I first knew something had changed
when I thought,
“my wing has fallen asleep” —
my wing? I sat up heavily.
The dog ran from the room
as I spread my wings out
six feet either side of my body
(no exaggeration).
I ran from the house
and all the birds for miles
were silent.
My cat eyed me coolly.
I leapt and fell.
leapt and fell.
I ran around the yard
trying to glide.
I climbed on the picnic table
jumped
and fell on my face
my wings folded elegantly behind me.
My neighbor came out at the commotion
and I wrapped my wings
around my nakedness.
“Why are you wearing a leather cape?,” she asked.
It’s sort of a gift, I answered.
Since that day, I’ve gotten used to the stares
and whispers.
I’ve learned to wax my wings
against the creaking
and the mites.
I sleep standing up —
rarely upside down.
I’ve jumped from buildings, bridges and planes
each time falling like a stone.
Some gifts are hard to take.
Some gifts aren’t all that great. mjh
9/7/2004
[for another take on this imagery, see going home]
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges. …
The GOP’s evolution has become too much for some longtime Republicans. Former senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraskacalled his party “irresponsible” in an interview with the Financial Times in August, at the height of the debt-ceiling battle. “I think the Republican Party is captive to political movements that are very ideological, that are very narrow,” he said. “I’ve never seen so much intolerance as I see today in American politics.”
And Mike Lofgren, a veteran Republican congressional staffer, wrote an anguished diatribe last year about why he was ending his career on the Hill after nearly three decades. “The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe,” he wrote on the Truthout Web site. …
[I]t is up to voters to decide. If they can punish ideological extremism at the polls and look skeptically upon candidates who profess to reject all dialogue and bargaining with opponents, then an insurgent outlier party will have some impetus to return to the center. Otherwise, our politics will get worse before it gets better.
A stone sits midstream —
immovable object
parting the waters
that seem to yield to solid.
But soft water works wonders
polishing with relentless caress
rubbing out roughness
erasing edges
transforming the immovable
with the irresistible
turning boulder into a pebble
you turn in your palm
and pocket for a charm. mjh
at night
the wolves wait
on my temples
for the elk to venture
from my sparse hairline
onto my forehead
instantly, the pack pursues the herd
some escape into the thicket of my eyebrows
as the rest charge across
the curve of my cheek
longing for the forest of my beard
I sleep through the slaughter
on my jaw
soothed by the steady snores
of slumbering bears
in the caves of my ears mjh
Just like that, all would be well — as if we never needed the trust-busting of the Progressive Era, the social legislation of the New Deal, the health programs of the Great Society and the coordinated action of the world’s governments in 2008 and 2009 to keep the Great Recession from becoming something far worse.
APD’s arrest of an unarmed, 60-year-old intoxicated man by firing numerous bean bags at him, siccing a dog on him and then repeatedly Tasering him was “clearly excessive” force, says a federal judge who took the unusual step of overturning the jury’s verdict in the case …
“No reasonable person could believe that an inhibited, slow-moving 60-year old individual who made no physical or verbal threats and wielded no weapons could constitute a threat to the safety of any of the 47 armed and shielded police officers who stood 20 feet away,” Black wrote, reversing the outcome of the weeklong jury trial last October in Santa Fe.
“Nothing presented at trial showed that the officers’ extraordinary use of force was reasonably necessary to safely arrest (the plaintiff),” said the opinion Black wrote this month.