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Selected Poems
Because our sons adore their plastic missile launchers, / cybertronic space bazookas, neutron death-ray guns, / a decade down the pike it won’t prove difficult / to trick them out in combat boots / & camouflage fatigues
— from “Memorial Day”
January 2006Why I Am Not President
On January 19, 2004, the day of the Iowa caucus, I decided to run for president. Perhaps, in my tiny way, I reasoned, I can prevent America from becoming a Jesus-flavored neofascist empire. So I announced to the world (or, at least, to the portion of it that is on my e-mail address list) my candidacy for the Republican nomination. My campaign had begun.
January 2006
Thieves In High Places
Jim Hightower On Taking America Back From The Plutocrats
I think that there is a small-d democratic spirit in people that rebels against plutocracy, or rule by the rich, which is what we had from the robber-baron era to the 1920s and what the New Deal was designed to eliminate. Now here we are again with this increasing concentration of wealth. It’s not that people resent wealth; they resent greed.
November 2005
Remote As The Moon
I was fucking a near stranger in northeast Chicago when my mother died. His name was Jonathan. He was tall, long-limbed with enormous hands and prematurely gray hair, an activist who lectured on “the struggle” so genuinely I almost believed him: that we would win this, whoever “we” were, whatever it was.
August 2005August 2005
After 9/11, I promised to stop demonizing our leaders. That’s what al-Qaeda does, and it’s just a matter of degree.
August 2005Sunbeams
June 2005I have the world’s largest collection of seashells. I keep it on all the beaches of the world. Perhaps you’ve seen it.
Driven By Desire
The first sharp pang of desire hit me in the parking lot of my daughter’s preschool. It was a cold winter day in North Carolina, and as I buckled my seat belt, another mother maneuvered her gleaming new Volvo station wagon into the space beside my 1992 Honda Civic. She smiled and gestured for me to roll down my window so we could talk.
June 2005
Crimes Against Democracy
Thom Hartmann On Voting Fraud And The Right-Wing Attack On The Middle Class
The unfortunate reality is that about 80 percent of the vote was either taken on or counted by computers that are programmed by private corporations, and these corporations say we have no business asking how they program their computers. These voting machines leave no paper trail. There’s no way to audit them. There’s no proof that if you push button A, the machine records A rather than B.
June 2005
Possessions
Walking around the block after sunset in pj’s and bathrobe, hoarding corks in a million-dollar house, trading wedding crystal for a minitoilet
June 2005
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