it's the simple stuff I need


Sheep Jones, Yard Birds, 2006

Untitled
-- by e.e. cummings

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.


Mirror
-- by Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful---
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.


F15
-- by Carol Mirakove

flash card. fever down.
"arépa!" as an expletive--translation=pancake. flip flop
happy feet: corn is what we've got & worth it.
scholars, watchdogs, tactics, public. thanks to you,
CHARLES LEWIS. how long before my membership to anti-
slavery international tags me as an accessory to a terrorist
organization? naming corporations who use bonded labor
to suck oil is, as they say, unpatriotic. read between the
pipelines.

if you're free & in. if you're running late. if you're burning
a mix. if you're better & better. love. love. wondering.
warmth.

the gift of an eye for horror. have tape, will capture.
sweetest v-day of the freedom freaks. we shall overthrow.
frozen toes or no.

4 million in the streets & all mobile, save NYC. saying no
to war were college students, middle-aged couples,
families, veterans of the 60s civil rights movement,
Average White Guys for Peace, laborers,
environmentalists, Christians, businessfolk, and elderly
ladies wearing pink kerchiefs who, after 80 years of
globalization, just--can't--take it anymore!
rage & helplessness abound in the barricades, controlled,
inward, still denied assembly, right to sidewalks kicked to
the curb. beating the penned-in kneeling puppets,
chickens watch. standoff in SoHo rings DROP BUSH, NOT
BOMBS!

their F-15 = detect / acquire / track / attack. the single-
seat, low-drag, superior-weapon, Eagle air.
mythological in stature: war reasons & their means.
actual in cost: $2,000 per family, here; entire families,
there.