Cold Moons

Like a fiddle bow
on a flexed saw
my bones twang.

I rise from the bed
of the woman
of my dearest nightmares

and wake up
beside my wife.
My father walks

out of the cracked mirror
and without a word,
kisses me on the left shoulder:

I wake again,
beside, again , my wife.
How many wakings left to go?

I am no longer a young man.
Seven times seven
are the winters I have seen.

No longer the chosen lamb,
I still dream dreams
but I am not the son of these cold moons.

I never rode with coven
or Joan of Arc
and I never was a fickle one

tho’ all cats are grey
in the dark,
and a coat of many colors

is all black
in the Great House
of Mother Night.

A mercenary not for hire,
an assassin who does not kill,
worth no one's salt,

I take my pay in sand,
sands of sleep and time,
and spend it all

in the precinct of harlots
in the temple of the Crone.
She lays me down to sleep,

drapes me with her cloak
of many daughters,
so that I may be stabbed with sickles of light,

sore afflicted
with a pox of moons,
so that I may walk in other worlds,

in new wrinkles
of laminate verse,
and this is not a sin.

Dana Pattillo, 2007

Devil Goin' Down

Not Even Wrong

Wolfgang Pauli, Nobel Prize winning physicist, the Pauli in the Pauli Exclusion Principle, as the tale is told, once succinctly reviewed a young physicist's paper, saying sadly, "That's not right; it's not even wrong." I heard a soundbyte of Bush on the Beeb yesterday, and those three words said themselves to me with my own mouth. Not even wrong. Almost every statement that comes out of Howdy Dubya is so dumb and delusional that his assertions (pre-programed or otherwise) do not even rise to the level of being wrong. Not falsifiable, as Karl Popper put it; not susceptible to proof, because the proposition has no testable hypothesis. The Decider doesn't have a plan or a goal, much less a strategy, he has articles of faith so slippery that they can explain any fact and elude any test.

People speak of framing the debate on the war; that we must change the frame, that is to say, we must alter the rhetoric and metaphors of political discourse in our favor, ala George Lakoff. We must substitute, insinuate, and impose our memes such that we replace the Republican frame with a Democratic frame. That's OK as far as it goes. We are all soldiers on the field of memes. But a frame is just a frame; it may largely and elaborately distract from, subtly direct attention to a particular aspect of, or complement the essence of the picture; but the picture is still the same picture no matter what the frame. It's the same picture if it has no frame at all. And the picture we're looking at is ugly. It's so ugly people can't bear it. We can't face our shame. No one is putting a frame on this picture, we're all putting a good coat of whitewash on the picture so we don't have to look at it. We don't want to look in the mirror and see ourselves as we truly are. Dubya, like Tom Sawyer, is standing by and collecting our treasures one by one, as we each take our turn with the sopping brush.

Every day I listen to NPR and the BBC World Service. I read the blogs, sometimes even WaPo or other MSM. If I pinched myself every time I thought, "I can't believe that Bush is President, it just can't be this bad," I'd be covered with so many welts I could get a job exhibiting myself at a freakshow as "The Pincher." I feel like I am living in some alternate reality, but that hypothesis is not testable.

Another soundbyte that has got a lot of play is John Boehner's tearful

"After 3,000 of our fellow citizens died at the hands of these terrorists, when are we going to stand up and take them on? When are we going to defeat 'em?"

That is not the pertinent question. Rather ask, "When are we going to stand down from these people?"

We already got us right where they want us. Some Republican or other, I can't recall who, had the absolute, fatuous arrogance to assert that we will see the light at the end of the tunnel, come September. The conventional riposte is, "Yeah, and it's the headlight of an oncoming train." There is no light. We're groping in black void, hoping to find a wall, and to feel our way to the opening of a tunnel. The tunnel has already left the station.

Follow the tropes.

We have our ass in a crack in Iraq, and Dead Eye Dick is offering Iran the other cheek. The longer we stay, the bigger chunk we leave behind. Meanwhile, Al Qaeda has the Enemas-R-Us franchise. In all seriousness, folks, what we are facing away from is the Crack of Doom. It is too late to do our duty and get off the pot. The situation calls for a crowbar, not a plunger. Congress has handed the Plumber-in-Chief a new plunger; he's already got a fan.

Open a frame shop, invest in Sherwin Williams, pray to the murderous God of Love, if conscience permits; we, as individuals, as a people, as a nation, will not make this right because we can't even make it to wrong.

Well, it's a long, long time
From May to December
But the days grow short,
When you reach September.
And the autumn weather
Turns the leaves to gray
And I haven't got time
For the waiting game.

Music by Kurt Weill,
lyrics by Berthold Brecht,
translated by Maxwell Anderson,
and best sung by Lotte Lenya.

Burning in Heaven

Oscar Wilde said, on hearing of the demise of his nemesis Lord Douglas, "I have no doubt that he is burning in heaven."

Jerry Falwell is dead since the day before yesterday, and he will be dead a long time. That is some consolation. Some. Not much.

A co-worker me told that his wife knew Falwell personally, and when she got the news of his death by cell phone while driving on the expressway, she was so upset she almost had a wreck and had to pull over.

I can't find it in my black heart to feel the slightest bit of sympathy for the bereaved. I couldn't squeeze out even a single crocodile tear if you tied me to a chair and made me watch the PTL Club until I was as mad as Jose Padilla.

On the other hand, I'm not singing and dancing like a Munchkin after Dorothy drops in on the Wicked Witch without leaving the house. Falwell was well past his "pull by" date, but the damage is already done. The man did a truly monumental amount of harm to our country and the planet in the three score and 13 years allotted to him by Fate. I do mourn. I mourn what he did in this life--I mourn that he ever lived.

I have no call to judge him or any other mortal soul, but in all honesty I think the world would be a better place if Jerry Falwell had never been born.

Without Falwell, perhaps, there be no Bush Regime; no Iraq war. There might not be a Supreme Court poised to reverse Roe v. Wade; no Justice Dept. wiping its collective arse with the Bill of Rights. There might not have been long eight years of Reagan.

Falwell was present at the creation, so to speak, of the Christianist movement that has brought us to our present pass. He was one of the first mullahs of the American Taliban. One of the first dominoes to drop. At the very least, there would be no "Moral Majority" and no Liberty U. madrassa training the next gen prayer warriors and lawyers.

The Fascists wouldn't be calling themselves Republicans, the Republicans wouldn't be calling themselves Democrats, and "Liberal" would not be a synonym for "Pariah." I'm not saying that we all would be living in some ecologically balanced people's paradise, absent Falwell--but all by himself he made he made the world a worse place to live in--a much, much worse place.

Now, I believe, Falwell is beyond all reward and punishment. I am glad he's gone. But my--joy--is tempered by my suspicion he is beyond all suffering. I don't believe in an afterlife, heaven, or hell. I wish there was a heaven for him to burn in. I kind of like imagining Rev. Falwell's entry into heaven and his turn before the Judgement Seat in the style of a Jack Chick cartoon tract--in the last panel he'd be makin' like bacon in the skillet of righteousness.

AHA!—The Diabolical Canadian Death Poppy

U.S Army "Contractors" travelling in Canada earlier this year filed confidential reports that lead to a Defense Department espionage warning about mysterious coin-like objects with RFDs—radio frequency devices.

According to the Associated Press,

The worried contractors described...the coin-like objects, each marked with a sinister red dot...as "anomalous" and "filled with something man-made that looked like nanotechnology," according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.

The mysterious coin-like object

"...did not appear to be electronic [analog] in nature or have a power source," wrote one U.S. contractor, who discovered the coin in the cup holder of a rental car. "Under high power microscope, it (the red dot) appeared to be complex consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire-like mesh suspended on top."

The confidential accounts led to a sensational warning from the Defense Security Service, an agency of the Defense Department, that mysterious coin-like objects with radio frequency transmitters were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada.

One contractor believed someone had placed two of the mysterious coin-like objects in an outer coat pocket after the contractor had emptied the pocket hours earlier. "Coat pockets were empty that morning and I was keeping all of my coins in a plastic bag in my inner coat pocket," the contractor wrote.

But the Defense Department subsequently acknowledged that it could never substantiate the espionage alarm that it had put out and launched the internal review that turned up the true nature of the mysterious coin-like object.

The true nature of the mysterious coin-like object? It was a 2004 Canadian Quarter adorned with the image of a red poppy, Canada's flower of remembrance, inlaid over a maple leaf. The 25 cent piece commemorated Canada's 117,000 war dead. Approximately 30 million of these coins imprinted with the dread Canadian Death Poppy were struck by the Royal Canadian Mint. The supposed RFD nanotechnology was the coating applied by the mint to keep the coins from losing their scarlet, so to speak.

Numismatist Dennis Pike of Canadian Coin & Currency near Toronto, Ontario, quickly matched a grainy image and physical descriptions of the suspect coins in the contractors' confidential accounts to the 25-cent poppy piece."

It's not uncommon at all," Pike said. He added that the coin's protective coating glows peculiarly under ultraviolet light. "That may have been a little bit suspicious," he said (...after he stopped laughing).

Meanwhile, senior Canadian intelligence officials expressed annoyance (between bouts of hysterical giggling) with the complete lack of intelligence in U.S. intelligence agencies.

WHAT I DID WHILE I WAS AWAY (1)

I...pontificated...at the wedding of friends Barbara and Randy.

Papal vesture (full pope drag) was requested by the bride.

FOR I AM WITH YOU

All moons, all years, all days, all winds

reach their completion and pass away.

So does blood reach its place of quiet,

as it reaches its power and its throne.

Measured is the time in which we can praise

the splendor of creation.

Measured is the time in which we can know

the blaze and warmth of the sun.

Measured is the time in which

the phalanx of stars will wheel,

and the gods trapped within the stars

watch over us.

BOOK OF CHILAM BALAM