The actual author is unknown but he/she speaks volumes.
You didn’t get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.
You didn’t get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate Energy policy and push us to invade Iraq .
You didn’t…
Two churches located across the street from each other. At least the Catholics have a sense of humor. lol
Yesterday, a friend at The New York Times, upon editing and posting the At War entry about the blessing of the bodies of Anatoly Nagaiko, Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington, sent me two poems. The deaths in Misurata, she said, summoned them to mind.
Every so often you read a poem — or a…
“In Theses Times” by Bob Hicok
My sister’s out of work and my brother’s
out of work and my other brother’s
out of work, these are facts available
over the phone or in person, just as now,
three clouds travel north, one
above another, smallish, amoeba shaped,
and the bottom cloud just died,
and the top two have joined forces
and left me to fend for myself
under a new sky.
How vague is that, amoeba shaped?
That could anything: cigar shaped,
Manhattan shaped, could be libor, t-bill, jobs report,
which arrive as theoretical entities, words
from a tele-prompter repeated by newscasters
and converted to waves beamed to satellites
and bounced to my set to be reconstituted
as their basset-hound eyes of concern
when the day’s dollop or wallop of woe
is mashed and rehashed by people
making good scratch for telling us how bad it is.
There’s little to hold in what they say.
That’s what a job is: a pencil to hold, a scalpel,
shovel, “A Statistical Analysis
of the Probability That Anyone Will Read
the Statistical Analysis,” even such slippage
is a mind-hold that keeps some someone
from drifting off into irrelevance.
I could offer this in Hegelian or Satreian terms
of engagement before the void, but really,
if you’re alive, and sentient,
you’re an existentialist in that you know
most of what awaits is neither breath
or the electro-chemical dream of you
you carry forth and mix with fellow soothsayers
of the eternal mysteries, know intuitively
that work is money, honey,
but also and maybe moreso, is your hands
kept busy with needle and thread, hammer and scythe,
memo and counter memo, is you
joining the thrum and hum that is all there is
except what there is not.
My sister’s out of work and my brother’s
out of work and my other brother’s
out of work, these are facts known to many
and more many every day,
there but for the grace of a W-2
go you, as I’m employed by this poem
that’s about to lay me off, I remember that
when the question of what to do
gets intellected about.
Jobs to do because there’s work to do
because this whole to-do’s
a stop-gap measure to the zip
or heaven to come, about which
we haven’t a clue.
A little Keynesing now or a lot of keening
later, when the phone rings
and maybe it’s you whose house
is no longer your house, whose car’s
just been slicked away by a guy
tatted-up all goth and penitentiary,
you whose kid needs grub, me
who has to mumble through
some version of
could you, I don’t know, maybe send me,
I hate to ask, a few bucks?
If you never had to make that call,
let me kiss the inside of your skull, let me intercede
on the part of the burned field
for the grass,
on the side of the cadaver
for the walk under moonlight, I’m only praying
you listen to the theory
that how we get to be alone
is how we work to be together, since there are stars
inside your thumb, your breath,
and how you say yes or no is how they shine
or burn out.
