Definition #2
A cynic
is an idealist
who’s seen too much.
February 2008
New Historians
New Historians
pore through the past
writing check lists
for the present
and a wish list
for the future.
This is not history.
This is the only history
worth extending.
This Week in the News, April 7-13, 2007
A corpse in a cowboy hat spews bile at the mic.
This time, he says he’s an idiot.
A drove of men crowd around a bombed car in Karballa.
All look excited. None sad.
14 take pictures with their cell phones. The rest want a camera.
What does the Titanic have to do with Jesus?
You’re a screen upon which all […]
The Back 40, Martin’s House, 1968
When you ask me
where the boy went
I listen
with the ears he left me.
He’s not here
in the sounds we each inherit
or the dinner down the hall
that sniffs around our room.
I have to catch him
past you
through the paler square of paint
through the nail hole
that bore
a former tenant’s portrait.
He’s alone there
still
beneath the slant-roofed ceiling
peeling slivers of old […]
Cross Talk
Cross Talk
Left hanging
will be a saying
in the destined nation
a millennia or two since my aching feet
and palms are ripped from this rare piece of reused tree.
I thirst
for better revelations
than bumper stickers promising
to free machines from their manifest sins. Sorry
friends. No rapture will come to your four-horsemen town.
I am that I am
a haggard rabbi with no […]
