Living Versus Existence

I am the faceless man,
specter of countless lives,
keeper of that which
we choose not to see,
holder of memes passed
but not communicated,
lifeblood in the heart
of Memory's vascular cells,
plasma awash with vitality
of what has been, what is

I am the vagueness of twilight,
phantom light of day's cresting
and night's toiling labored afterbirth,
discarded over and again, reborn
in the exhalation of despair and desire,
in the recall before the recoil

I am the nameless pattern,
the winnowing spiral on which
one may rise precipitously
or fall precariously
fixed throughout with probability
but bowing reverentially to choice

Why Americans are "hopeful" about Obama, Part I

We speak often of our national obsessions, and in the tallying of these we just as often lie to ourselves regarding the root causes. The provenance of this almost manic desperation toward hope, as a most apt current exemplar of this inclination, rarely (if ever) is given vent. The truth of the matter is that because of the retrenchment of civil, social and economic rights (indeed human rights in toto) under the Bush administration Americans have been eddying at a rapid swirl into the mire of hopelessness. Now this is held up as a banner for causality without acknowledging that it is merely the symptomatic denouement of the real cause: our collective irresponsibility in ceding the wielding of OUR power to leaders so that we can bemoan the fact, in apparent contradiction, that we are powerless to change what is done to us and done abroad under the auspices of this country. In a statement, we are hopeless because we have chosen to engage hopelessness in all aspects of our existence; and from this frenzy springs the unfettered end-run around despair towards the illusory smoke of hope. The consequences of our own irresponsibility are not some exogenous visitation from hostile forces beyond our ken. They are in every nuance the direct result of a dis-ease within the body politic, the body economic, the body social and all other forms of our manifestation as a nation. Bush is not the problem but a byproduct of the chemical reaction of our careless lab work; and just as no man is wholly the Devil incarnate, neither can one man be the angelic personification of peaceful and prosperous harmony in a society composed of a multiplicity. The leaders we have vested energy in are but a mirror reflection of where we are as a culture, and the window of our own soul is bared and waiting for us to recall the truth of what we hold; or in the absence of recognition and a choice to shift to a different experience, we will continue to be witnesses to what we have allowed and very witting participants in the manufacturing of our on-going hopeful/hopeless assembly line.

On the cusp of Pride, in the wake of our right to marry: a haiku

Love's Labour


I have held him nights

While love laboured in my arms

Waiting to heal Life