east of a
rip
Let us begin our activism right here: with the money-driven villainy at the heart of American foreign policy. To do this would be to give up the illusion that the sentimental need to “make a difference” trumps all other considerations. What innocent heroes don’t always understand is that they play a useful role for people who have much more cynical motives. The White Savior Industrial Complex is a valve for releasing the unbearable pressures that build in a system built on pillage.
yeah I’m serious
from the steez change volumes
The world is chaos, whispered a mouse in the garden; it’s night and no one hears her but the grass and an owl overhead, an owl who eats mice.
It’s summer and the clouds move quick, they’re pink and magicfilled, aloft for awhile here, but tomorrow, probably in some other place in some other time, over an Arabian caravan, the women dancing with bells ringing around their waists, the bonfire their projector.
The garden doesn’t know this. Tonight is tonight is simple, better this way, with the oak towering above the wooden fence and the moon towering above him. The cicadas are clicking and our mouse is gone beneath the gate.
In the house a family asleep. Each in different rooms, parents included, dad on the couch. He didn’t kiss his wife when he came in that night. His children, 5 and 7, didn’t see.
The 5 year old, he wears pajamas with feet, it’s comfy, they’re his favorites, he dreams of a balloon, a yellow one, it keeps expanding, unbelievably so, and it pops and he wakes up and thinks for a minute and knocks the wall.
On the other side his sister, she wakes up at the knock, the cat is at her feet, curled like a garden hose. What is with her brother, she wonders, knocks back. The boy can fall asleep now.
The house is wooden, most of it, the mom’s choice, her bed an expensive cedar, she who was raised on a farm at the foot of a mountain, they got so much sun there, Virginia. She hasn’t been back in 10 years, but her house is wooden now, it reminds her of the farm and the windows are big just the same, she’s even got the skylights.
She has a job part-time and her own bank account. She taps it for projects around the house. Just last week she finished the outside deck and it is beautiful the way it handles the sunset, the moon, and then the stars, like old friends, it’s wooden as well, the boy already skinned his knees on the steps, a ladybug band-aid, his sister called him a girl and he brow furrowed, they’ve both long forgotten.
The world is unsure what year it is and the garden grows anyway. The witching hour is in hand, its palm opening in a million different ways like the grass collecting dew, collecting prisms; there are dreams undreamt still, the dad shifts uncomfortably on the couch, he is poised every morning for defeat, but not now, right now he is on an airplane and the stewardess leans over his lap and sets down a drink, he’s sure she’s speaking to him with her eyes and her arms but he can’t figure what it means, “Sir, the bathroom is open,” So it is he tells her.
In five hours he wakes up with a neck stiff and the stewardess boarding another flight. He compulsively checks the sheets.
friends
“Listen. You’re a hell of a good guy, and I’m fonder of you than anybody on earth. I couldn’t tell you that in New York. It’d mean I was a faggot. That was what the Civil War was about. Abraham Lincoln was a faggot. He was in love with General Grant. So was Jefferson Davis. Lincoln just freed the slaves on a bet. The Dred Scott case was framed by the Anti-Saloon League. Sex explains it all. The Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady are Lesbians under their skins.”
said hemingway
slept on
