StarPoet Newsletter Vol. X, No. XXXIII

The sweat on my forehead,
The dryness in my mouth,
The sun beats down on my shoulders,
A slow tan burning across both my breasts,
The moisture gathering between them.

If you were here,
Beneath this, our summer star,
I would leave my soft white flesh,
My breasts below my nipples,
Unclothed and open
For you to gaze upon.

Assuming you wouldn't mind looking
And the gazing was mutually reciprocal.

The thunder comes each night 'round eight,
Filling the skies with lightnin',
The August weather will take your breath
And start a dog a-tremblin',
To start the dogs a-tremblin'.

The storms come fast when they're rollin' east
Across the Great Lakes heavin',
The days are hot, the nights are strung
With the heavens angry shoutin',
Heavens angry shoutin'.

The morning's heavy with august warning,
Summer does not go gently,
The afternoon will find you always wishin'
The trees were red and yellow,
Red and yellow.

I come from a long line of dead people,
Nothing special, that's just the way it works out,
The further back you go, the deader they get,
Each second you live, you grow closer yet.

Eventually, if you go back far enough,
You'll arrive at a time without pizza,
Then without cities and villages
Until there is only the nests in the night trees
To separate you from your ancestors.

Ecce homo, before we got all caught up in our brains
And mighty civilizations, imagining ourselves
To be the special children of some almighty god
Who takes a personal interest in the particular tree
We choose to sleep in and the food we eat for breakfast.

We both see the world the same way,
We both have the skills to make the world
A better place.  This is not a bad thing,
We are not bad people, no matter what
You may have heard from either the right or the left,
The undereducated, soft science speculators
Or the righteously indignant religious professors.

We believe in certain principles we learned
From our fathers and they from theirs:
Country above all, honor among thieves,
The efficacy of science and the moment when
Your own life becomes less important
Than the mission left before you.

We believe that an individual,
Even if they cannot change the world,
Can shift the percentages and move it
Towards a better place, one more suited
For the human pursuit of individual liberty
And the free life we fervently wish for
Our children and all posterity.

In our nakedness, we are only women,
Wives, mothers, sisters, daughters,
In form no different from our grandmothers,
No different from our granddaughters,
Or the Oracle at Delphi.

Amidst all the change and decay
In the world around us, we remain who we are,
Neither servant nor goddess nor sacred vestal,
Only women, bloody with our ancient humanity,
Who dare to stand before you in our nakedness.

Historic restaurants,
Born several decades after I was,
Are shutting down with much public sorrow;
Bookstores whose beginnings I celebrated
Are closing left and right; Top 40 Radio,
Black and white TV, even Rock and Roll I fear,
I've seen them all come and go
And can only wonder who or what may be next.

What was commonplace in my childhood
-- Saturdays spent riding my bike
Out towards the distant Sierra Foothills;
Howdy Doody; Kukla, Fran, and Ollie;
Ed Sullivan at the end of Sunday night --
Is now treated like some ancient Greek ruin
And subject to haughty explication
And nostalgic wonder.

My father spent his youth
Walking the streets of Oakley,
His dog Tux at his side,
His twenty-two rifle in his hand;
I was free to peddle where I wanted:
Downtown Sacramento, the American River,
Weekends and summers spent free
Of constant adult supervision.

I learned the streets by being on the streets,
Learned to be alert and fast on my feet;
Built my confidence and the ability to deal
Will all sorts of circumstance and curious strangers;
I learned how to avoid unwanted attention,
How to hide in plain sight of almost everyone
Except my mother who seemed to have spies
All over Northern California who regularly reported in.

I learnt to depend
On my hands and my brains,
Take advantage of my dimples,
My smile, and my eyes;
Learned how to think quicker,
Speak faster than my enemies,
And when running
Was the best solution of all.

I lived a life that seems
All but impossible now,
Where childhood was spent
In independent discovery
And all the adults stood ready
To catch us when we fell.

All gone, consumed by the nanny government
And the irrational belief we can avoid everything dangerous
If we just try hard enough or just not go out;
There's nothing left to learn if you spend your summers
Watching the world go by on your flat screen HD TV
While listening to your personal soundtrack on an iPOD.

A pair of yellow finches,
Small and nervously flighty,
Pause for a moment on the rose of sharon,
Sample a few sunflower seeds
From the stash I've placed by the fence,
Then leave, quite rapidly,
With a few flaps of their wings,
All the while eyeing me suspiciously
Through the backyard window.

I got checked out
By a General Officer today,
Stars on the shoulder don't change
The man underneath the uniform
-- Not that celebrity has ever been a factor
In determining who I should put out for;

Neither rank nor money
Should be the criterion for fucking
Any more than should the rapidity of the notes
Generated from a Fender Stratocaster. 
A slow hand, however, should be treasured.

Cell line development,
The integration of transgenes,
Site-directed engineering
For defined chromosomal predictability.

Such is the life of the everyday housewife
Moving down biosimilar pathways
Formed in the volcanic ash at Laetoli
Where Lucy walked and gave suck to humanity.

I remember Father McDermott
-- I haven't thought of him in years --
Standing at the fence line, pointing out to me,
As he popped his shoulder back into place,
The very spot where the woman started beating him,
Shouting out for all the parish to hear that he was the devil
(Something about the red shirt he was wearing);
His shoulder popped out that morning too
And it was all he could do to hold the gate shut
Until the woman tired out or help arrived to convince her
That Father McDermott was not likely a minion of Satan.

This was the same steel gate where years earlier
I slipped as I played at first grade recess,
My foot sliding under the sharp ends of the bottom wire
To produce a well bloodied scrape on the self same heel
That would later produce a rather prominent fatty tumor
That surgeons would twice attempt to remove
Only to see it grow back determinedly each time.
Several lifetimes afterwards, the tumor still grows
And I wonder if Father McDermott is even still alive:
Has he married and left the priesthood,
Did he ever have surgery to fix his shoulder,
And does he ever still think about that Saturday morning
When he was thought to be the devil incarnate?