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Showing posts with label junkies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label junkies. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Return of the Sacrificial King [Today's News Poem, August 24, 2010]

Return of the Sacrificial King [Today's News Poem, August 24, 2010]
For C.B.

A prophet had visions—I read it in story.
The crust was inverted; its guts rose to surface.
A mask of its final repose was the glory
Of termites; siafu: the mandible creatures.

He lived in a room in a flat that was tilted.
And witnessed the omens that nature transmitted:
The rotting of cars and the gardens that wilted.
The rust of the canisters mixed with their contents

To sprout—between junk heaps—a blackberry angle.
It bundled the weeds and the splinters, transmuting
Exposure to toxins, that spilled on the tangles,
To venom by berry—for givers of poison.

He listened to cooing one evening; a growling,
A gnawing—it sounded like mating or murder.
He opened his door and he followed the howling
From kitchen to staircase. A junkie was laughing.

“They're licking my foot in a gesture of friendship,”
Raccoons were both ripping his toes from their knuckles.
The moon served as witness: the essence was worship
That fell through the cracks to the vines down below them.

While starlight possessed him, he called to the cosmos:
“Where will we live when the world is a graveyard?
And where will be bury our dead when the magma
Surfaces, coating the planet with buildings?”


“A new study finds oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico from a ruptured BP well degraded at a rate that was "much faster than anticipated" thanks to the interaction of microbes with the oil particles. ”
– Vivian Kuo, CNN,August 24, 2010 5:51 p.m. EDT
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/08/24/gulf.oil.study/

“For more than nine days, for more than 60 miles, thousands of Beijing-bound vehicles have come to a virtual standstill on a stretch of highway called the 110 (honest!) that runs from Inner Mongolia southeast to the nation's capital.”
– Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times, August 25, 2010 Edition
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-china-traffic-20100825,0,3689656.story


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Monday, June 14, 2010

From Spice to Stone [Today's News Poem (Sonnet), June 14, 2010]

From Spice to Stone [Today's News Poem (Sonnet), June 14, 2010]

The spice is heated first no matter how
It's taken: needles, clean in leather bags;
Or smoke that flees the room and winds through boughs
Of deodar and rides a breeze—and drags
The user near the helicopter blades
That carry ammunition home to bone
And brick. The soldiers—far from home, on raids
To burn the crop—have found a trove in stone:
Beneath the deodars and graves of moss;
Below the gust of chopper blades in flight;
Beside the fields of poppies; where a loss
Can dissipate inside the wind at night:
A mechanism eats the roots in soil,
And poisons what is left, to rake the spoils.

“The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.”
– James Risen, June 13, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.html?ref=business

“As such, Klare is not hopeful about Afghanistan’s future, believing it will inevitably come to resemble Nigeria—with a veneer of democracy, constant violence, and most people remaining mired in poverty.”
– Haley Cohen, Vanity Fair, June 14, 2010
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010/06/the-resource-curse-why-lithium-may-spell-misery-for-afghanistan.html

“Mr Galbraith, who was removed from his job after being outspoken over last year’s disputed Afghan presidential election, on Tuesday hinted that Mr Karzai was not only corrupt, but also a drug addict. “Some of the palace insiders say [Karzai] has a certain fondness for some of Afghanistan’s most profitable exports,” Mr Galbraith told MSNBC.”
– Edward Luce and Daniel Dombey, The Financial Times, April 7 2010 00:21 GMT
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/eb5a9ed6-41d1-11df-865a-00144feabdc0.html

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