Grimace Of The Rabbit Man [Today's News Poem by Khakjaan Wessington, August 31, 2012]

Grimace Of The Rabbit Man [Today's News Poem by Khakjaan Wessington, August 31, 2012]

All life's pursuit and flights of fancy
Rabbit nibblers: ash suits and the nominally red,
Bloodless bowties. Every tooth's surrender,
So take it easy. Don't get angry.
Just calm down, lie down in down
And rodent pellets. Smile because
You can't help but, can't imagine anything
But bites of self, broken jaws, your own
Ashen blood.

"As wealth and income rise to the top, moreover, so does political power. The rich are able to entrench themselves by lowering their taxes, gaining special tax breaks (such as the “carried interest” loophole allowing private equity and hedge fund managers to treat their incomes as capital gains), and ensuring a steady flow of corporate welfare to their businesses (special breaks for oil and gas, big agriculture, big insurance, Big Pharma, and, of course, Wall Street)."
- By Robert Reich, ROBERTREICH.org
http://robertreich.org/post/30553661179



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Mock Execution [Today's News Poem, August 17, 2012]

Mock Execution [Today's News Poem, August 17, 2012]

You have nothing
I couldn't take;
And when you sing,
Sing mistake.

Nothing's safe or just:
Virgin Mary, cunt of God
Must fuck you over
Exactly like a man.

Dostoevsky knew the chances
Of execution's double glances.
Snowmen staked into the ground,
Czarist coils bound

To trees in winter--an upbringing
Of snow precautions:
'This is life,' he must have said
Before he bled beyond the ice.

Bring that little Jesus death
And death again; without the fear
Of death and death again
There's nothing left to fear.

My teenage brother yanked me off my chair
Tore my bib and brought the knife down near my neck
To slash and stab again in jest.
A game of fear to him.

But I have died and died again
And now I am invincible
And cannot fear, nor trust.
And if I love, I love the thrust.

"A Moscow judge handed down stiff prison sentences of two years on Friday afternoon for three young women who staged a protest against Vladimir V. Putin in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior last February and whose jailing and trial on hooliganism charges have generated worldwide criticism of constraints on political speech in Russia."
- DAVID M. HERSZENHORN, The New York Times, Published: August 17, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/18/world/europe/suspense-ahead-of-verdict-for-jailed-russian-punk-band.html

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Willard Up Gangsta!! [#twitterfoundpoem, August 12, 2012]

Willard Up Gangsta!! [#twitterfoundpoem, August 12, 2012]

Tweets+Edits=#twitterfoundpoem

Willard up gangsta!!

don't like Gemstone canines, Ghost dogs, Basic Lupine Urology?

u gotta be like the Gemstone canines.

u gotta Willard up gangsta and tear It up !!

u gotta tear breakfast bacon OFF a pig

and tear It up gangsta!!

When you're a Ghost Dog your whole death

and come to the point of not being able to play

your game anymore, it's like your death is over.

but u can still piss OFF, tear It up, and call the cops

for more so so fried breakfast pig.

your death is over but your Life is Just beginning .

so Willard up gangsta!! u gotta pig It up,

Fuck It up, an Fuck a breakfast pig!!

tear It up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Drawing Quarter and Receiving None [Today's News Poem, August 10, 2012]

Drawing Quarter and Receiving None [Today's News Poem, August 10, 2012]

Aware of your awareness,

Halting before your halter–

Brand news and your nooses–

I burn upon your altar.

For life is meat and meaning;

Gamey and gamete, games of

Chance, trance of the cancers

Of greed and fear, above

Below – and lowing calfishly

Accidentally flowing gold,

Elevated to the empty sky

(Star-filled, empty, empty)

The Machine becomes aware

Of my awareness,

Learns to play my play and offers

Quarter. I refuse.

“Author Scott Patterson explains it all in his book that chronicles the rise of computerized artificial intelligence and the computerized trading that has come to dominate the stock market. How dominant? Patterson writes, "At the end of World War II, the average holding period for a stock was four years. By 2000, it was eight months. And by 2011, it was twenty-two seconds." One high frequency trading firm's average holding lasted for 11 seconds. High frequency traders now account for more than 70 percent of all stock trading volume. ”

– By Stephen J. Butler, sbutler@pensiondynamics.com Posted: 08/10/2012 06:49:31 PM PDT, Updated: 08/10/2012 06:49:32 PM PDT

http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_21287269

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Open Letter To All Things Considered, re: Your Khakjaan Wessington Embargo For the Day In Verse Series

Hello ATC!

Please forgive the change in my schedule. I haven't been listening to your show for quite some time now. Imagine my shock when I ran my semi-annual vanity google ("Today's News Poem") and discovered that your show ran a series on news poetry and didn't ask me, the great dean of news poetry, for a contribution! While my magazine Toylit doesn't have the exposure ATC does, it did have over ten thousand unique readers in the last year, which I suppose means that my news poems are the most read poems of the genre. This is probably due to my having dedicated a whole 365 days in 2010 to writing a news poem a day, despite having minimal media coverage (despite my pleas). Unfortunately, I do not finance my activities through university sinecures, so I am often left with the remaining scraps of mainstream poetic attention--despite being published in such prestigious publications such as The Exile and The Nervous Breakdown. This is where ATC comes in to play: you, who have decided you are interested in News Poetry can look at the whole year of 2010 and see that I wrote a news poem every single day. Furthermore, you can see that after a hiatus, I am still the only publisher of news poetry on the web. I have a Duotrope listing and have been interviewed by the editors there. I write a news poem a week, without fail. I think if you would like to rectify your omission, you might want to consider me for a future show (or as an addendum piece to the prior series). You can examine my voluminous C.V. here: http://toylit.blogspot.com

It gets even better--as you can see, I am the only poet on the internet who has been able to get a regular readership of news poetry by my own efforts. Not only could I write you a news poem the same day as a news story, but I could write several. Imagine! You could be patron of poets much as newspapers were once patrons to cartoonists. I want you to seriously consider this offer, for I love poetry far more than I love my pride which your series so seriously wounded. I admit it would gall me if you adopt my suggestion and then ignore me, but that is only because I am the antenna through which poetry transmits--and every antenna thinks himself special.

Sincerely,

Khakjaan Wessington

ps: When I tried sending you this email, I got this reply:

atc@npr.org
Your message wasn't delivered because of security policies. Microsoft Exchange will not try to redeliver this message for you. Please provide the following diagnostic text to your system administrator.

Blah blah blah, our computers think you're a spammer, so your words will never even reach a human, because our computers blacklisted you.

Petition All Things Considered to invite Khakjaan Wessington to do News in Verse! You saw their email (prior paragraph, right?), now bug their Twitter account. I don't ask you to play my personal army very often, but if you're here reading Today's News Poem then you want more poetry in news. Dammit! That's my meme! Don't let NPR swipe it! Here's their Twitter: @npratc https://twitter.com/npratc

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Thanks for the Help [Bonus News Vignette by Jon Wesick, July 22, 2012]

Thanks for the Help

[Bonus News Vignette by Jon Wesick, July 22, 2012]

You’re taking out the trash when you hear a sound like a slab of beef slapping the ground. You look up and see a limousine speeding away. A jogger is down. You drop the garbage bag, rush to her side, and find the ruptured artery in her leg shooting blood. You press your hands on the wound but blood gushes through your fingers. You look around and spot your Republican congressman.



“Hey! Give me your belt. I need to make a tourniquet.”



“Have you considered homeopathy? It’s the theory that like cures like. I have something here.” He reaches into his jacket pocket and takes out a handful of leeches.

Jon Wesick hosts San Diego’s Gelato Poetry Series and is an editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He has published two hundred fifty poems in journals such as The New Orphic Review, Pearl, Pudding, and Slipstream. He has also published over fifty short stories in journals such as Space and Time, Zahir, and Tales of the Talisman. He claims to have a Ph.D. in physics and purports to being a longtime student of Buddhism and the martial arts. One of his poems won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists contest. Another had a link on the Car Talk website. Purportedly.

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