Switching Gears

Rereading sparks reflection.
---------------------------------------
Shocking feeling:
To realize you stand
over your own corpse.

An older version of myself
has passed,
like shedding snake skin.
Outgrown...
the remains are cast aside.

I recognize the face at my feet...
decaying, as a memory at rest.
Dead lips part... in fear, I start.
"Bury me"
pleads my poor old body.

And so I do.
-------------------------------------

Returning to the Southern United States has been a rocky landing.
Like,
who would put enormous speed bumps on a jet's runway!?

The observations, conversations, and general maturation of ideas
during my sprint abroad...
provided plenty of momentum
for a smart sting when I
walloped back into America's concrete defenses
face first.

Pissed,
I naturally grabbed the nearest pick-axe to pummel the offending cement
in a fit of rage and frustration.
Vis-a-vis the tone of my recent posts.

I don't make a good political pundit,
wouldn't want to be one anyway.
Vomiting venom onto my keyboard
doesn't exactly complement my style.
And is not gratifying.

I have two different kinds of writing.
Starting now, my metaphorical spitting shall be grounded
with other such rants in my journals.
The private ones.
At least until they can count to ten
and learn to play smart.

So expect my political jabs to flirt in and out,
as opposed to taking center stage.

In its place, I intend to continue writing stories as before.
Now from my home in Durham.
With occasional wanderings, of course.
Yes, the unthinkable has happened.
Nate is Nesting.

So to my readers,
Thanks for suffering through my soapbox sermons.

I now present:
The Diaries, Observations, and Musings of your Barman.

The Inevitable Trial

People are afraid,
Wealthy customers frazzled
Approach my bar with purpose.
Booze is recession proof.

I try being sympathetic...
me: How's shit?
them: I still have a job.
me: Alright! So shit's good then.

I lost nothing in this lemming run.
I have no 401K, no money in stocks,
not even a savings account.

Nevertheless, I tease out drunken opinions
From the political left and right.
Consensus: group consciousness has
resolved itself to wait and see.

See if Obama can say "ta-da!"

I know this song and dance.
Eight years ago,
The herd was terrified of terrorist,
So Bush got a blank check.
Now in Obamaland,
The evil's the economy.

Granted, our current leader's hands are more capable than the last.

That said, I have to call out the President
For encouraging the nation to move on too quickly.

We came damn close to a dictatorship... where the commander in chief made unilateral decisions on torture, personal liberty, and secret military actions.

This is no witch hunt... we need to find out exactly what was going on.
So this type of thing can't happen again.

Somebody in Washington apparently had a hearing on Wednesday about forming a truth commission to get to the bottom of things. Declassified documents revealed that a US citizen on US soil had been held for five years by the military with no trial.

Obama's assertion to just move on is meant to keep things friendly, I know that.
But this is the same short-sightedness that got us into this mess.
A country can't just barrel blindly forward and pretend it didn't do anything wrong.
That's Bush's non-reflective personality, not America's.
We must hold our leaders accountable:
Bush aint God. And even if he was, I would say the same thing:
Put that Asshole on trial!
This truth commission will only be effective if it has the power to prosecute.

And here's the really cool part.
If we don't prosecute Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, and the rest of them...
Then smart people from other countries will.
Our leaders fucked with international human rights law,
As much as they fucked with domestic personal liberty.

I don't know about you,
but I'd rather put ole' yeller down myself.


http://www.democracynow.org/2009/3/5/lawmakers_begin_debate_on_commission