If you hunt explanations for the fantastic with bullets of reason and traps of the possible, you will return from that strange, dark field with a bag full of nothing and mysterious bites that never heal.

My second (and last for awhile) book is now available on Lulu.com

Now, to promote them somehow...

We caught up with [Dave] Matthews just as news hit the Web that former President Jimmy Carter believed racism was the root of some of the negativity directed toward President Obama in recent weeks. The 42-year-old singer-songwriter offered a unique perspective, as a man who split his childhood between the United States and South Africa during apartheid. The following is an edited version of the interview.

CNN: President Carter said he thinks that a lot of the animosity directed toward President Obama is race related.

Dave Matthews: Of course it is! I found there's a fairly blatant racism in America that's already there, and I don't think I noticed it when I lived here as a kid. But when I went back to South Africa, and then it's sort of thrust in your face, and then came back here -- I just see it everywhere. There's a good population of people in this country that are terrified of the president only because he's black, even if they don't say it. And I think a lot of them, behind closed doors, do say it.

Maybe I'm paranoid about it, but I don't think someone who disagreed as strongly as they do with Obama -- if it was Clinton -- would have stood up and screamed at him during his speech. (Shakes his head) I don't think so.

CNN: Everything has gone to such a frenzied pitch.

Matthews: I think a lot of it has to be on the press. We give the podium to a lot of people who shouldn't have the podium. The message that's delivered the loudest and in the most entertaining way is the one that we're going to put on because that's what we want. We want ratings more than we want to deliver information. That's just where the culture's gotten.

There's no way that Walter Cronkite, as a young journalist, no way Ed Murrow would be hired to do news today. Not a chance.

CNN: Because they're too low-key? Because they're not bombastic?

Matthews: Because they're thoughtful, and they're patient, and they're tying to tell you a truly balanced story. They're trying to impart information. I don't think that's the goal [now] because it's not a good business plan. ...

Everyone's outraged all the time. Why are you outraged? There's war -- there's always been war, as long as most of us have been alive. There have always been people being abused, there's always been horrible things in the world. Why are we outraged? We should just be quiet and figure it out, and work it out together. ... There's no solution in Washington as long as people are shouting like that.

A lot of people in the DMB community are making a huge stink about these comments, but I say come on people, he is not off-base. The trouble is people are taking these comments and trying to suggest that what Dave means is that ALL opposition to Obama is race-related, and that's clearly not what he's saying. What's everyone's thoughts on the situation? [Note: I'm leaving this post public, because it should really be a matter of public discourse.]

My book is now available on Lulu.com


OMG.

Aubade On East 12th Street

The skylight silvers
and a faint shudder from the underground
travels up the building’s steel.

Dawn breaks across this wilderness
of roofs with their old wooden storage tanks
and caps of louvered cowlings

moving in the wind. Your back,
raised hip and thigh
well-tooled as a rounded baluster

on a lathe of shadow and light.


- August Kleinzahler





Meditations in a Swine Yard

A god isn’t worth the salt
In our bread if we can’t
Stamp our feet & shake a balled fist
At eaters of the brightest insects

On their first day here.
Sometimes we must tug him out
Into the hog’s bloody mud.
His beauty is our blue

Derision, like a child banging
Her rag doll against the floor,
Calling for Daddy. A god isn’t worth
A drop of water in the hell of his good

Imagination, if we can’t curse
Sunsets & threaten to forsake him
In his storehouse of belladonna,
Tiger hornets, & snakebites.


- Yusef Komunyakaa




Manhattan Island Poem

Thin river woman with a concrete star
wedged in her ear. I wrap
a blue scarf of old movies around my eyes.
At night I am a jar of fireflies dying.

- Gregory Orr

Source: Moments In Erasure

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