"It is astonishing that someone who has proved in his memos to be so lacking in judgment and so ideologically twisted in his reasoning that he laid a blanket of legal immunity over those who wanted to torture now holds one of the most powerful and prestigious seats a lawyer can attain." - Marie Cocco, Bybee Must Go
He traced her figureOn his heart With charcoal. The fired remains Of yesterdays perfectly perceived And profoundly destroyed. It was nice to have a another subject, But mostly his thoughts were on the medium.
After a time The bitter black lost dominion To the beauty of her form: Dead grit Came to soft life As curious fingers Feathered heavy outlines Into beating tissue.
He moved to watercolors When shades of gray Could no longer contain his vision. Rough sketches Were replaced with impressionistic hopes, And light was everywhere.
Time sharpened edges, Made features more familiar. He got into acrylics Knowing faults Only added to reality; That truth bound better than fantasy, And that patience Made for truer focus.
When it was time for portraits, (When he could get the three girls To sit quietly For more than five minutes) He brushed oils Across the linen of his life, And felt, for brief moments, Like a master.
They spread his remains From a mountain in Boulder Across an amazing blue sky. Each one held a gallery Inside Of the love he had given. Reflecting on the art of their own lives As a cold gust stirred, For a moment they could see A figure Traced in ashes, And they smiled.
By ten in the evening the anoles have had it, especially the young ones, so they climb up into the honeysuckle or the ferns or a densely leafed section of the boxwoods where they are safe from the nocturnal ground hunting predators, and they drift off to meet with Morpheus.
The littlest ones prefer the comfort of the mint patch in the back yard, and by mid summer, when the spring clutches have all hatched and the tiny reptiles have had time to learn a bit of the layout of things, you can find five or six of them stretched or curled like strange fruits at the tops of the tallest plants, eyes closed, dreaming warm dreams of fat insects and sunny tomorrows.
The air around me is sentient, whispering constantly in Romani and the Japanese slang of shops and arcades along the Ginza strip. "Si khohaimo may pachivalo sar o chachim," dark velvet strands of vowel and consonant accuse, tickling my ear like an unrelenting gnat.
I wave my hand distractedly, annoyed. A trick of the light, perhaps, or the tonal impetus of days lost to all the ways my world has ended. Wee, private Ragnaroks crying out in temporal dissonance, betrayed by the forward stumbling of weary feet; a widowed unwillingness to lie down.
"Nogitsune!"
Fox-spirit. Old Man Coyote. Loki. I've been called worse more often than better.
The Oracle at Delphi was out of her nut on wine and ethylene when I showed up curious one late spring evening, and she squawked the answer to my impetuous question for the whole crowd to hear.
"You!" she shrilled at the top her slowly dying lungs. "You are your own worst enemy!"
Plutarch was embarrassed by the show and quickly rushed me off to some debauchery or another where we forgot all about it.
The air though, oppressive, bilious, entirely too talkative, has never forgotten.
"Hamas, the Iranian government and the Taliban have been condemned by Washington for advocating policies that mirror those expressed by Lieberman toward Palestinians. Ahmed Tibi, an Arab deputy in the Knesset, has called on the international community to boycott Israel as it did Austria when far-right leader Jorg Haider joined that country’s government. This seems a fair request. But I expect the hypocrisy and double standards that characterize our relations with the Middle East, along with our obsequious catering to the Israel lobby, to prevail. Racism, as long as it is directed toward Arabs, does little to perturb our conscience or hinder our support of Israel." - Chris Hedges, Israel’s Racist in Chief
"Almost everyone in the United States or indeed anywhere else in the world knows about Zimbabwe’s sit-tight president, Robert Mugabe. But who is Mogae? Who is Chissano? Who is Kikwete? And who is Kufuor? Sadly, very few people outside Africa recognize these names."
- Gbemisola Olujobi, Who is Magae?
It's a terrible thing to say, but I can't help it. It's like a quiet chirp from my inner being echoing and magnifying as it moves up through the empty caverns of a dark and sinister heart until it physically hums the whole of my being and comes out unbidden and uncontainable: "I want Cheney's head on a pike!"
As one who rebels against the use of violence, the statement is abhorrent. Even the way it sits on the screen like a bizarre owl pellet containing only the undigestible bits of political diatribe and dehumanizing caricature. But like that necessary regurgitation, it feels good to have it out.
He kept it on a key chainWith a bald rabbit’s foot And a mini Magic 8 Ball. It caught her attention From across the little city library, Over the top of Harlan Ellison’s The Pain God and Other Stories. She lost her breath And her page.
She moved to stand expectantly At his left shoulder, Like a wooden match Looming over a rough surface: Longing for flame But nervous of the strike.
He was flipping slowly through a book of clouds And explained without looking up, “I forgot why the sky is blue.” “Higher frequencies,” She whispered, “Are prone to scattering.” “That would explain”, he replied, Looking up, “How your eyes wax azure As I'm moved from want to wonder.”
On a bench outside, Where the big maple promised to hold the world, He closed his eyes and touched her hand With just the tips of his fingers, Like a child reading the Vedas in braille. “I feel like I’ve been trapped in summer forever,” She said, “And I just want to fall." He smiled beneath his blindness When she asked if he'd catch her. "No," he answered "But I'd never let you fall alone."
He still had his rabbit foot when he opened his eyes, But she'd taken his heart from the keychain. It jingled hopeful in her hand as she waved From the ice cream cart across the street. Without even consulting the Magic 8 Ball He knew he had nothing else to lose.
We faced them down across a field of doggerel and dandelions: the fascist dreams of corporate legions rattling the sharpened bones of children like weeping sabers. We knew the time was near, the angels at hand, and held our ground as an endless wave of principalities broke over our granite courage.
In those final moments of desperate chaos I stood against one of the chieftains of Avarice and knew I would never get to hear Gabriel's brassy charge. The dark beast wielded a twisted naginata stolen from one of Tokugawa Ieyasu's demon monks back in the fall of 1601. I had only a broken basalt rosary and four of my initial three hundred words left (I'd taken most of my artillery from St. Paul's letter to the Galatians and was down to 'hearing', 'uncircumcision', 'grace', and 'law').
You might be surprised what you can accomplish with a bit of igneous stone and a word like 'uncircumcision'.
"I have not, as far as you know, ever killed anyone, and it's my sincere intent to keep it that way." "Making sure you never kill anyone?"
Keeping you ignorant about it."
