Congratulations, America! You've just given even more power to rich, overfed, fundamentalist white people! Now, do you really think things will get better for you if you're poor, minority or open-minded?

This isn't exactly the final edition of this, but it'll slow down now that I'm not teaching full time*:

More true than he knows:

"The people that usually are convicted are the murders and rappers."

Birds/bees, etc.:

"The hardest part about following that stamen is hearing the cries of the families that have last a member due to murder. "

The wages of ( Read more... )

1.

She is not the sort of woman for whom one buys flowers;

she is the sort for whom one builds gardens.

The pout, pursed into bow, the serpentine

arms, the hands poised as if

in the middle of a thought. Through almost thought

those hands make the table they lay on. The vase,

the spoon.

2.

A curl of fennel glides to those lips: commas ( Read more... )

Apocalypsis

Shots of angry Dawn®

reach my lips, snaps of peach

and a bit o' vermin-tail. The women

gargoyle about the buff blinds, chains

of barbed-wire tinkle from their bras.

It's love, the same

harsh distance as igneous

shards, rock love--

the land it's spewed up on. In my dream

of the apocalypse, this molten stream

of steel breathes a ( Read more... )

So I'm parking this here for now.

From the Cataclysm,

a girl named Pepper

emerges: a sausage from a cluster

of fey-grey petals. Drone-

bodied and doily-tatted,

( Read more... )

Headline: Goldman Sachs gets record $500 million fine. Passes hat in office, pays it off.

Meanwhile, Fabrice Torre gets Scootered; the truly responsible skate. As NPR reported this morning, no management changes are expected at Goldman, even after they admitted fraud. In other words, the world is still safe for the rich and privileged.

( Read more... )

The common wisdom, probably due to comments Ronald Reagan made in the 1980s about “welfare queens” (and incessantly repeated by Rush Limbaugh), is that the poor have a “sense of entitlement” to their welfare benefits and that the public dole has become a “lifestyle” for the poor. The theory goes further, stating that this results in a large number ( Read more... )

What would the world be like if rich people stopped always wanting more?

My beloved NPR has done it again, this time failing to call petroleum-industry spokespeople and analysts on so-called "rig migration." The first I heard of this mysterious behavior was on last week's Morning Edition when a petro-analyst claimed that the danger in the current moratorium on offshore drilling is that oil rigs will "migrate" from the ( Read more... )

The impetus for this analysis is a seemingly sloppy piece of reporting by NPR's Chana Joffe-Walt that appeared on the June 17 2010 episode of All Things Considered. The story, titled “Avoiding Government Oversight” (which reads like a how-to, and which it could, in fact, be), was apparently trying to explain how government regulators get “captured ( Read more... )