| Starpoet Newsletter Vol. IX, No I |
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| News - Newsletters | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Written by Lisa Jain Thompson | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Saturday, 05 January 2008 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 The
Starpoet Newsletter Volume IX, No. I The year ends, the year begins, Our love knows no calendar Or weekends spent apart Time is but one dimension Space but another That love conquers When love is true I hunger for your touch But not your love Which remains constant No matter the distance between us. Lisa Jain Thompson C. 2008 C. E.
  The calendar slips loose, repins itself newly numbered as if time moved while space stood still.
New year
Changing the Volume
For want of my convenience,
I number my newsletters in volumes,
I could just have easily used papyrus
If I knew how to distribute the scrolls.
But ages change, media evolve,
Only the poet remains,
With or without her audience.
Lisa Jain Thompson
January 2008 We are not a collection of red states and blue states.
We are the United States of America. And in this moment, in this election, we are ready to believe again. — Barack Obama
January 3, 2008 mid winter ruminations
Searching For What Is Missing
So again I say, if only it was real,
A savior who smote his adversaries
When they dare distort his words, Who would tell us how
He escaped the tomb,
And where he and Mary went afterwards.
Did he ever return to Jerusalem
Or did he leave his men behind
To struggle with his teachings
When the end days never came?
Lisa Jain Thompson
January 2008 Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children;
now I have six children and no theories. — John Wilmot 2nd Earl of Rochester
Ronald Reagan lost Iowa in 1980,
as did George HW Bush in 1988,
as did Bill Clinton in 1992
- three of the last four presidents, in other words.
(The fourth, the current President Bush, did win the state in 2000.)
In 1988, when Bush Senior lost in Iowa,
he came third behind an evangelical minister,
Pat Robertson,
who very obviously wasn't going to be elected president of the United States
but who excited the heavily evangelical constituencies
that comprise Iowa Republican caucus-goers.
a little sex music
When Lips Collide
The moment our lips collided,
I knew
The touch of your hand
Would send me shivering into fire. You held all the cards
But I did not call for a reshuffle,
Could not, did not want to,
And willingly surrendered.
Even now I cannot but submit
To your voice, to your hand;
Your happiness is all,
And, achieving that,
I find my own.
Lisa Jain Thompson
January 2008 War, war!
That's all you ever think about, Dick Plantagenet! You burner, you pillager! — Virginia Mayo King Richard and the Crusaders Denying and Dismissing: What They Don't Understand
by Lisa Jain Thompson
Global Warning 29 Dec 2007 Springfield, VA, USA. Gender and gendering, the social and cultural categorizations embraced by post-modern theory, are not the reason that HBS men and women have surgery to bring their outward primary and secondary sexual characteristics into congruence with their brain and the innate sexual identity with which they were born. HBS (Harry Benjamin Syndrome — fka transsexuality) is a birth condition with physical causes, not a social construct or cultural imperative . . . Read more at http://ts-si.org/content/view/2823/995/.
talking snow
First Fall
There is a snow storm falling
Somewhere between us and Greater Canada
That will arrive late Tuesday,
Or maybe it's Thursday,
Somewhere along the east coast
Between the Carolinas and New England,
And leave three feet of white stuff
Or perhaps only a dusting
On the grass, out of the sun, in the shade.
But it's more than enough
To buy a month's worth of milk,
A couple cartons of fresh eggs,
And a case or two of toilet paper,
Just in case
The ice age falls,
Or the world should end,
Or dysentry strike
Everyone in our family,
And our neighbors
And all of their kids.
Lisa Jain Thompson
January 2008
Notable Deaths
2007
Others Who Left
Bob Carroll Jr, writer for Lucille Ball, Gian Carlo Menotti, composer "Amahl and the Night Visitors", Luther Ingram, R&B singer, Calvert DeForest, Larry "Bud" Melman, Johnny Hart, B.C., Rosco Lee Brown, actor, Don Ho, singer, Kitty Carlisle Hart, singer-actress, Tom Poston, comic-actor, Charles Nelson Reilly, actor-director, Gretchen Wyler, actor, Liz Claiborn, designer, Boots Randolph, saxophonist, Charles Lane, character actor, Laszlo Kovacs, cinematographer, Tom Snyder, talk show host, Grace Paley, poet and writer, Hilly Kristal, owner of CBFB in Manhattan, Alice Ghostley, actress, Joey Bishop, comedian, Teresa Brewer, singer, Porter Waggoner, singer, Ira Levin, writer, Dick Wilson, "please do not squeeze the charmin", Evel Knievel, daredevil, Michael Kidd, choreographer, Stu Nahan, sportscaster, "Skipper Stu", hockey goalie.
All men lose when they die and all men die.
But a slave and a free man lose different things.
— Kirk Douglas Spartacus over the years
Calendar Down
A week into the new year
Who knows how it will end: One president is leaving, Another is getting ready, The Nation will make do With whoever has won For another four years Come January next. A better system than the
Divine right of kings (we fought a revolution over that), But not one that most countries Are able to adopt (So caught up in tribal niceties, class differences, and civil warfare) — A bullet's the preferred ballot For any rise to power. We muddle through
Despite the jack-asses, The dull-minded overachievers, The one trick ponies Who, having achieved the presidency, Have nothing left to show us, Leaving us alone and rudderless Until we cast the die again. Lisa Jain Thompson January 2008 Of course, I may bring a boyfriend home occasionally,
but only occasionally,
because I do think that one ought to go to the man's room if one can. I mean, it doesn't look so much as if one expected it, does it? — Liza Minelli Cabaret
the conflict in the hardwiring
Lodestar
A part of me wants to start a new family, Have a couple babies, be a mom and housewife; Another bit would like to be buried on Mars, Beneath rust red sands outside the Bradbury city limits. This is an ancient curse: the need to make choices
That seem to be mutually exclusive, denying one To make real the other rather than having both -- Our worlds must be larger than we are willing to accept. A poet pretends modesty, some muse driven magic
That comes and goes without conscious control: in truth I would make lie to that despite my diligent self-effacing, This lines are a skill I have earned through work and talent. We pretend to be unaware, blaming inspiration and the gods
For whatever words appear or the success we may achieve — I would be greater than Sappho, more popular than Shakespeare, Richer than Rod McKuen or Bob Zimmerman Dylan. I would be a pregnant poet, well filled with words and children,
Tending my garden on some distant planet, where earth's sun Is a pale point of light in some newly fashionable constellation: I would burn brighter than any timeworn lodestar ever could. Lisa Jain Thompson January 2008 Ben, you're boring me. I have a husband. I don't have a need for another one.
— Sigourney Weaver The Ice Storm  on growing up
Monsters My mommy always said there were no monsters. No real ones. But there are. Ellen Ripley Alien: Resurrection There are monsters in the woodwork,
Lurking just out of sight, Villains in the grocery stores, Waiting for their moment on the stage. There is evil walking the face of the earth
In the form of men, hiding their intentions, Wandering from opportunity to opportunity Until the moment comes they decide to strike. There is no need of devils
Or semi-rational, explicating philosophies Discussing gods and adversaries: We have monsters enough ourselves. The distance between jungle and city,
Between ape and humanity, Between the fish that became crawling reptile And our better angels is frightenly short. The aggression inside we struggle to contain,
Our fear of the other, our apprehension of change, Our need to be dominant one over another, Makes ripe the monster within us Who speaks with assassination, mayhem, and explosion,
Our ancient tribal rites from when we moved in packs, Searching the grasslands for lame deer and easy kills, Spreading out across the continents time and again, Perpetuating our genetic darkness, generation to generation,
Blood to blood to bloody death until we no longer Can distinguish between right and wrong, only us and them, And so we die needlessly by our own hand, day by day. We are of, and one with the Earth — mammals, primates, all —
And cannot claim any special glory in this universe. The stars shine with or without our knowledge until time's end, Caring not whether we survive or perish on this pale blue dot. Somewhere there is a poet distantly meditating on her humanity,
Sitting near a storm filled river under a dying red sun As a sliver moon rises across the valley above the hill, Discorrupting and charging full her soul and body. The sprawl and fullness of infants gives hope we might
Someday grow to realize what lies within us, That evil and goodness reside side by side and we alone, Among all our infinite possibilities, may choose who we become. No god can save us, no Satan drag us deeper than we are:
We stand upright on the savannah, gazing towards the heavens, Though gravity and totemic instinct hold us bound, Unsatisfied with this rough-hewn prison acre we find ourselves. Lisa Jain Thompson
January 2008   Copyright © Lisa Jain Thompson 1995-2008. Further distribution of this newsletter in its entirety is authorized. Email your letters and postcards or visit her contact page at the Starpoet website. |
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