On Sisters and Ticks

OK, Dear Readers, we have a serious problem, since what happens to a blogger without Internet? The same thing that happens to surgeons without scalpels…

Right, the son of a newspaperman am I, so, was I going to be defeated by what never existed until the last years of my father’s life? Shouldn’t I be able to find something, anything, to write about?

He would have been 105, three days before that day (Wednesday,) and he died nearly twenty years ago, but here’s today’s secret, Dear Readers: it gets better, yes, but never to the point of best. Which means that, yes, I no longer weep when I see a wok (Jack was an excellent Chinese cook), and I’m glad that he got out of the world as he did: fast and painless, with not too much deterioration. Life makes you philosophical, and the icon giving the option to go on indefinitely can’t be found on the desktop. So you might as well go when you still have most of your faculties, and life isn’t too onerous. But that said, his absence turns up, once in a while, and then I miss him.

Wednesday, for example, he showed up at The Poet’s Passage, the café / craft shop where I work, and where the Internet had decided to take a prolonged cigarette break. I was delivering rice and beans to Naïa, the daughter of the owner, whom I had seen and who was going off to get her child the rice and beans. Since I myself was going for rice and beans, it was no problem to get an extra order.

Naïa, of course, is completely unfazed by Marc arriving with the food instead of her mother. And also completely in character, she has a joke:

“What do you call a mad flea?”

I know it’s going to be bad.

“OK—tell me.”

“A lunatic!”

I’m about to protest that a tick is hardly a flea, but guess what? The damage is done, and Naïa is a girl who has never once ventured down the doll aisle of a toy store. Instead, she heads straight for insects—in which I believe—or dinosaurs—in which I don’t. So that means that not only is she twelve, but she’ll probably win.

“How can you not believe in dinosaurs,” she said, when I presented my belief.

“Never seen one,” I said, and braced myself for the inevitable.

“And have you ever seen a tick, “ I said, hoping to deflect the argument, and she professed that she had—one had been venturing across the inner landscape of Lorca’s ear. (Lorca being the toy Chihuahua…)

So we talked about that, and discussed proper tick-removal schemes: you can’t pull them out if they’re embedded. Then I asked what she had done with the tick.

“Flushed it down the toilet,” she said.

“A singularly uncreative thing to do with a perfectly good tick,” I said.

“Yeah? What would you have done with a tick?”

“In fact, there is a long history of inventive uses of ticks in my family,” I told her, since first it was true, and anyway, there was no Internet.

Eric walks into the café.

“There was my brother Eric, who was engaged to an genteel lady from Pittsburgh: her father was a cardiologist, her mother hung out with the Carnegies and the Mellons. So what happened when Eric found a tick on him, one weekend after having been out in the woods? Well, he went to the jewelry store, got a ring box, deposited the tick on the cotton, and then had them wrap it up. Then he left it on her desk at the Daily Cardinal, the student newspaper where they both worked.”

The marriage ended in divorce.

Naïa, of course, doesn’t see that. Eric definitely picked the wrong girl….

“Then there was my father, who had also been out in the woods, and who had to interview the president of the Bank of Madison.”

Historical note—there was a time, Dear Reader, when banks had perfectly sensible names, before they began to call themselves MadBank, or whatever.

Jack walks into the café.

“Well, the president of the bank was young, and very pompous, and treating Mr. Newhouse with great formality, which generally tended to be wasted on Jack. So the prez left the room, which was a good thing, since Jack had begun to feel that really awful feeling: something strolling across his scalp. So there my father was, holding the tick in his hand. And then he heard footsteps.”

“So what did he do?’ asked Naïa.

“He must had had Mercury blossoming all over his astrological chart,” I told her, “since he knew immediately what to do. He leaned forward and dropped the black tick on a white piece of paper on the president’s desk.”

“Then what happened,” asked Naïa.

“Well, he waited for the situation to evolve. And then he saw the president start, and reach out to grab the paper. But Jack wasn’t having any of that!”

“So what did he do?”

“He leaned forward and said, ‘is that a TICK on your desk?’ So then the president got really nervous and said ‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry, I’m afraid I don’t know!’ He should just have laughed, of course, but he got rattled. So Jack leaned farther forward and said, “well, any damn fool can see that that’s a TICK!” And now, Jack couldn’t help it, and began saying things like, ‘do you mean to tell me your bank has TICKS!’ and ‘have you ever had an infestation of TICKS before?!’ So of course the president got completely rattled.”

“So then what happened,” Naïa wants to know.

“Well, Jack finished the interview and went across the street to have a cup of coffee behind the front window of the diner. And guess what happened, twenty minutes later?”

“What?”

“Three trucks from Oliver Exterminating roared up in from of the bank. And the guys came out running, like HazMat guys going after a bomb!”

Naïa is completely unimpressed. Right, I realize it wasn’t much of a story.

Unless, of course, you had known Jack….

Family is funny, I thought. People come in and out, die, turn up unexpectedly, and go away again. And then, sometimes, people just turn up.

“Marc, I don’t know how to say this,” said Lady, Naïa’s mother.

This is rarely a good sentence to hear.

“You’re one of my closest friends,” she says simply.

“You’re my sister,” I say, without thinking. That’s when you know it’s true.

We kiss. Then I head off to the café.

Naïa has to have her rice and beans.

Soccer, Anyone?

Well, the news out of Washington—or anywhere else in the world, it seems—is so abysmal, so frightening…well, wait. Stop using these puny adjectives: Barack Obama said it in two words in his most recent email to me—we’re finished.

Right—so what’s happening on the island? All going well in the Isle of Enchantment?

Doesn’t seem so. Though there is good news: the children of San Juan, in an imaginative plan, will have a place to play soccer!

Critics sniff at the proposal, of course, saying that the idea of renting out a couple of acres in a park to a developer, who will install three soccer fields and two beach volleyball courts, as well as provide a “deli juice bar” that also has beer—craft beer, that is—and wine is going to benefit only those people (hint, we don’t know them) who can pay 80 bucks an hour. In short, all of the kids in the projects are going to be left playing kick-the-ball in the parking lot.

There’s also a little question about the rent, which according to El Nuevo Día, would be only 2,500 bucks a month. But wait, cried the mayoress of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, the developer has promised to give the first weekend of the month, as well as one weekday night, free! This she deems “services in kind,” and so the real sum is a respectable 8,690 bucks a month. Great deal, right?

Predictably, the argument leaves some cold; here’s one critic:

González Costa señaló que en 25 años la empresa “habrá pagado apenas un millón de dólares y lo que va a generar Ecofútbol en un año es cinco  veces lo que generará el Municipio en 25 años”.

(González Costa pointed out that in 25 years the business would have paid scarcely a million dollars, and Ecofútbol would have generated five times in one year what the Municipality earned in 25 years.”)

“Ecofútbol,” you say? What’s so “eco” about soccer?

The plot, as it seems to in the tropics, thickens….

Ecofútbol sprang into existence in—no surprise here—July of last year, and was awarded the contract without a public auction. Why? Well, according to the paper, the matter was in “the public interest.” And the developer behind the project? A father / son team of guys named Víctor González Serrallés and Víctor González Barahona.

The first impression was good; here’s what Wharton School’s alumni magazine had to say about the father, Víctor González Barahona:

Gonzalez’ business ventures are grouped into three companies. Puerto Rico Land and Fruit Co. produces and sells organically grown coffee, manages ecological restoration projects and is involved in setting up a mitigation bank. The concept behind a mitigation bank, says Gonzalez, is to establish an inventory of restored and created wetlands which are then sold as credits to developers whom regulatory agencies allow to impact environmentally sensitive areas.

“No one else in Puerto Rico is doing this, although it is becoming more common in the U.S.,” he adds. “These mitigation banks are seen as a way of resolving the main conflict between the business and environmental communities by offering companies a way to both make money and protect our environment.”

But González is no stranger to controversy. There was the brilliant scheme to put a wind farm in Culebra, a plan that riled the residents, since the turbines…well, consider this source:

This project involves the construction of five wind turbines 390 feet high, four residences, an office structure, a maintenance shop, an electrical substation, and a water storage tank of 10,000 gallons, among other facilities, which are all visible from Flamenco Beach.

Flamenco Beach, by the way, routinely makes the ten-best-beaches-in-the-world list in travel magazines. Here, take a look….

Happily, the residents prevailed—not without a good deal of struggle—and González withdrew the project. But now, he’s back at it, because guess what? According to the print edition of El Nuevo Día of 24 April 2014, the son, Víctor González Serrallés is going to operate Ecofútbol, but papa is going to have “a part” by using solar and wind power to generate electricity.

Wonderful scheme, right?

There is, as always, a problem. We might have the sun, but do we have the wind? Because González put up twenty-five or so wind mills in a fertile valley of Puerto Rico, with the expectation of generating enough energy to sell back to the power company, and now…

…well, I’ve looked, and I can’t tell you. The last thing I remember is that the whole thing was shut down, and the contracts were being “renegotiated.” Oh, and that the whole affair was such an environmental mess that González Barahona had to cede 623 cuerdas (one cuerda is roughly an acre) of land to the Department of Natural Resources. What did he do? He gave up only 427 cuerdas, and then turned around and asked for a million dollar tax credit from the treasury department. Why? He claimed the land was a “donation,” when in fact it was part of a settlement…..

So the news about the wind project is scarce.  What I can tell you is that the company website is, well, unimpressive, and curiously incomplete. I have just spent—what’s time to a blogger?—ten minutes going through the site, and guess what? The Guayanilla project doesn’t appear there. What does? Photos of solar panels on private residences.

Guys? According to the print version of El Nuevo Día, Windmar was awarded six contracts worth 524.6 million dollars, and your company is showing me solar panels on rooftops? Somebody out there, tell me if there isn’t something just a bit screwy about this….

“Windmar has acquired extensive experience with the local government permitting process and has received several PPOA’s for wind and solar projects from the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (“PREPA”).”

That’s from the home page of the company website.

And it seems it’s not just “extensive experience with the local government permitting process” that Windmar has acquired. They also seem to know how to bamboozle the municipality of San Juan….

An alternative for the municipality….

Purpose-Driven Deaths

It was called ABC and it made perfect sense. Well, the B and the C, certainly—to me, the A is a bit of a stretch.
 

A is for abstinence

B is for be faithful

C is for condoms

See? Anybody who has progressed through the very first books of their lives can get this. And it seemed to be working, down there in Uganda; here’s what one writer had to say:

By 2003, Uganda’s AIDS rate plummeted 10 percent. The government’s free distribution of the “C” in ABC—condoms—proved central to the program’s success, according to Avert, an international AIDS charity.

So—a nice little success story! But before cracking open that bottle of champagne, consider this quote, from the same source:

On New Year’s Eve, 1999, Janet Museveni, who had become born-again, convened a massive stadium revival in Kampala to dedicate her country to the “lordship” of Jesus Christ. As midnight approached, the First Lady summoned a local pastor to the stage to anoint the nation. “We renounce idolatry, witchcraft, and Satanism in our land!” he proclaimed.

What had happened? Well, at least some of it had to do with Rick Warren, who teamed up with a Ugandan preacher, Martin Ssempa, whom Kay Warren, speaking through tears, called “my brother.” And Ssempa, among other things, was the driving force behind a Ugandan paper publishing the photos of…well, here it is:

Warren, you see, had been to Uganda in 2008 to declare that homosexuality is not a natural way of life and so not a human right. This, of course, was the message that our old villain Scott Lively had been pouring into their ears. In addition, it was the message, according to Rachel Maddow, that The Family, a mostly secretive group of fundamentalists who have been infiltrating our government for years now, had given David Bahati, the sponsor of the most recent law.

It wasn’t, therefore, enough to go after homosexuals. What else had to be done? Obviously, the message that condoms would prevent AIDS had to go, since that was a direct contradiction to the message that the fundamentalists wanted to get across. Here comes our born-again first lady again:

Two years later, Janet Museveni flew to Washington at the height of a heated congressional debate over PEPFAR. She carried in her hand a prepared message to distribute to Republicans. Abstinence was the golden bullet in her country’s fight against AIDS, she assured conservative lawmakers, denying the empirically proven success of her husband’s condom distribution program. Like magic, the Republican-dominated Congress authorized over $200 million for Uganda, but only for the exclusive promotion of abstinence education. Ssempa soon became the “special representative of the First Lady’s Task Force on AIDS in Uganda,” receiving $40,000 from the PEPFAR pot.

How involved was Warren with Uganda? Well, involved enough that Ssempa, when Warren finally was forced to denounce the Uganda anti-gay law, published an open letter to Warren. Here’s what he had to say:

When you came to Uganda on Thursday, 27 March 2008, and expressed support to the Church of Uganda’s boycott of the pro-homosexual Church of England, you stated; “The Church of England is wrong, and I support the Church of Uganda”.  You are further remembered to say, “homosexuality is not a natural way of life and thus (it’s) not a human right. We shall not tolerate this aspect at all”

Warren, according to The New York Times, is starting a new program within his church to reach out to people suffering mental illnesses, an issue important to him since his son committed suicide a year ago. I hope it works but…

…why am I so unconvinced?

Where We Cannot Go

What happened to him should never happen to any parent. Because however difficult it might be to lose a child in an accident, or through disease, how much more difficult would it be to lose a child through suicide?

Nor was it the case that they hadn’t tried everything, hadn’t gone to the best hospitals, hadn’t gotten the finest doctors. But a decade before he took his life, Matthew had gone sobbing to his father. “It’s pretty clear,” he had said, “I’m not getting better and I’m never going to get better. So why shouldn’t I kill myself? I know I’m going to heaven, Dad. So why not kill myself now?”

His father was a minister; his answer reflected that.

“Sometimes we don’t know why we’ve been given such great pain, Son. But there is a reason, and we’ll find out in the end. But I am never, ever, as a father going to give up looking for a solution to your problem….”

And it had gone on for years. Matthew, their third child, had been a remarkable child; since birth, he had been different. Shy, sensitive, he could sense in a moment the person in the room who was hurting the most, and would make a beeline for him or her. For the rest of the evening, he would stay by that person’s side, laughing, joking, trying to cheer him or her up.

“He had an amazing ability to help people, and he knew it,” his father said. “He once told me, ‘the only person I can’t help is me….’”

Yes, different; different almost from birth. The father had feared something was wrong from the very beginning; indeed, almost from the day Matthew had been born, his father had started to dread that his son would kill himself. There was that sensitivity, the inability to shrug off pain, a softness that wasn’t like other boys’. He played different, he acted different, he…well, was different.

And so they had prayed, yes, but they also knew—they had to get help. It all came clear after the first suicide attempt; then there was no choice. Matthew had swallowed the Tylenol and had left the bottle on the bed when they found him. It was, as the doctor said, the classic call for help.

Help that, despite their best efforts, they could not give him. They tried—they lost count of the number of psychiatrists, psychologists, family counselors, pastors, prayer groups, professionals, friends…  It was numbing, after a while, and in itself depressing, as well.

“We had pulled him off from the edge more than once,” said his mother. “And the night before, Matthew and I were in his bedroom, and I was begging for him not to kill himself. And he was crying and sobbing and rocking on his bed, and all I could do was hold him, and beg him to go on, and tell him that it would get better, and he just cried harder, and started pounding on the bed and shouting that I didn’t understand. That it was never going to get better and that he was in so much pain and he couldn’t go on—and it was so unfair of me to ask him to take this pain, he couldn’t bear it. He was screaming in my face that no mother would want her child in so much agony. And I was screaming back that I couldn’t let him die, I just couldn’t, no mother could. And I couldn’t bear it, seeing him in such pain and there was nothing, NOTHING I could do to help him. My son, my son, in so much pain! And I remembered when he was a child—he’d fall and cry and I’d pick him up and it would be OK. And I never imagined that there would come a day or a night when I couldn’t help him.”

“At last, he quieted down, and began to talk about going home. And something, I don’t know, something didn’t feel right. He was too calm; too collected. He had gone too quickly from utter despair to being, well, collected. We begged him to stay, we pleaded with him to stay, but he was firm. And that’s when he said it. He turned around, as he was leaving, and said, very slowly, very forcefully, ‘you know, if you ever call the police on me, or call 911 to get me help, it’s an instant suicide.’”

“I was stunned—the look in his eye was awful. But it was his voice, how cool he was, as if he had settled on something. Of course, neither of us could sleep, and we kept calling and calling. I texted him—‘just send me one word, ONE word telling me you’re OK.’ Then we drove to the house, about three in the morning. All the lights were on. That’s when I knew—but we didn’t have a key. And what should I do? Should I call 911? Was it a bluff? Would he really have the courage, or the desperation or the despair to do it? So we were sobbing, Rick and I, and holding each other in the driveway, and praying. And that’s when I knew. We left, and then got the call from the police department. We went to the house, and a cop came out, and we looked at him and he just nodded.”

All right, Readers, why have I spent 891 words telling you this story? Because I read in The New York Times last week that Rick Warren, the pastor of the mega-church Saddleback Church, and an outspoken opponent of marriage equality, was going to start a mental health outreach ministry in his church. Why? Because, with some poetic license, the story of Matthew, above, is the story of Matthew Warren, Rick and Kay’s son.

It happened just over a year ago, and if I knew about it, I had forgotten it. But what’s significant about the story—for me, at least—is that I immediately assumed Matthew was gay (which of course was why I was banging that “sensitivity” drum up there). So I turned to find a picture of him, since gaydar will—very occasionally—work with photos. Here he is, and no, it didn’t work….

Well, it’s a heart-breaking photo, this boy who seems to be telling us, ‘one day you will know, you will see, you will understand this half-smile of mine…” And it’s sad, as well, that even in death, Matthew’s photo, when I saved it just now, had “rick-warren’s-son” as the default save option. Matthew was not Matthew, but Rick Warren’s son.

Nor was I the only gay man who had wondered about the question, since apparently Twitter and the social networks erupted. And I’m sorry to report that a number of my gay brethren pounced on the death as god-or-the-devil-sent stick with which to beat up Rick Warren. Here’s one example….

Was @rickwarren's son gay? Maybe conversion therapy, condemnation and hatred towards gays was too much for matt...#ripmatt

— Samir Perez (@SamirPerez) April 7, 2013

That is by no means the most egregious; here is one of the 70 comments made to the article referenced above:

I wish I could come up with the right set of sentences that would drive this pain (if Mr. Warren actually feels such, being an experienced con man) deep, deep into Mr. Warren such that he could no longer cling to his sick delusions of god service.

The only 'god' Rick Warren serves is himself. He has poisoned the minds of millions.

He is NOT a friend to democracy.

Religion comforts...and cripples.

Or how about this:

Rick Warren's son has committed suicide // ‪#IWOULDTOOIFIWASHIM ‪#FUCKRICKWARREN ‪#UGANDA ‪#GAY ‪#EXECUTIONS ‪#LAKEFOREST

Guys? There are some places we cannot go, and just as we abhor the Phelps family—which of course came out and said the usual about Rick being an apostate and worshipping a false God and, anyway, no matter what, God hates you-know-whom—we cannot, let me say it again, we CANNOT do this to a suffering family.

That much I knew. What didn’t I know?

The skinny on Rick Warren’s celebrated AIDS program in Africa.

Drop by tomorrow, and I’ll tell you all about it….

To the Ramparts!

OK—this is not the news that you necessarily need to hear when the week is young, but my duty, Dear Reader, is clear. So here it is:

We’re fucked.

Sorry for the strong language, but it’s pretty clear: with the most recent decision of the Supreme Court, democracy just retreated to a minute dot in the rearview mirror.

So, allow me to present you the guy who has just gob-sacked us.

Yup, it’s John Roberts and why shouldn’t he be smiling? He has just handed the rich and powerful a major victory; in the process, he has ensured that anybody who isn’t rich and powerful is screwed.

Roberts was one of five guys who just decided—not only are corporations people (the work of Citizens United), but now there are absolutely no limits to how much spending overall in politics an individual can make.

I came to this issue via an article in The New York Times; here’s the sentence that triggered it:

She has been battered by $10 million in negative ads against her, most of it underwritten by the Koch brothers-backed group Americans for Prosperity.  

Who’s the “she?” Kay Hagen, a United States senator from North Carolina. And the Koch brothers? Two guys, neither of whom live in North Carolina (full disclosure: I have not checked this out…)—but even if they did, so? Why should a guy be able to give 10 million bucks to a political party, when an average guy like you or me is going to have a hard time to cough up a hundred bucks?

“Do you think Citizens United is going to be the Dred Scott of the 21^st century?” I asked Mr. Fernández over the dinner table.

“Probably,” he said.

Well, if it’s not Citizens United, it’s McCutcheon versus Federal Election Commission. And the decision raised the question: did Roberts know what he was doing? Did he really think that giving money to political parties was “free speech?” Was he naïve?

Well, consider this line from his decision:

In a bit of irony, the Chief Justice reveals his deep understanding of how Washington works in his discussion of disclosure.  Right after pointing out how effective our current disclosure law is, the Chief adds the following:  “The existing aggregate limits may in fact encourage the movement of money away from entities subject to disclosure. Because individuals’ direct contributions are limited, would-be donors may turn to other avenues for political speech. See Citizens United. Individuals can, for example, contribute unlimited amounts to 501(c) organizations, which are not required to publicly disclose their donors.  . . . Such organizations spent some $300 million on independent expenditures in the 2012 election cycle.”   

In short, Roberts—who, after all, is a Harvard man—knew all too well what he was doing.

But who am I, except the guy at the last red table in the café? Right, so it was time to call the legal department, which in this case was Johnny, my brother.

“It’s total bullshit—pretty soon, there will be only person in the country with free speech, and that’ll be the richest guy in the country.”

“And did he know what he was doing?”

“Of course!”

“And is there any intellectual argument or rationale to justify the decision?”

Disgusted noise from the other end of the line.

So I tuned in to the video below—and so should you. And found out, by the way, that there are two states that actually have campaign financing that makes sense. Arizona, for example, has an excellent system, as described below:

Arizona enacted a campaign finance law that provides matching funds to candidates who accept public financing. The law, passed in 1998, gives an initial sum to candidates for state office who accept public financing and then provides additional matching funds based on the amounts spent by privately financed opponents and by independent groups. In 2008, some Republican candidates and a political action committee, the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, filed suit arguing that to avoid triggering matching funds for their opponents, they had to limit their spending and, in essence, their freedom of speech.

What happened to the case? Well, here’s the next paragraph:

The U.S. District Court for District of Arizona found the matching-funds provision unconstitutional. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned the case, saying it found "minimal" impact on freedom of speech.

And here’s the last word:

The Supreme Court reversed the lower court order in a decision by Chief Justice John Roberts. "Arizona's matching funds scheme substantially burdens political speech and is not sufficiently justified by a compelling interest to survive First Amendment scrutiny," the chief justice writing for the majority, noted that the holding does not contend that the First Amendment forbids all public financing.

In short, any chance that campaign finance is going to have is slim, indeed. Here’s one writer on the subject:

Indeed, one of the main cases relied on in McCutcheon was the Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett case from 2011, which struck down a perfectly good public campaign finance statute in the state of Arizona. Ya wanna try to pass one anything like that today? Roberts will laugh you out of the Supreme Court, and he's already now built enough of the chain of precedents to do it.   

What’s the solution?

Well, you can sign a petition for a constitutional amendment here.

I saw the video below advertised on the site of Americans for Campaign Reform (ACR), which supports two pieces of legislation. Here’s what they say:

Federal public funding legislation enjoys bipartisan support in both houses of Congress, with over 120 cosponsors. The bills would create a modern system of public funding of Presidential and Congressional elections based on small donations from citizens.

I mean, we all do want to take the money out of politics..,

…don’t we?

News flash: this story has a—potentially—happy ending, since John Paul Stevens, the retired US Supreme Court justice, has recently written a book, in which he proposes six constitutional amendments. Here’s what The New York Times said:

His own book has, in addition to the chapter on campaign finance, chapters on gun control, the death penalty, gerrymandering and aspects of state sovereignty. Each concludes with a proposed amendment.

And here’s what the 94-year ex-justice said about McCutcheon versus the FEC:

The plaintiff, Shaun McCutcheon, an Alabama businessman, had made contributions to 15 candidates in the 2012 election. He sued so he could give money to 12 more. None of the candidates in the second group were running in Alabama.

Mr. McCutcheon was not trying to participate in electing his own leaders, Justice Stevens said. “The opinion is all about a case where the issue was electing somebody else’s representatives,” he said.

Whew!

Thought I was the only one!

(Felt badly about ruining your day, so check out this dude on cello….)

Poetry? Nah!

Well, Billy Collins might be right—Walt Whitman was nothing if not a great self-promoter. But who knew that he invented pseudonyms and then wrote surprisingly positive reviews of his own work? Great idea—I may take it up….

And Collins is right, too, about the poetry being a verbal bear hug. Consider this, randomly drawn from the Calamus section of Leaves of Grass:

I do not know whether many, passing by, will dis-

         cover you, or inhale your faint odor—but I

         believe a few will;

O slender leaves! O blossoms of my blood! I permit

         you to tell, in your own way, of the heart that is

         under you,

O burning and throbbing—surely all will one day be

         accomplished;

O I do not know what you mean, there underneath

         yourselves—you are not happiness,

You are often more bitter than I can bear—you burn

         and sting me,

“Enough,” you want to cry. Or maybe—here’s a thought—join in? Right, here goes:

O ever stretching, ever-churning Atlantic, your waters seething with the salt and the foam and the violence of wave;

O ever-stirring prairie, your gold poured out on the ribbon of the earth, the wheat, the oats, the soybeans waving gently in the humid night air;

O Poet’s Passage, the quiet Stephan murmuring to his charge, Lucia stroking the coffee that has been freed from the bean, the hapless writer deep in his toil;

All you do I love, all you do I seek, generations of teachers, and writers, and baristas to come, to all you who come,

From Maine to Missouri, from Wisconsin to Wyoming, from the plains of Kansas to the fruited slopes of California, you, all you,

Do I love!

OK—that’s mean. That’s unfair. But why is it that so much poetry—wrote peotry, but it got corrected (and is now red-squiggled), dammit—just leaves me cold? Why do I distrust it so much? And especially stuff that everyone else gets—why am I so immune?

Let’s take a favorite of my mother’s—Walter de la Mare, or not. Since it’s an unknown world to me, why not fall flat on my face and write one?

To A Poem

You’re in there, I know,

Dammit, clutching a wire in the

Hard drive,

Lurking under the keyboard

Flitting fleetfoottedly from the number

Pad to the keyboard to

The screen.

You glare out,

Sticking your tongue on

Which letters glisten

Out at me.

Letters that circle and spin,

Drop up and rise down

And will not form

A simple sort of word.

You tease me, you poem that

Drank coffee with me in the morning

Made my bed, dusted the

Fireplace…

And then…

Took the suitcase from the closet shelf,

Brushed off the cat hair,

Packed a dictionary and thesaurus

And walked out of my life, forever…..