Boris Yeltsin in his underwear on Pennsylvania Ave.
Do you need another reason alcohol is bad


Cara Ober, 2008

Bi-Partisanship
-- by Klipschutz

To my friends across the aisle who lost the Oval Office, the Senate and the House, but aggressively persist in the charade that they represent the true will of the People;

To those most visible representatives of our elected government, who were elected to do jobs, but choose to vilify instead the very processes of governance itself, and to botch its execution, then demonize the duties they have failed to carry out, via seventh grade debate club tutor’s tricks: capitalization (Government), just add Godzilla (Big Government);

To the Next World Understanders prescribing piety, hectoring humility, who reserve the right to dine out on our weakness, reserving for themselves the privilege to deem sanctified any low, foul, greedy, super-freaky, cop-a-plea-inducing, vow-ignoring, weasel-slandering, sub-moral, goalpost-moving, trans-legal, sewer-filthy deed they do;

To all you True Believers in the Wisdom of the Market, who invoke Main Street when pressed, with little catches in your voices full of milkman memories, apple pies on window sills, and young couples in front parlors pitching woo, all in all a wilted nosegay of nostalgia mixed with dudgeon cribbed from The Handbook of Rhetorical Device —cut to Sinclair Lewis, pecking out a blunt retort one key-stab at a time on a Remington in his forgotten grave;

To that backwater fantasia of aphasia, the Petting Zoo of Contemporary Verse;

To Deniers who go moist daydreaming how to make the Holocaust come true;

Fuck You You Nickel Bag of Wind Fuck You You Fucking Pebble In My Shoe. . .


Response
-- by Bob Kaufman

for Eileen

Sleep, little one, sleep for me,
Sleep the deep sleep of love.
You are loved, awake or dreaming,
You are loved.

Dancing winds will sing for you,
Ancient gods will pray for you,
A poor lost poet will love you,
As stars appear
In the dark
Skies.


The Long Dream of Falling
-- by John Haag

Half my life ago I read
on the back page of the daily paper
of a boy-child in his eighth year who,
in his father's garage, hung himself
rather than suffer parental
revulsion engendered by
the great, flaming D
D for deficient
D for defeat
D for die
on his report card.

Bad news rains leapers from parapets
and everywhere unrequited lovers,
the irreparably damaged and
the merely gutless spin
the turnstiles to surcease.

So why does this kid
still wake me in the middle of the night?