My party piece:
I strike, then from the moment when the matchstick
conjures up its light,to when the brightness moves
beyond its means, and dies, I say the story
of my life -

dates and places, torches I carried,
a cast of names and faces, those
who showed me love, or came close,
the changes I made, the lessons I learnt -

then somehow still find time to stall and blush
before I'm bitten by the flame, and burnt.

A warning, though, to anyone nursing
an ounce of sadness, anyone alone;
don't try this on your own; it's dangerous,
madness.

Make over the alleys and gardens to birdsong,
The hour of not-for-an-hour. Lie still.
Leave the socks you forgot on the clothesline.
Leave slugs to make free with the pansies.
The jets will give Gatwick a miss
And from here you could feel the springs
Wake by the doorstep and under the precinct
Where now there is nobody frozenly waiting.
This is free time, in the sense that a handbill
Goes cartwheeling over the crossroads
Past stoplights rehearsing in private
And has neither witness nor outcome.
This is before the first bus has been late
Or the knickers sought under the bed
Or the first cigarette undertaken,
Before the first flush and cross word.
Viaducts, tunnels and motorways: still.
The mines and the Japanese sunrise: still.
The high bridges lean out in the wind
On the curve of their pinkening lights,
And the coast is inert as a model.
The wavebands are empty, the mail unimagined
And bacon still wrapped in the freezer
Like evidence aimed to intrigue our successors.
The island is dreamless, its slack-jawed insomniacs
Stunned by the final long shot of the movie,
Its murderers innocent, elsewhere.
The policemen have slipped from their helmets
And money forgets how to count.
In the bowels of Wapping the telephones
Shamelessly rest in their cradles.
The bomb in the conference centre's
A harmless confection of elements
Strapped to a duct like an art installation.
The Premiere sleeps in her fashion,
Her Majesty, all the princesses, tucked up
With the Bishops, the glueys, the DHSS,
In the People's Republic of Zeds.
And you sleep at my shoulder, the cat at your feet,
And deserve to be spared the irruption
Of if, but and ought, which is why
I declare this an hour of general safety
When even the personal monster -
Example, the Kraken - is dead to the world
Like the deaf submarines with their crewmen
Spark out at their fathomless consoles.
No one has died. There need be no regret,
For we do not exist, and I promise
I shall not wake anyone yet.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Synopsis: (from www.bn.com)

Levitt (economics, U. of Chicago) and writing collaborator Dubner (a writer for the New York Times and The New Yorker) dub the material in this work "freakonomics" because Levitt uses analytical tools from economics to address a range of questions that, at first glance, might seem to be far removed from the discipline of the "dismal science." They consider questions such as how to determine if teachers are aiding in students' cheating on standardized tests, the impact of information asymmetry on the operation of the Ku Klux Klan, how the organizational structure of crack gangs resemble other businesses, and the influence of parents on child development.

My take:

I'd had this book on my "shelf" for several years and now that the new "SuperFreakonomics" just came out, I thought I'd better get to it.  As with Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, which I'd recently read and reviewed, I question the science employed here, but found the theories and anecdotal evidence interesting, if not compelling.

Apparently, this book stirred up quite a frenzy when it came out because of it's controversial stance that the decline in crime in the 90's is directly correlated to the passage of Roe v. Wade and the legality of abortion.  Essentially, the author proposes that the majority of abortions of unwanted pregnancies in the 70's eliminated individuals that would later grow up to commit violent crimes.

The author also prides himself on the fact that the book has no overarching theme other than the fact that he uses raw numbers to prove his theories.  It reminded me a lot of the saying:  "Lies, damned lies, and statistics".  Still, I was entertained throughout the book; not sure I'll pick up the sequel, though.

When I was young and bold and strong,
Oh, right was right, and wrong was wrong!
My plume on high, my flag unfurled,
I rode away to right the world.
"Come out, you dogs, and fight!" said I,
And wept there was but once to die.

But I am old; and good and bad
Are woven in a crazy plaid.
I sit and say, "The world is so;
And he is wise who lets it go.
A battle lost, a battle won-
The difference is small, my son."

Inertia rides and riddles me;
The which is called Philosophy.

- Dorothy Parker

http://www.cartoonlabs.com/comics/index.php?date=2009-11-28&show=sinfest

Sinfest
Tatsuya Ishida

Would you be interested in dancing with me?
And maybe tell me all your dreams
Talk to me like you would in your sleep
Don't censor anything
Cause i wanna hear everything
There's no innocence left to spoil
You can swear she's not a little boy

We'll fly tonight so far away
Where they will never find us
Use your wings and i will run fast
Cause that's what i do when i'm not afraid
We have it made up in our heads
We don't have to wait for anyone or anything
Go anywhere we desire

So close your eyes become blind
From the world listen instead to the girl
She'll tell you why she chose to fly
And you're left behind
Just like me alone and free

We can smile when we've filled the void
And treated the burn
But until then i believe
We're gonna have to learn
To discard any disguise we're using
Yes it's hard and it's never amusing

Virginitiphobia
— The fear of rape.

by Patrick Ryan Frank

They took her out to the field in a new black truck
that smelled like apples and the denim

of a young man's thigh. They turned the engine off
but left the radio on, the headlights lighting

the woods to the west, toward the mountains, then
to California. They laid her down

and tied her hands over her head with field-grass.
She could have pulled them free, no problem,

ripped the roots right out of that soft dark dirt.
They told her she was beautiful.

( + )( + )

Hello,

Could anyone point me to some poems they enjoy that center around the theme of, or mention, monsters? Thank you.

Hello,

Could anyone point me to some poems they enjoy that center around the theme of, or mention, monsters? Thank you.

The first sorrow of autumn
Is the slow goodbye
Of the garden who stands so long in the evening-
A brown poppy head,
The stalk of a lily,
And still cannot go.

The second sorrow
Is the empty feet
Of a pheasant who hangs from a hook with his brothers.
The woodland of gold
Is folded in feathers
With its head in a bag.

And the third sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the sun who has gathered the birds and who gathers
The minutes of evening,
The golden and holy
Ground of the picture.

The fourth sorrow
Is the pond gone black
Ruined and sunken the city of water-
The beetle's palace,
The catacombs
Of the dragonfly.

And the fifth sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the woodland that quietly breaks up its camp.
One day it's gone.
It has only left litter-
Firewood, tentpoles.

And the sixth sorrow
Is the fox's sorrow
The joy of the huntsman, the joy of the hounds,
The hooves that pound
Till earth closes her ear
To the fox's prayer.

And the seventh sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the face with its wrinkles that looks through the window
As the year packs up
Like a tatty fairground
That came for the children.

Always I have been afraid
of this moment:
of the return to love
with perspective.

I see these breasts
with the others.
I touch this mouth
and the others.
I command this heart
as the others.
I know exactly
what to say.

Innocence has gone
out of me.
The song.
The song, suddenly,
has gone out
of me.

- from Monolithos: poems, 1962 and 1982

Small fact and fingers and farthest one from me,
a hand’s width and two generations away,
in this still present I am fifty-three.
You are not yet a full day.

When I am sixty-three, when you are ten,
and you are neither closer nor as far,
your arms will fill with what you know by then,
the arithmetic and love we do and are.

When I by blood and luck am eighty-six
and you are someplace else and thirty-three
believing in sex and God and politics
with children who look not at all like me,

sometime I know you will have read them this
so they will know I love them and say so
and love their mother. Child, whatever is
is always or never was. Long ago

a day I watched awhile beside your bed,
I wrote this down, a thing that might be kept
awhile, to tell you what I would have said
when you were who knows what and I was dead
which is I stood and loved you while you slept.

the second printing of the pfsc book arrives next week, you'll need to order it soon if you want it for christmastimes

santana v. - totensamba

ANIMALS

The phone call, from
my wife. She’s hungry,
she’s pregnant, someone
kicked her in the stomach—

we have to. I said yes,
but the reply I kept
to myself was We don’t
have to do a goddamn

thing. A dog. I’m talking
about a dog I would have
otherwise left to starve.
Now though, five years

since, I love this animal
more than I can most
people. And the boy,
six years old, who named

a dog and five cats after
our Lucy, the rescue?
The boy, my brother,
born in Henry Ford’s

hometown, lives now
in Lebanon, which
the Greeks called Phoenicia,
and they tried but failed

to subdue it, same as
the Egyptians, the Hittites,
Assyrians, Babylonians,
Alexander the Great,

Romans, Arabs, Crusaders,
Turks, the British, the French,
the Israelis. There, my father
built a house with money

earned in Detroit--as
a grocer, with social
security. Also there,
the first alphabet was

created, the first law
school built, the first
miracle of Jesus--
water, wine.

•

On the first day
the bombs fall they flee,
and the boy asks
to go back for Lucy,

the dog. As for the cats,
No. They take care of
themselves. One week
into it, he wonders

who feeds them, who fills
the water bowls. Maybe
the neighbors, the mother
thinks out loud. The father

is indignant--What
neighbors? The mother is
stunned--What do you
mean, what? After a month,

everyone forgets or just
stops talking about
the animals. Here, on
the other side, we can’t

help but shake our
heads so to say, Don’t
think about them.
During the ceasefire

my father drives south,
a thirty-minute trip
that lasts six hours--
wreckage upon

wreckage piled on
the roads, on what is
left of the roads.
The landscape entirely

gray, so catastrophic
he asks a passer-by
how far to his town
and is told You’re in it.

•

They found three of
the cats, all perforated,
one headless. The dog
was near the carport,

where it hid during
lightning storms, its torso
splayed in half, like
meat on a slab; its entrails

eaten by other dogs
scavenging on the streets.
Look. They’re animals.
Which is to say,

there are also people.
And I haven’t even
begun telling you
what was done to them.

i think i need the sea.

And now I have another lad!
No longer need you tell
How all my nights are slow and sad
For loving you too well.

His ways are not your wicked ways,
He's not the like of you.
He treads his path of reckoned days,
A sober man, and true.

They'll never see him in the town,
Another on his knee.
He'd cut his laden orchards down,
If that would pleasure me.

He'd give his blood to paint my lips
If I should wish them red.
He prays to touch my finger-tips
Or stroke my prideful head.

He never weaves a glinting lie,
Or brags the hearts he'll keep.
I have forgotten how to sigh-
Remembered how to sleep.

He's none to kiss away my mind-
A slower way is his.
Oh, Lord! On reading this, I find
A silly lot he is.

- Dorothy Parker

I regret the moment we met
and the way you pretended.
I regret the sun that day,
its warmth so artificial,
and I regret the way pain
has taught me nothing.

http://www.cartoonlabs.com/comics/index.php?date=2009-11-27&show=sinfest

Sinfest
Tatsuya Ishida