Rain the timbers sideways, raise the tarp
And slide if you dare through a hurricane.
Jets are steaming drinks of sky for you:
A latte of contrail and shivering.
Who recalls the first of many lights?
The last is the one we remember.
"The weather looks like shit in my neighborhood, but no snow yet."
-Khakjaan Wessington
Source: Khakjaan Wessington's window
Time Machine [Today's News Poem, February 22, 2011]
Los Angeles twists on Sierra—
A snow-melt from faucet to desert—
And gargles the fossils with toothpaste.
The mountain is boundary, sentry;
And distance is measured in pipelines
We lay like a path to the future.
The future is now and it orbits
A tribe in Brazil in an airplane
And photographs warriors fleeing.
The past is around us, it threatens
The girder with rust and the freeway
With sinkholes; turns water to sewage.
Machines are the network: they've processed
The distance with diesel, computed
The time with those nerves of connection,
And mingled—yet mingle the present
With infinite loops where the t-shirts
And bottles go drift in the ocean
That links all with shorelines and current
And plastic and ink made of pixels
With past to the future, with present.
"Four Americans taken hostage after their yacht was hijacked by Somali pirates off the Horn of Africa last week were killed early Tuesday when gunfire erupted during attempts by the United States Navy to negotiate with their captors, American military officials said. American officials had opened a channel of communication between the pirates’ financier as well as elders from their village to help negotiate the hostages’ release."
—J. DAVID GOODMAN. The New York Times, Published: February 22, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/world/africa/23pirates.html
End of the Cargo Cult [Today's News Poem, July 5, 2010]
The cargo is flying away and we're gathered
To witness the finish of what we found sacred.
Our engines are thirsty and whine as we clamor
Around the last tanker that wasn't quite emptied.
A silvery age is departing; propelling
An angel of turbine away on an airstream.
The scientists sit on the plane drinking coffee;
Their families gaze at the smoke from the ruins
Of home—once a city, now cluttered with refuse.
From dollars to gold; and now batteries purchase
A barrel of fuel—which I load in my pickup.
I'm waiting for things to return back to normal;
For people to smile and make plans for the future
And stop with the grasping; the tricks and the thieving.
I'm waiting for hope while he's waiting for nothing.
He's grabbing my drum and it's spilling the fluid
That everyone wants and it turns into vapor
And flies off to heaven to join all the cargo
That's never returning. Another is screaming
'It's over' and rushes the crowd that encircles
My gasoline, rolling my drum. And the liquid
Of power is spilling all over. A lighter...
“Protests against a recent increase in fuel prices shut down markets, schools, airports and businesses across India on Monday, and thousands of people were arrested as violence flared in some cities... About 1,000 people gathered at Chandni Chowk, Old Delhi’s main commercial hub, to protest the price increases and listen to speeches by opposition politicians.”
– Heather Timmons and Hari Kumar, July 5, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/business/global/06rupee.html?hpw
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