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CounterPunch
September
21, 2002
"How many times
have I sailed by"
by DANIEL WOLFF
How many times have I sailed by
the houses of the rich?
Never a light. It's funny.
As if they didn't exist,
only their property. Maybe these are their summer homes?
Probably. Or, maybe they're in there,
in the dark, surrounded by all they own.
And because their share
of the world's things
isn't fair, they're trapped.
They hear me passing
and wish that they could lose all their crap
and have what I have. Which is...?
Sailing past the houses of the rich.
Daniel Wolff
is the author of Work Sonnets, You
Send Me: the Life and Times of Sam Cooke and The
Memphis Blues Again. He can be reached at: ziwolff@optonline.net
Saddam in Tombstone, Arizona
by PHILIP METRES
Outside the 7-11, a burrito and Mello
Yello in his hand, Saddam stood on the street of Tombstone, Arizona,
like he owned it. And no one did a thing! Until John Dole stuck
out the phantom limb he lost at Dunkirk and tripped the old dictator.
He fell like King Kong from the Empire State, but held on to
his burrito like it was Faye Wray. Blue-haired salon lovelies
bit off cuticles. You go, girls. Lottie Tungsten gouged out his
eyes, and that was just the beginning. Bits of Saddam, flying
everywhere! Until there was nothing left-just a pool of blood,
a mustache, and a job well done. But from each coin of flesh,
another Saddam grew. And another. And another. This will not
do!
Outside the 7-11, a burrito and Mello
Yello in both hands, Saddam stood on the street of Tombstone,
Arizona, like he owned it. And no one did a thing! Until Ron
Bush reached out a claw he got after beaching at Omaha and plucked
one thick black hair from that mustache. That'll learn 'em. Harry
Caray from Hohokam Park hit him with a Bud, and plucked a hair
from the mustache for his buddy Stonie. And the Bleacher Bums
stole the same little souvenirs, one by one. Saddam looked beaten,
like the Indians at the end of any baseball season. It became
harder to see him, with every lost hair, like a TV on the fritz.
Each hair grew a dictator, even in Harry's lunch box. Seven.
Seven times seventy.
Outside the 7-11, a burrito and Mello
Yello in every hand, Saddam stood on the street...etc. etc. And
no one did a thing! Eleventy seventy, seventeen million, twenty-two
million. Who could kill twenty-two million? He had grown far
larger than anyone could even see. Like the Grand Canyon one
shot could not contain him. We just had to shoot and shoot to
see what developed. The little flashes took their toll. He fell,
an accident unfolding, slow-mo. The great dictator shut his eye
like an old Zenith, just a white lid retreating to a single pixel.
It stayed for a long time, longer than hair rollers & Twinkies,
7-11s & bones.
Philip Metres
lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
He can be reached at: pmetres@jcu.edu
Naked Horizons
by MURRAY DAILEY
See how it all changes,
Measured in moons
And clenched fists!
Like space walking or
Deep sea diving,
The limits
Weightless
Wage an unending
War not withstanding of
Course the labor of love.
And see how it all
Changes in the
Morning over pickled
Roses and Echinacea,
Fulgurating like a
thumping evening
thunderstorm.
And time doesn't wait
To stop us or answer
Why.
It's measured in moons
And clenched fists!
This tremor at the break
Of dawn in a new age of
Ideas and contraptions,
And it will never
be the same as wise men
Said it would be.
The most constant definite,
The only rule that never changes,
The primal immortal
Consonant;
Yes-the sameness much the same.
And see how it all changes
in angels' eyes
As beautiful as
Half used tea bags
And summers sweat
On girly curves,
As simple as that
I say.
Murray Dailey
clamors in the northern outskirts of Detroit, Michigan with his
wife and dog. When he is not traveling or lingering around her
shorelines and forests, he keeps a tenous and skeptical pace
beating back the city, raising hell and writing.
He can be reached at: Murphwild1@aol.com
Canyonlands
by JEFFREY ST.
CLAIR
We descend on a trail
narrow as a haiku
and nearly as strange.
The switchbacks stop
and start like early
morning dreams, leading
to one prospect, a bend
of green river, say,
uncoiling through the slotted
canyon, placid as glass
for the most part, except
those few gashes of white,
so often a sign
of the coming together
of currents, a marriage
of streams, rather than
just the river's fall,
its crushing descent.
Night arrives early down here,
in the spleen of the canyon,
buttressed by red colonnades
that rise, block by block, for a mile
or more and marshal out all
but the most potent strains of light.
The trail never reaches
the river, but rises
up a rock dome,
capped by crags,
fins of entrada
sandstone--a maze,
where black vultures nest,
in crevices that reek
of shit and early death.
The slickrock here is scratched
by violent rains, and human
hands, so up close
the scars look like frail writings
from a desert scroll,
the work of some exile,
a fevered visionary, lost
for epochs, then revealed
by a freakish wind, just in time
to be found, but never understood.
Moab. Spring, 2001.
Today's Features
Joan Hoff
Debating
War:
the Forgotten Tradition
Norman Madarasz
Lessons from a Cyncial Master
Jean Chretien's New York
State of Mind
Mitchel Cohen
Toxic Wastes
and
the New World Order
Peter Lee
Why Bush
Wants This War
Bruce Jackson
20 Questions
About Bush's
War Against Arabs
Krystal Kyer
Greenwashing the Marketplace
New
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to Subscribers:
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- DC's Best Political
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- Lese Majeste: That's
Against the Law Too;
- The Greatest Endorsement
AAA Will Ever Get;
- Merle Haggard on Civil
Liberties;
- Dullness Hailed: The Press on the Defeat of McKinney,
Traficant and Barr;
- National Review Puffs
into Town.
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September
20, 2002
Joan Hoff
Debating
War:
the Forgotten Tradition
Norman Madarasz
Lessons from a Cyncial Master
Jean Chretien's New York
State of Mind
Mitchel Cohen
Toxic Wastes
and
the New World Order
Peter Lee
Why Bush
Wants This War
Bruce Jackson
20 Questions
About Bush's
War Against Arabs
Krystal Kyer
Greenwashing the Marketplace
September
19, 2002
Ron Jacobs
Cheney's
Vermont Breakfast
Ilija Trojanow
/ Ranjit Hoskote
Who Cares
for Human Rights?
It's a "Just" War
Jordy Cummings
How
to Silence
Pro-Palestinian Voices
Salam Rahal
The Rape
of a Nation
Richard Falk
& David Krieger
War with
Iraq:
It's Not Bush's Decision
Ralph Nader
How Congress
Can Fight Corporate Crime
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Senior:
Hating Saddam, Selling Him Weapons
September
18, 2002
Rep. Cynthia
McKinney
Goodbye
to All That
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Cancerous
Air
Born Under a Bad Sky
Ben Tripp
Smoking
Gun
of a Hatchet Job
Peggy Thomson
20 Years
After:
Sabra and Shatila
Thomas Mountain
September
1982
Sabra and Chatila (Poem)
William Cook
Yet Another
Bush Doctrine
Kathleen Christison
Israel's Other Voices
Resources:
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Read
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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