In the Hall of the Mountain of the Financial Aid Officer [Today's News Poem, February 16, 2011]

In the Hall of the Mountain of the Financial Aid Officer [Today's News Poem, February 16, 2011]

The yuppie code expels its vitriol,
Coffee breath and twinkled euphemism;
And searches for the worthiest to share
Pity, grant conditions, tsk-tsk sneering.
Obliged and bored but not yet jaded; pleas,
Thanks conform to all the forms of office—
Where clicks from a computer swallow grain,
Bankrupt revolutions, drill and drill and
If you can hope they'll ever feel ashamed
Then you fool, you'll shred the application.

"Are you better off than your parents? Probably not if you're in the middle class."
—Annalyn Censky, CNN, February 16, 2011: 4:30 PM ET
http://money.cnn.com/2011/02/16/news/economy/middle_class/



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We Just Want To Be Free [Today's News Poem, February 15, 2011]

We Just Want To Be Free [Today's News Poem, February 15, 2011]

Dinner has vanquished the evening,
All the dishes oppress the night,
The fridge is the banquet, banker;
Sleep is betrayal—effortless
Allocation—hours to night.
The traffic nibbles the edges:
Days in boxes and yearning for
Revolt as our life disappears.

"Protesters chanted: “We’re not Sunni. We’re not Shiite. We just want to be free.”"
—MICHAEL SLACKMAN and J. DAVID GOODMAN, The New York Times, Published: February 15, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/world/middleeast/16bahrain.html

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Webbing to Bind Them [Today's News Poem, February 14, 2011]

Webbing to Bind Them [Today's News Poem, February 14, 2011]

The fly or the spider, which represents us
In webs of our days? Or maybe the webbing

As symbol is better; anchored to branches
And tied to the doorways, gathering captures:

Dust in our weaving, flies that the spider
Juiced and the shells remain warnings ignored.

Strands represent connections of tendrils,
Mortar; the living tree and the timber.

The fly has sheer numbers, speed and its diet
Of feces, while spiders feed on the living;

And both of them feed on byproducts, tissue:
In use or else past it. Predator preying,

Preyed in its turn; a spider to capture
A fly, and a bird for spiders, a feline

To capture the bird and webbing to bind them.

"Young Egyptian and Tunisian activists brainstormed on the use of technology to evade surveillance, commiserated about torture and traded practical tips on how to stand up to rubber bullets and organize barricades. They fused their secular expertise in social networks with a discipline culled from religious movements and combined the energy of soccer fans with the sophistication of surgeons. Breaking free from older veterans of the Arab political opposition, they relied on tactics of nonviolent resistance channeled from an American scholar through a Serbian youth brigade — but also on marketing tactics borrowed from Silicon Valley. "
—DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and DAVID E. SANGER, The New York Times, Published: February 13, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/world/middleeast/14egypt-tunisia-protests.html

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Anonymous is Legion [Today's News Poem, February 13, 2011]

Anonymous is Legion [Today's News Poem, February 13, 2011]

How did things get so anonymous?
How did the face disappear in crowds?
Lost to the fashion bazaar, to the smoke
Sputtering out of the cigarette

Butts, from the asses of motorcars;
Gasses that seep from the sewer grill
Blessed with the fragrance of piggies on fire:
Embryos far from the factory.

How did we get so anonymous?
Hundreds of armpits in silent trains,
Thousands of anuses walking the street,
Millions of tears, condominiums

Stacked with the snot of the desperate
Snoozing alarms to deflect the days:
Someone must benefit, someone must own,
Know, understand this impersonal cloud.

"Tracing the money is likely to be difficult because business in Egypt was largely conducted in secret among a small group connected to Mr. Mubarak... Estimates of the Mubaraks’ fortune vary wildly, including a widespread rumor that they are worth as much as $70 billion. United States officials say that figure is vastly exaggerated and put the family’s wealth at $2 billion to $3 billion."
—NEIL MacFARQUHAR, DAVID ROHDE and ARAM ROSTON, The New York Times, Published: February 12, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/world/middleeast/13wealth.html

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Violent Regenerations [Today's News Poem, February 12, 2011]

Violent Regenerations [Today's News Poem, February 12, 2011]

Did technology save him in winter?
Did the towers transmit his location?
He fell in the snow, made an angel
That froze as impression—a hollow,
Haunting the calendar: Boogeyman Off-Road,
Futile The Frozen, Gentle And Buried now.
Granite for tooth rings will make a strong toddler,
Razors in oatmeal and napalm for ointments
Will cull the unworthy and only the strongest
Will breathe on the trees to ignite them,
Will focus the sun with a lens made of air:
Revenge against seasons, our mother, our earth.

"In a 2007 study of 141 adolescents, published in the journal Development and Psychopathology, 85 percent reported that they’d been slapped or spanked."
—KATHERINE ELLISON, The New York Times, Published: February 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/opinion/12ellison.html

"It was a story that touched everyday Americans and prompted the biggest search-and-rescue mission in Oregon's history: The disappearance of the Kim family. The Kims went missing on Thanksgiving 2006. Husband James, wife Kati and their two young daughters, Sabine and Penelope, had been on a road trip when a wrong turn left them desperately lost in the Oregon wilderness. "
—ALAN B. GOLDBERG and JAY SCHADLER, ABC News, Feb. 11, 2011
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/kati-kim-tells-heart-wrenching-story-family-ended/story?id=12884927

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Excerpts From the Combatwords Arena 2/11/2011, 11:25pm PST

Combatwords (http://combatwords.blogspot.com/2011/02/combatwords-february-11-2011-sales.html) started 2/11/2011, 2pm PST. Here's the game so far:

Steven M Grant (February 11, 2011 4:27 PM PST) Dear Object of My Desire,:
"I called her cold
and she responded by
adjusting her caller ID."

Seann McCollum (February 11, 2011 9:20 PM PST) Fiji Mermaid:
"“You’d be so easy to love,” she warbles, but the fact remains
she’s awfully difficult to buy for."

HikiMadwoman (February 11, 2011 10:53 PM PST) committed:
"mom has her knives out
she's grinding them down
their edges stochastic infinities
and her eyes smell like rust
her breath full of religion
from a greased green bottle"

If you think you can write better, prove it. Go to http://combatwords.blogspot.com/2011/02/combatwords-february-11-2011-sales.html and bring your ink!

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Vise Sales, Vice Sails [CombatWords Poem, February 11, 2011]

Vise Sales, Vice Sails [CombatWords Poem, February 11, 2011]
From http://combatwords.blogspot.com/2011/02/combatwords-february-11-2011-sales.html

The purchase one dare not speak or name
Has purchased the fullest claim,
All secrets, its blame.

Gilded pussy-pounce:
Cats devour the sea by ounce;
Rubs the pole in buxom dollar bounce.

Speak me so horny, yowl in the heat;
Star in a movie conceit:
Plasma from starbeats.

One's pulse is divided
By molecules blood provided
And needles injected. Sharps. Junk-sided

Sails through the veins to pleasure, pain.
Sales through the brain to leisure, strain.
Sail all our sales; our treasure's slain.

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Savage Disobedience [Combatwords Poem, from February 4, 2011]. Also, Combatwords JUST started.

Savage Disobedience [Combatwords Poem, from February 4, 2011]
From: http://combatwords.blogspot.com/2011/02/combatwords-february-4-2011-mischief.html
Wanna play? Go here: http://combatwords.blogspot.com/2011/02/combatwords-february-11-2011-sales.html The game is aggressive or tame, depending on the readers and players.

How does it feel to attract the whole mob?
Web intersections by hand and bike rage
Circles around you. They're calling; you come
Reaching for drivers like you—they've had it.
One of them swings at the crowd with truck door.
Missing, he leaps to the street and flings bikes
Out of the way and the crowd's confused. Pride
Strays to an anger—you call out, "hold hands
Break for the light and the traffic shall pass."
Spirits of violence giggle, slap off
Glasses and push you; they're balling threats, fists.
Shouldn't pedestrians trump their bike ride?
Shouldn't a carefully argued speech sway
Cyclists protesting cars... is it you?

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Devolved Phoenix [Today's News Poem, February 11, 2011]

Devolved Phoenix [Today's News Poem, February 11, 2011]

By match or lighter, someone burned alive
To death in a street: one of the many lives
Squirming for rescue, for the end of nerves.

The ears that lean upon the walls have heard,
They've typed up a eulogy, phoneward bound:
Littlest birds that have delivered sound.

Baskets are flowing and the honey blooms
From jar to the tummy. The birdie croons
And twitters nightly, under office moon.

Rumor transforms what was once flame to spark,
And spark to an image; the whispered dark
Above the keyboard, screenshot bird: a lark.

Bird of pain, bird, my brain,
Phoenix lord—Lord, I'm bored—
Embers flick, trick and fade;
Monitors: glitter blades.

"President Hosni Mubarak told the Egyptian people on Thursday that he would delegate authority to Vice President Omar Suleiman but that he would not resign, enraging hundreds of thousands gathered to hail his departure and setting in motion a volatile new stage in the three-week uprising. "
—ANTHONY SHADID and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, The New York Times, Published: February 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/world/middleeast/12egypt.html

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Thoughts on Poetry (Reposted from Twitter)

How to fake a poem: 1) Remove prepositions 2) Adjective as verb or noun 3) Sex that shit up 4) End on a pointless, but sweet image.

Objective signs of shit-ass verse: 1) Tries metrical schema & fails 2) Tries rhyming & fails 3) Symbolism is nonsensical 4) Narrative is nonsensical 5) Removing the linebreaks yields poorly written prose 6) Can be summarized in fewer words than the poem 7) Repetitious symbolism 8) Repetitious vocab 9) Incomplete thoughts 10) Incoherent thoughts

Violence against women is bad:


Violence against jackasses is good:


Hmm, further investigation reveals that this was an idiot-on-idiot crime:


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Mother of Fog of War [Today's News Poem, February 10, 2011]

Mother of Fog of War [Today's News Poem, February 10, 2011]

Bring the majority unit.
Speak, let the gasses cohere
Misting the windows with promise.
Cadres in uniform blow
Fog of all—mother of warfare
Into the room. She invents
Shackles for fingers and eyelids,
Vises for arteries, veins;
Clamps for the lungs and the heartbeat;
Stencils to color the thoughts
Squeezed out of blemishes, pimples.

"Under pressure to make deeper spending cuts and blindsided by embarrassing floor defeats, House Republican leaders are quickly discovering the limits of control over their ideologically driven and independent-minded new majority."
—CARL HULSE, The New York Times, Published: February 9, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/us/politics/10congress.html

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Boardwalk Desire [Today's News Poem, February 9, 2011]

Boardwalk Desire [Today's News Poem, February 9, 2011]

Chase that balloon; chase is our fullness,
Lifting us near red in the blueness.
Buoyant, the winds blow us together;
Higher than gulls, carousels, popcorn.
Neon and waves clash on the beaches;
Thrilled with chase, tugging at people.
Only the chase offers completion.
Boardwalk desire: lap up the candy
Sold by the cone, pink like arousal.
Escalate, cast darts for a trophy,
Aim for the fixed center, for winning
Isn't the goal: chase is our fullness.

"Representative Chris Lee of New York, caught in the midst of a scandal involving a shirtless photo he reportedly e-mailed to a woman, has stepped down, according to a senior Congressional official. "
—RAYMOND HERNANDEZ, The New York Times, February 9, 2011, 6:15 pm
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/09/new-york-congressman-resigns-over-shirtless-photo/

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Media Pie [Today's News Poem, February 8, 2011]

Media Pie [Today's News Poem, February 8, 2011]

Nobody cares for the topic, they care for the tone.
Everything's easy—as tasty as pie—just as healthy.
Sugar and blindness? Not sweets, it's the eye. Blame the eye,
Blame the inadequate tongue, not dessert nor the baker.
Even the arteries carry some blame—they are weak.
Butter's ambitious and no, it's not deadly, the body
Dies and is deadly, but butter's from udders, not Death.
Likewise the heart seems to fail the best pastries and dinners,
Grateful for seizure, and buried—dessert for a shroud.



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Work Ethic (or: 'Be More Like Ariana Huffington') [Today's News Poem, February 7, 2011]

Work Ethic (or: 'Be More Like Ariana Huffington') [Today's News Poem, February 7, 2011]

It's greed that has brought us together.
Greed shall define us.
While ethics and competence matter,
Our greed shall define us.

A gravity draws with charisma,
Repels with a phone-call,
And pulls in its orbit the slowest;
Parries with phone-calls.

A mastermind lacking the genius:
Drawn to the chances
Of winning, then rages at losses
Incurred with the chances.

Mass such as this can even eclipse
Stars at a distance, sun in the day,
Words from our keyboards, breath from our songs,
Plans for our tongues, for decimal sense.

"The Huffington Post soon blossomed into a tribe with a roster of mostly unpaid bloggers that grew from 500 to 9,000 over the course of five years, all creating a site that manufactured much of its own content and liberally borrowed much of the rest. "
—DAVID CARR and JEREMY W. PETERS, The New York Times, Published: February 7, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/business/media/08huffington.html

"After Levin's death in 2004, she called him "the big love of my life... The couple divorced in 1997, and in 1998 Michael Huffington revealed that he was bisexual. he financial terms of their divorce agreement remain undisclosed... Huffington was accused of plagiarism for copying material for her book Maria Callas (1981); the claims were settled out of court in 1981, with Callas biographer Gerald Fitzgerald being paid "in the low five figures."[27][28][29]
Lydia Gasman, an art history professor at the University of Virginia, claimed that Huffington’s 1988 biography of Pablo Picasso, Picasso: Creator and Destroyer, included themes similar to those in her unpublished four-volume Ph.D. thesis. "What she did was steal twenty years of my work," Gasman told Maureen Orth in 1994. Gasman did not file suit.[30]
Maureen Orth also reported that Huffington "borrowed heavily for her 1993 book, The Gods of Greece."[31]"
—Wikipedia, 9:17pm PST, 2/7/2011
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariana_Huffington

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Weekend Warriors Admire Boys of Leisure [Today's News Poem, February 6, 2011]

Weekend Warriors Admire Boys of Leisure [Today's News Poem, February 6, 2011]

Aluminum wreckage, cans at salute—
Miasma of anus, sweat and a cheer—
Defeat chips and plastic, tackle the Sunday.
Go watch, drink and fart as men are supposed to
While watching the boys of the jersey catch footballs:
Your weekend their workday; their workday, your envy.

"In Super Bowl XLV, there will almost certainly come a moment when Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers looks out over the Pittsburgh Steelers defense and is utterly bewildered."
—Mark Sappenfield, / Staff writer / February 5, 2011
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Sports/2011/0205/Super-Bowl-2011-forecast-60-minutes-of-chaos

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Candle in the Attic [Today's News Poem, February 5, 2011]

Candle in the Attic [Today's News Poem, February 5, 2011]

It's too late for us loves.
Yes, our cobwebs are thick,
But the candle has dripped
And it bridged with our net
And the flame has begun
To expand. Here's its slide,
And it opens its jaws.
So our world is inferno
And our clutches consumed.

"An Egyptian plant that carries natural gas to Israel exploded in the northern Sinai desert, the state-run Middle East News Agency reported. It said that “subversive elements” were behind the explosion."
—Nayla Razzouk, Bloomberg, Feb 5, 2011 12:37 AM PT
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-05/egypt-gas-pipeline-feeding-israel-explodes-in-sinai-desert-arabiya-says.html

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Get Your Stalkers, Sluts and Sociopaths in CombatWords, February 4, 2011: Mischief

http://combatwords.blogspot.com/2011/02/combatwords-february-4-2011-mischief.html

Started at 1:53 PM PST, 2/4/2011:

Steven M Grant February 4, 2011 3:12 PM, PST: "The days that followed were so magical and painful for me. Every morning on my way to work I would walk past Pete’s hoping to catch a glimpse of her. “If she sees you just smile at her, don’t be such a pussy” Sometimes I would see her through the window but she was always busy behind the counter. I really started to get a sense of who she was. She was kind of shy like me, not a lot of friends and she rarely went anywhere after work except straight home. I was pretty sure that she really had been flirting with me that Thursday evening because she did not have a boyfriend. She never went out at night and she never got cards or letters from any men."

Roxi Xmas aka Misti Rainwater-Lites, February 4, 2011 7:33 PM, PST:
"I'm all about dick
he spews CUNT
I hiss pusSsSy"

And I wrote something too. See you there: http://combatwords.blogspot.com/2011/02/combatwords-february-4-2011-mischief.html

Vlad, please escort them to the next exhibit:

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Prisoner's Daydream [Today's News Poem, February 4, 2011]

Prisoner's Daydream [Today's News Poem, February 4, 2011]

Longing to rapture; then yearning returns.
Spend all your fancy—the memory calls.
Keyboards are nothing; you've traveled to cliffs,
Hiked with a lover—she's gone to a postcard.

Gone to an envelope, tagged with a stamp,
Send out by thousands your letters of sale.
Bill it... no, still it. The day in the tree—
Pause the machine and imagine the ocean:

Painted with ripples of heat, white and blue;
Mountains as tan as a folder, its gold
Golder than salary, crisp as the sun,
Crisper than dry-cleaning, somewhere outside.

"The labor market has lagged the broader economy, which grew at a 3.2 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke on Thursday acknowledged the pick-up in the recovery, but said "it will be several years before the unemployment rate has returned to a more normal level.""
—Reuters, Fri Feb 4, 2011 12:00am EST
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/04/usa-economy-idUKN036699720110204

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Thespian Killers [Today's News Poem, February 3, 2011]

Thespian Killers [Today's News Poem, February 3, 2011]

Throttle the mic; music will flow.
Out of the shrieks, edited song.
Twenty-two years separate births:
Austrian fry, Illinois spawn;
Actors by trade; thespian lords
Dressed for the stage, camera, film.
Thoughts sound like voice, voice sounds like thought:
Reason your ears, eyes can betray.
Only a suit, tie and a note
Carry the whole drama along.
Stick to the script: shock's for the crowd,
Charge for the mic, lies for us all.

"Ronald Reagan would have turned 100 this Sunday, and nearly seven years after his death, one might think he were still alive and leading the Republican Party. "
—JENNIFER MEDINA, The New York Times, Published: February 2, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/03/us/politics/03reagan.html

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The Perfect Shape [Today's News Poem, February 2, 2011]

The Perfect Shape [Today's News Poem, February 2, 2011]

Nature is crooked; it creases—it's bent.
Lines in the fissures are jagged and steep:
Never sheer, ever flowing;
Even dead things have motion.
Look at your spine, there's a curve near your ribs.
Bones for a corset, a girdle of fat,
Modeled round after solar,
Lunar—whole planets—bodies.

"“The F.D.A. has decided that the most significant threat to public health will not be treated by any drug,” said Morgan Downey, editor of the online Downey Obesity Report, who is a patient advocate and has consulted for drug companies."
—ANDREW POLLACK, The New York Times, Published: February 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/02/business/02drug.html



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Riot Lord [Today's News Poem, February 1, 2011]

Riot Lord [Today's News Poem, February 1, 2011]

God is your keyboard; it answers commands.
God is your monitor, casting Its image.
God is electron—a cellular phone.
God is a wavelength and particle bearing.
God is horizon, regression—a mote.
Morale is the faith in the actions of others.
Morale is the person and grouping at once.
Morale is your voice, so you call to the riot.
Morale is the face you impose on the crowd.
Morale is your God—it obeys your commandments.

"King Abdullah of Jordan Tuesday replaced his prime minister after protests over food prices and poor living conditions, naming a former premier with a military background, Marouf Bakhit, to head the government."
—Reuters, Feb 1, 2011 9:37am EST
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/01/us-jordan-government-idUSTRE7104G620110201

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Calendar Conspiracy [Today's News Poem, January 31, 2011]

Calendar Conspiracy [Today's News Poem, January 31, 2011]

Scar of a pyramid, open your eyelid.
Silt in the river of calendar rhythm;
Tell us the date, flood all our riverbanks.
Lord of the hives, bite with your mandibles—
Rip a new season and stretch out our wounds.
Sand for a path, or a dune in the wastes;
Dune for a joke, monument, prophecy—
Dates by the flood-banks of desolation.

"As tens of thousands of protesters gathered in central Liberation Square to shout for his ouster, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt reshuffled his government on Monday, a gesture that the opposition has already dismissed as inadequate. "
—ANTHONY SHADID, DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK AND KAREEM FAHIM, The New York Times, Published: January 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/world/middleeast/01egypt.html

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Two Diagrams [Today's News Poem, January 30, 2011]

Two Diagrams [Today's News Poem, January 30, 2011]

Are we atoms? A ball in our models—no nuclei, leave out electrons—
Yoked to our fellows in chains that distort our best properties—moles in a tube.
For example, I want to believe we are one, but I fear and divide us:
Whole by the faction and faction; religion, by piety; piety, doubt.
We are balls on the table, we're racked all together and shot by a player
Known by her aim as she shoots us in pockets, depositing each of us down
To unknown—so we cluster together and hope to survive that last eightball.

"But Mr. Suleiman, a former general, is also the establishment’s candidate, not the public’s. His appointment, and his elevation, if it were to occur, would represent not the democratic change called for on the street, but most likely a continuation of the kind of military-backed, authoritarian leadership that Mr. Mubarak has led for nearly 30 years, experts said."
—MICHAEL SLACKMAN, The New York Times, Published: January 29, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/world/middleeast/30suleiman.html

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Recoil From Our Infant [Today's News Poem, January 29, 2011]

Recoil From Our Infant [Today's News Poem, January 29, 2011]

The new biology, aware of its nerves,
Flexes and the organism flicks electrons
Across the oceans, where it currents the fish.
Frying the schools with its uncanny wavelengths,
It travels into the indifferent air.
Floppy; an infant that is testing, tasting
We teeter, topple from the playful attack:
Somehow it's growing and already too much.

"WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says he enjoys making banks squirm thinking they might be the next targets of his website which has published U.S. diplomatic and military secrets.
"I think it's great. We have all these banks squirming, thinking maybe it's them," Assange told the CBS television program "60 Minutes" in an interview."
—Reuters, Fri Jan 28, 2011 7:57pm EST
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/29/idINIndia-54494520110129

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Come, Run-Away From the Sea [Combatwords Poem, January 28, 2011]

Come, Run-Away From the Sea [Combatwords Poem, January 28, 2011]
From http://combatwords.blogspot.com/2011/01/combatwords-january-28-2011-waiting-for.html

Life as we know it is supple and bitter;
Life as we know it is vicious and glitter.
We look for our lovers in movies,
At networked computers as psychics,
Unknowable God in our psyches—
Our secrets are obvious vices.
Flows to the heart, ebbs fall apart—we're reaching.
Blows shall impart hesitant starts—stone to sandy beaching.

--
The battle has just started. Try to defeat this poem here: http://combatwords.blogspot.com/2011/01/combatwords-january-28-2011-waiting-for.html



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Monsieur Mange Tout [Today's News Poem, January 28, 2011]

Monsieur Mange Tout [Today's News Poem, January 28, 2011]

Swallow your phone if you can't bear to fuck it.
Nibble your keyboard; absorb all the letters.
Arsenic scammers and mercury grifters
Took all your hair and diminished your vigor.
Chomp on the light-bulbs and tear up your palette;
Glass and the vacuum reform in your stomach.
Vomit a circuit, yes, vomit your greeting:
Freedom of trinket, of splinters and ulcers.
Eat and become what you eat, you're the patsy:
Junk's your vocation; your outrage, illusion.

"Our technology editor Charles Arthur has the details on the internet restrictions in Egypt. He writes:
Egypt appears to have cut off almost all access to the internet from inside and outside the country from late on Thursday night, in a move that has concerned observers of the protests that have been building in strength through the week."
—The Guardian UK, 28.01.11, Updated 08.52 GMT
http://m.guardian.co.uk/ms/p/gnm/op/sqcsls3cjigDe3RtcOrYA_w/view.m?id=15&gid=news/blog/2011/jan/28/egypt-protests-live-updates&cat=world



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Teeth in the Wind [Today's News Poem, January 27, 2011]

Teeth in the Wind [Today's News Poem, January 27, 2011]

Inside your face a smaller one grins in its chamber of teeth—they are seeds
Of pomegranate red, it is fertile—your mouth is a garden of jaws.
Stamen the wind—you'll bless it with something as small as a sliver of sand.
What swells when there is only the breeze to upset it, what burdens conspire
Windward to sully angiosperms with a blessing of curses and birth?
Don't spill it, you can spread it with smiles in the jaws of your jaws and your breath
Rancid as jasmine; sweet to the brink of the rotten—the breath that you add
To air: if you have prayers, they are psalms of aggression, Persephone, Mars.

"Obama is striking a different strategy than the one deployed by President Bill Clinton after voters gave him a mid-term rebuke in 1994. Clinton got busy slashing spending and it contributed to a decade of historic growth and prosperity. Obama is taking more of a hybrid approach. Tuesday night he promised spending restraint and deficit reduction, and said some very encouraging things about fostering a healthier business climate. At the same time, he is pitching major new spending initiatives and only modest deficit reductions."
—Editorial, The Detroit News, January 27. 2011 1:00AM
http://www.detnews.com/article/20110127/OPINION01/101270343/1008/Editorial—Mixed-signals-in-Obama-speech

"Many of the budget-cutting proposals from Democrats and Republicans focus on a relatively small part of the U.S.'s $3.5 trillion budget: the roughly 15% that accounts for nonsecurity, discretionary spending. But the deficit is being driven by programs that are more politically difficult to cut, such as the Medicare health plan for seniors, military spending and Social Security."
—DAMIAN PALETTA, JANET HOOK And JONATHAN WEISMAN, The Wall Street Journal, JANUARY 27, 2011
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703293204576105902436635610.html

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Rohypnol Fight Club [Today's News Poem, January 26, 2011]

Rohypnol Fight Club [Today's News Poem, January 26, 2011]

How will we war with no shrapnel to season our bloodiest Marys?
Gunpowder lines on the toilet are wimpy and cordite's last season.
Top what preceded this fashion—imbibe all the newest creations:
Salt for your peter, a clot in your arteries—stroke to the finish.
Addle the placid, obstruct what was clear and get higher than sorties
Bombing the stones into dance-floors and guzzle your tankards of tonic.
Roll all those bills to inhale all that fragrance—those fractions of warheads—
Dance to the sound of machine-guns in seizures of puncture and leaking.
Spike in the drink adds the pleasure of virgins and burns like a monarch:
Mickey, a roofie, a body to ravish then ditch in a dumpster.

"“I cannot say it strongly enough: I will not support any measures that stress our forces and jeopardize the lives of our men and women in uniform,” Mr. McKeon said in an opening statement that followed up on a letter to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates urging him not to stop work on the Marines’ $14.4. billion Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, a combined landing craft and tank for amphibious assaults that Mr. Gates canceled this month."
—ELISABETH BUMILLER and THOM SHANKER, The New York Times, January 26, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/us/politics/27pentagon.html

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The Pyramids [Today's News Poem, January 25, 2011]

The Pyramids [Today's News Poem, January 25, 2011]

You have wondered where days go, where sweat lands;
And you ponder the pizza, your best friend
When you're weary and used-up from work days.
You're an animal eating the dry crusts
On the floor, by computer, in light-bulb
Serenade; and you laugh at your tv
And you tumble your beer on the hardwood.
In the night an alarm will awake you
As the safety glass fractures on curbside
And you'll wonder who benefits, who cares
As the shrieking subsides down the hillside,
With a sound like the mornings you hate. Rise!

"It takes a lot to terrorize a Russian. Compared to the truly spectacular acts of terrorism and violence that Russians have suffered over the past two decades, today’s suicide bombing at Moscow’s busiest airport, Domodedovo, is too small-time to have much of an effect besides pissing off an already-pissed-off population.... Back in 2004, two passenger jets that took off from this same airport were blown out of the sky by Chechen “black widows”... Eduard Limonov explained to me what he thought was behind the logic: “They understood that Russians wouldn’t be moved if only one plane was blown up, so they blew up two planes simultaneously, just to get our attention,” he said. "
—Mark Ames, Vanity Fair, January 24, 2011, 6:20 PM
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/01/dead-souls-how-russians-react-to-terror.html



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Pattern of Rapid Decline [Today's News Poem, January 24, 2011]

Pattern of Rapid Decline [Today's News Poem, January 24, 2011]

Sand blasts and water spouts mist:
Elephant charges a whale.
Red foam collides with death groans;
Dissipates under the waves.

In the clouds, there's an eagle
Landing to nest deep in the cliffs.
She has scavenged from battle
Bones of the slain beasts of the beach.

Dragon awakens annoyed
From its sediment coffin,
Cracking the spine of the rock
It is shaking the mountain.

"FOR a superpower, dealing with the fast rise of a rich, brash competitor has always been an iffy thing. Just ask the British, who a century ago were struggling to come to terms with the erosion of their status as the world’s No. 1 empire. It didn’t help that they were being upstaged by a former colony that had turned into an upstart sea-power with money, talent, and a knack for mangling a perfectly good language. Eventually they took the hit to the national ego from those Americans and discovered there were advantages to no longer playing the role of the indispensible power. Or ask Thucydides, the Athenian historian whose tome on the Peloponnesian War has ruined many a college freshman’s weekend. The line they had to remember for the test was his conclusion: “What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.”"
—DAVID E. SANGER, The New York Times, Published: January 22, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/weekinreview/23sanger.html

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