Here are eight poems I wrote between 1974 and 1981. Unlike the poems in the two part-series I published a couple of weeks ago, which had never seen the light of day, I shared these with friends and others, and I revised them from time to time. They
Other places
Vladimir Putin and Self-Hatred
So many human qualities can be inversions of what they seem. Hatred of someone else can be hatred of oneself. To punish another can be to engage in self-punishment. The subject of inversion came up the other evening during the rebroadcast of Dick
Gonna to Texas
Hey y’all, Getting into that Texas spirit!! Just itching to climb into those cowboy boots and hitch up these Texas-size britches for a spell. I’ve put in an order at the airport’s rent-a-gun store for a Glock and holster. The wife says it makes
Can’t You Hear my Heart Beat?
1 With the romantically labeled “Texas Heartbeat Act,” Texas’s Republican-controlled government has deputized individual citizens to sue anyone who might be involved in abortion. The target could be a doctor, a cab driver unknowingly transporting a
Longing
I’ve wondered why the Beatles’ “Michelle” lingers in the mind. For one thing, the lyrics are ludicrous. The only French words the singer, Paul McCartney, claims to know are “ma belle” and “Sont les mots qui vont très bien ensemble,” which he goes on
Tribalism in Amber
1 When we look back at a long-ago era, what wasn’t obvious to the people then can be plain to us today. As with a tree’s hardening resin, an era’s scurrying, uncertain lives eventually become fixed like insects in amber. It used to be in Europe