Echelon your dreams and they'll come true


Milana Braslavsky, The Couple, 2006

A Tortured Critique
-- by klipschutz

Floggers flog
As bloggers blog
far from the scene of the crime

The questions come
The answers go
Spit it out with a wince, I’ll make it rhyme

Water, even water, glorious alive moon-powered water
which I feasted my bad eyes on, on and on
not three weeks ago on English Bay

is an arrow in the quiver of the "truth"
(but see Johnny Cash; but see Colbert)

Hard times for heroes, hard times
for Burmese monks, for Pakistani lawyers

Silence in the court of insta-polls!
Judge Judy and Executioner (I stole that line)

Even Superman was Humpty Dumpty broken
by the misinterpretation of a horse

And cautionary tales fall on deaf ears
borrowed from a Carolyn Forché poem.


My Life in Robes
-- by Leonard Cohen

After a while
You can't tell
If it's missing
A woman
Or needing
A cigarette
And later on
If it's night
Or day
Then suddenly
You know
The time
You get dressed
You go home
You light up
You get married


Always on the Train
-- by Ruth Stone

Writing poems about writing poems
is like rolling bales of hay in Texas.
Nothing but the horizon to stop you.

But consider the railroad's edge of metal trash;
bird perches, miles of telephone wires.
What is so innocent as grazing cattle?
If you think about it, it turns into words.

Trash is so cheerful; flying up
like grasshoppers in front of the reaper.
The dust devil whirls it aloft; bronze candy wrappers,
squares of clear plastic--windows on a house of air.

Below the weedy edge in last year's mat,
red and silver beer cans.
In bits blown equally everywhere,
the gaiety of flying paper
and the black high flung patterns of flocking birds.