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The
Starpoet
Newsletter
Vol VII, No. XXVIII
Half way through the weekend
I want you on me
Hunger for your touch
Grow wet
Thinking about your kisses
After supper
When the breeze rises
And the night cools
I shall ask you
To do something about it
Lisa Jain Thompson 2006 C.
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<><><><><>
Between this week and the next, I will be experimenting with a new format for the newsletter, one that will be sent out via our own server vice topica.com. Will manage the list myself. We’ll see.
This seems to be an anti-religion issue.
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short piece to start: sex and humor
Alarum
Love lies sleepily,
Ignoring the voices on the radio
Infected by morning happiness,
Chooses body contact,
Cuddling,
Over a shower
And a darkly serious skirt suit.
Lisa Jain Thompson
July 2006
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meanwhile at work
Cycling
Morning
Work
Coffee first
Scan the Washington Post
Then BBC, CNN, and the rest
Read the Email
Sorting them into
Read, Keep, and Junk
Remember the mission
Check the schedule
Curse Microsoft
For writing clunky programs
Watch the office trickle in
While learning whose
Commute was worse
Weather
Salad
Mail, Word, and meetings
Then home again and sleep
Lisa Jain Thompson
July 2006
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Looking out a window, waiting for a meeting to start
Rosslyn in the Morning
Sun break slipping between buildings,
Bright oblong strip, roof to busy street,
Color blocked with parallel morning shadow.
Reflection scatters window to window
As light bounces out and in
Of offices still filling
With commuters and Starbuck’s coffee.
Cityscape along the river,
Virginia overlooking Washington,
The Right Stuff in view
Of the politics of identity,
Silicon money triumphing over old policies.
Lisa Jain Thompson
July 2006
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Why I Am Not A Socialist
There is . . . something intrinsically degrading and demeaning about philanthropy.
A society in need of philanthropists is one rooted in inequality,
in which the deprivation of the many is supposedly addressed by the largesse of the few.
No one can seriously suggest that social problems will be solved in this manner.
Especially in America,
where an aristocracy has taken shape before our eyes over the past decade
and the Bush administration is taking blind,
reckless measures to eliminate all restrictions on the accumulation of personal wealth.
-- David Walsh
World Socialist Web site
Personally, I like personal wealth.
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systemic dysfunction
Scrapbook
I miss my older brother and never knew him,
But he left a hole in parents’ marriage
That I had to learn to navigate,
His death while still in infancy made a larger gap
Than all the months the world war devoured
Or the years my father lost to cheap wine.
The emptiness was always there in my mother’s eyes,
The pain always present in my father’s guilt
That he was at war when Bobby died.
After America defeated all comers
And the troops came marching home,
My parents, like many others,
Tried to pick up their lives and rebegin.
I was the result, a strange convulsive small adult
In the body of a preternaturally gifted child;
When polio seized me and tried to take me
As Bifida had done my older brother,
My mother, my father, drew the line
And helped my body recover,
They refused to surrender their now oldest child
To still another mysterious disease.
But no matter how loved I was, I knew
The number of the birth order,
Just as I knew at some instinctive level
My parents’ marriage was less than best.
Years later, I put the pieces together,
And learned what drove them apart;
How different it may all have been
If my older brother had only been there.
I have his baby pictures stored in a box,
Next to the marriage photos of my Mom and Dad.
Lisa Jain Thompson
July 2006
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self humor
Birds
Crows on a light pole,
All in the row,
Black on Silver,
Arching over.
I quickly look around
For a Hollywood movie crew,
Then turn red self consciously
As I find none.
Lisa Jain Thompson
July 2006
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Pope Stresses Traditional Values
VALENCIA, Spain (Reuters) - Pope Benedict makes a lightning trip to Spain this weekend to glorify traditional family values in a country whose government has been sharply criticized by the Catholic Church for legalizing gay marriage.
The 79-year-old Pope, making his third trip outside Italy since his election in April 2005, will be in Spain for little more than a day, from Saturday morning to Sunday afternoon.
Last month a hard-hitting Vatican document branded gay marriage, abortion, lesbians wanting to bear children and a host of other practices it sees threatening the traditional family as signs of "the eclipse of God" in today's society.
Traditional values will take center stage at the Church's Fifth World Meeting of Families when the Pope closes the gathering with an outdoor mass for up to a million people.
Knowing my church history, I have taken it upon myself to list some of those
Traditional Christian Values
-- Subservience of Woman
-- Castrati
-- Religious Crusades
-- Anti-Semitism
-- Persecution of Non-Believers
-- Condemnation of “Pagan” Religions
-- Aggressive Prostylization
-- Forced Conversion
-- Cultural Imperialism
-- Rejection of the Physical World
-- Rejection of the Authority of Civil Government
(at least until they obtained control of the government)
-- Blind Obedience to Church Teachings
-- The End of the World Within The Current Generation
LJT
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what a poet writes while bored at a meeting
Tepidly
The principals have all consumed
Too much Viagra before the meeting,
They couldn’t stand down
If both their balls depended on it.
The scent of alpha male posturing
Renders the atmosphere unthinkable
And makes discussion impossible
Until boredom overcomes the men
And the women re-establish order
On all the gaming strategies of little boys.
Lisa Jain Thompson
July 2006
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Word Substitution Rant
The Christian God violates the laws of a Democratic Republic, of man ,and of nature.
I propose a bill that seeks to amend the Constitution to prohibit such gods.
Aside from being against the laws of the Republic and the laws of nature,
gods are against the interest of society in general.
Not only do gods stretch the limits of custom, tradition and social norms,
they endanger the interests of those
who might not realize that god is interfering with their liberty and their freedom.
See how silly the rant sounds when I substitute “God” for “Transsexuality”.
I could have found a similar moral rant against Same Sex Marriage.
People in Stained Glass Houses Should Not Moralize.
LJT
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sharing inward
Virtuosity
Sometimes whole poems
Arrive unbeckoned inside my mind,
In and out,
Like I had left a window open
And the poem blew into
Virtual existence
Before flickering quickly away.
I find the crumbs and fragments
Lurking in my corners,
Bits and pieces of poet magic,
Suggestions of greatness
That I no longer quite grasp
Or follow.
My soul demands, my craft requires,
That when the words exist,
However briefly,
Spacetime itself must stop and pause
To allow me to record my muse
‘Less the enchantment disappears
Into the darkness evermore.
Lisa Jain Thompson
July 2006
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finale
Logical Model
Think of human evolution
As a spiral of development
With the first mammal at its core,
The initial primates on an inner band,
And the great apes sliding outward
Along ever widening spirals:
The root of the common ancestor,
Then the orangs splitting off,
Followed by the Gorilla,
Leaving only Homo, chimps and man,
Until we split our species
Into our two solutions
A half dozen millions or so in the past.
The human spiral then expands
-- Afarensis
-- Erectus
-- Habilis
And finally (for the moment)
-- Sapiens.
Where we go from here,
For surely we must go,
Depends on the universe,
The human genome,
And time enough
For whomever we become
To prove their common birthright
Inherits the works of man,
Or failing that,
Brings this experiment to an end.
Lisa Jain Thompson
July 2006
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Man has been here 32,000 years.
That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him
is proof that that is what it was done for.
I suppose it is.
I dunno.
If the Eiffel tower were now representing the world's age,
the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit
would represent man's share of that age;
& anybody would perceive that that skin
was what the tower was built for.
I reckon they would.
I dunno.
-- Mark Twain
Was the World Made for Man?
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PEACE
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