the door, your eyes.
Friday, November 21, 2008
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Friday, November 14, 2008
REJOICE, REVEL, REPEAT (but Remember....)
I’m sitting in a Seattle coffee house gazing across at the spread of our weekly, the Stranger, which reads across the top in commanding font, REJOICE, REVEL, REPEAT. (Pause for eye rolling at the square angles of the cliché I inhabit). I like this headline. I find this headline important, timely, and right-on. I think this headline is something of an antidote to the rash of progressive naysaying and cacophonous mainstream doubts that are already so constant on the airwaves of our new America, from CNN to Democracy Now.
Being a news junkie (not to mention a presidential campaign junkie), I committed the grave error of persisting in my steady but unwholesome diet of media as early as 5:30 a.m. on November 5th (yes, I had to be up; no, I didn’t get to party the night before). I call this a grave error because it took no time at all for (my beloved) Amy Goodman to haul out acrimonious left wing critics of BHO, a move that was partially echoed later the same day by the deadpan intellectuals of NPR, then by the gregarious, colorful suits of the networks. NPR and the networks didn’t dig up radicals who called Obama “just another corporatist who’s only real import is, maybe, a racial shift” (paraphrase of the far left), but instead they started in on the delicious perplexity—served up by eyebrow lifting pundits—of how in the name of God he is going to keep his promises, meet his goals, satisfy the wild cross section of forces that lifted him into history and the Oval Office. This, of course, is a sound and logical question for journalism to posit. I just wish I had been allowed to REJOICE, REVEL, REPEAT a few times, but it’s my own damn fault for turning on the box.
Clearly there exists at least one super fly reason for building this network of looming incredulity over my man BHO, and it’s certainly been the motivation of the most progressive of the media such as (my beloved) Amy Goodman: hold his feet to the fire. BHO himself has articulated the danger of believing that he is the change we’ve been waiting for. He knows that’s not true and despite our reveling and rejoicing (and repeating) we damn well better remember that shit, too. Is it possible, though, that BHO is prescient enough to be asking us to hold his feet to the fire? Is it possible that part of the reason he’s hammered on the notion of a grassroots movement, of a change in the tattered American paradigm, is because he knows that to continue to have a progressive mandate he needs us to stay as present and organized and articulate as we have been for the last eighteen months? Maybe. I wouldn’t put it past the man. But regardless—whether BHO wants the pressure to keep him true or he comes to resent it and wish we would all just go back to our coffee houses, basketball courts, farms, classrooms—we must do it. We must do it because we carry the slab of responsibility with him. He made the promises we wanted to hear not merely to get elected but because he believed we were ready to weave them into being as a movement with him.
And that’s the lesson, isn’t it? I mean, to risk belaboring the point: we are the movement. When I hear doubts about whether BHO will be true to the labor movement that had his back, I remember the sixty year old man in a mesh cap and steel-toed boots who saw me coming with my armload of literature and headed me off at his chain link to shake my hand and tell me his Obama ballot was already in the mail. When I hear of the eighteen veterans that take their own lives each day, I remember the stringy-haired ex-Lieutenant who rolled out in his wheelchair when I knocked, his skull stoved in from Soviet artillery, a joint clutched in his palsied fingers and told me he’d rebuke McCain if Obama placed veterans on the map just one time before the election. When the trepidation about his foreign policy inexperience fires up, I think of the eighteen year old girl named Farah who cracked the door of a tumbledown Seatac shack and smiled beneath her headscarf as a jumbo jet shook the walls and told me how proud she was to cast the first ballot of her war torn life for another African. When the doubt circulates about whether Latinos will stick by the man once the nuances of his positions get defined, I think of the housewife who found me on her doorstep and got so excited she could only say ¡sí, sí, sí! and point at my button as her toddlers giggled and folded tortillas at the counter. When I hear skepticism about anyone being capable of uniting such a bitterly divided nation, I think of the flaking blue duplex where NRA plaques adorned the “Hunting Dog” pen and the paranoid man finally admitted that the civil libertarian in his weathered breast would not permit him to vote for McCain. When I hear conservatives pooh-pooh this revolution in democratic participation by claiming it was merely hatred of Bush, I recall the Vietnamese clan that yanked me inside and sat me down among toddlers, ancients, and stinky noodles to make me make certain they were registered and ready “write a card for black man.”
In no quantifiable way can I offer these people’s support as evidence that BHO will keep his promises to reform immigration, provide universal healthcare, extend unemployment insurance, protect labor, end the war in Iraq, or unite the nation. Maybe it’s a pure, unwieldy, sentimental trapping that makes me smile when I remember the faces that received me in the working class mazes south of Seattle and the masses that roared and wept in Chicago as the numbers tumbled in right. But hope and faith have been good to us this year and we if we don’t forget that they must be complemented by toil and sacrifice—and maybe the lighting of some fires—I think that 2009 will see the birth of many American lights (and, I hope, my own child).
Peace.
Being a news junkie (not to mention a presidential campaign junkie), I committed the grave error of persisting in my steady but unwholesome diet of media as early as 5:30 a.m. on November 5th (yes, I had to be up; no, I didn’t get to party the night before). I call this a grave error because it took no time at all for (my beloved) Amy Goodman to haul out acrimonious left wing critics of BHO, a move that was partially echoed later the same day by the deadpan intellectuals of NPR, then by the gregarious, colorful suits of the networks. NPR and the networks didn’t dig up radicals who called Obama “just another corporatist who’s only real import is, maybe, a racial shift” (paraphrase of the far left), but instead they started in on the delicious perplexity—served up by eyebrow lifting pundits—of how in the name of God he is going to keep his promises, meet his goals, satisfy the wild cross section of forces that lifted him into history and the Oval Office. This, of course, is a sound and logical question for journalism to posit. I just wish I had been allowed to REJOICE, REVEL, REPEAT a few times, but it’s my own damn fault for turning on the box.
Clearly there exists at least one super fly reason for building this network of looming incredulity over my man BHO, and it’s certainly been the motivation of the most progressive of the media such as (my beloved) Amy Goodman: hold his feet to the fire. BHO himself has articulated the danger of believing that he is the change we’ve been waiting for. He knows that’s not true and despite our reveling and rejoicing (and repeating) we damn well better remember that shit, too. Is it possible, though, that BHO is prescient enough to be asking us to hold his feet to the fire? Is it possible that part of the reason he’s hammered on the notion of a grassroots movement, of a change in the tattered American paradigm, is because he knows that to continue to have a progressive mandate he needs us to stay as present and organized and articulate as we have been for the last eighteen months? Maybe. I wouldn’t put it past the man. But regardless—whether BHO wants the pressure to keep him true or he comes to resent it and wish we would all just go back to our coffee houses, basketball courts, farms, classrooms—we must do it. We must do it because we carry the slab of responsibility with him. He made the promises we wanted to hear not merely to get elected but because he believed we were ready to weave them into being as a movement with him.
And that’s the lesson, isn’t it? I mean, to risk belaboring the point: we are the movement. When I hear doubts about whether BHO will be true to the labor movement that had his back, I remember the sixty year old man in a mesh cap and steel-toed boots who saw me coming with my armload of literature and headed me off at his chain link to shake my hand and tell me his Obama ballot was already in the mail. When I hear of the eighteen veterans that take their own lives each day, I remember the stringy-haired ex-Lieutenant who rolled out in his wheelchair when I knocked, his skull stoved in from Soviet artillery, a joint clutched in his palsied fingers and told me he’d rebuke McCain if Obama placed veterans on the map just one time before the election. When the trepidation about his foreign policy inexperience fires up, I think of the eighteen year old girl named Farah who cracked the door of a tumbledown Seatac shack and smiled beneath her headscarf as a jumbo jet shook the walls and told me how proud she was to cast the first ballot of her war torn life for another African. When the doubt circulates about whether Latinos will stick by the man once the nuances of his positions get defined, I think of the housewife who found me on her doorstep and got so excited she could only say ¡sí, sí, sí! and point at my button as her toddlers giggled and folded tortillas at the counter. When I hear skepticism about anyone being capable of uniting such a bitterly divided nation, I think of the flaking blue duplex where NRA plaques adorned the “Hunting Dog” pen and the paranoid man finally admitted that the civil libertarian in his weathered breast would not permit him to vote for McCain. When I hear conservatives pooh-pooh this revolution in democratic participation by claiming it was merely hatred of Bush, I recall the Vietnamese clan that yanked me inside and sat me down among toddlers, ancients, and stinky noodles to make me make certain they were registered and ready “write a card for black man.”
In no quantifiable way can I offer these people’s support as evidence that BHO will keep his promises to reform immigration, provide universal healthcare, extend unemployment insurance, protect labor, end the war in Iraq, or unite the nation. Maybe it’s a pure, unwieldy, sentimental trapping that makes me smile when I remember the faces that received me in the working class mazes south of Seattle and the masses that roared and wept in Chicago as the numbers tumbled in right. But hope and faith have been good to us this year and we if we don’t forget that they must be complemented by toil and sacrifice—and maybe the lighting of some fires—I think that 2009 will see the birth of many American lights (and, I hope, my own child).
Peace.
Friday, November 07, 2008
Perspective
(For the left wing doubters)
Election day conjured
beautiful freaks this year
not only men and women cut from American rock
but also creatures that reside in the caved shadow
that creation leaves behind.
It’s a new kind of carnival
even if the DC tilt-a-whirl
only gets a lube job, really.
We’d be lying if we said the Promised Land were visible
but we’d be fools not to celebrate
the tourniquet cranking down
the hemorrhage kicking
like a near dead horse, tiny and lost
in the rioting marrow
of new bones.
Election day conjured
beautiful freaks this year
not only men and women cut from American rock
but also creatures that reside in the caved shadow
that creation leaves behind.
It’s a new kind of carnival
even if the DC tilt-a-whirl
only gets a lube job, really.
We’d be lying if we said the Promised Land were visible
but we’d be fools not to celebrate
the tourniquet cranking down
the hemorrhage kicking
like a near dead horse, tiny and lost
in the rioting marrow
of new bones.
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
From a Barcelona Beach on Tuesday, 11/4/08
When the Polls Close
(A ditty for Barack and NewJack Hustle)
George Bush, I hate you
You hate me, you snake you
Today’s gray,
But the state’s blue
John McCain, you can’t kill me
With your plans for, WWIII
'Cause there’s no poll tax,
Democracy’s free
Karl Rove, your thick plot fell,
Like your hair piece,
Down an oil well
If you ask me
How can I tell?
It’s Barack’s face
Made from sand and shells
On a Spanish beach
This morning
That puts your
World on warning.
Ok,
I’ll try to
Be a Buddhist
Let the past go
With a soft kiss
Trust the fascists
To make their own lists
Of atonement
When the day’s done
Shrug and smile
At their evil run
When the polls close
Lovingkindness
In the face of
All their blindness.
(A ditty for Barack and NewJack Hustle)
George Bush, I hate you
You hate me, you snake you
Today’s gray,
But the state’s blue
John McCain, you can’t kill me
With your plans for, WWIII
'Cause there’s no poll tax,
Democracy’s free
Karl Rove, your thick plot fell,
Like your hair piece,
Down an oil well
If you ask me
How can I tell?
It’s Barack’s face
Made from sand and shells
On a Spanish beach
This morning
That puts your
World on warning.
Ok,
I’ll try to
Be a Buddhist
Let the past go
With a soft kiss
Trust the fascists
To make their own lists
Of atonement
When the day’s done
Shrug and smile
At their evil run
When the polls close
Lovingkindness
In the face of
All their blindness.
Saturday, November 01, 2008
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