"Summer can be a slothful and sinful season....." 
When you keep a six-year-old in chairs for six hours straight,
with no recess,
with no exercise,
You are psychologically straitjacketing that kid.
Forbidding 15 minutes a day
of fresh air and a little space
is a crime akin to forbidding a child to go to the bathroom.
They complain about children going ballistic
As if it is the children's fault!
I know guests, I'm losing my cool, I tend to pretend to have been dead for 500 years, but this is the year 2007, and I am pissed!
We wonder why our kids don't become scientists and engineers, when everything we learn needs to fit on a piece of paper,The military gets all that fat
federal wealth
straight from the source
But for YOUR education you'll have to depend on how much homes "go
for" ($$$)
in your area
Leaving the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free
in the piddly educations
of their tax caste.
He makes mother’s milk:
Dad got a vein tied off so they could conceive me. The white population grew by one.
In the privacy of his home Dad liked to talk like he was black. “Look at dem bruthas and sistahs!” he said to my pregnant mother as a group of children swarmed to our window.
“D’jou find your names?” he’d ask the kids, opening the door. “Oh, good!.... no? What’s your name? Precious?! I like that! Okay, honey, I’ll make sure you’re on the list next year.”
In our storefront window – a window that once displayed boxes of rice and beans and detergent – stood a life-size Santa Claus, old white man with the bushy eyebrows. Santa wore spectacles and held a quill pen, and when he was plugged in his hand swept slowly up and down his list of neighborhood children, as if considering.
“You better be good. Santa’s still got time to change his mind.” Our mottled sidewalk was host to all kinds of motherly warnings.
Dad took the list downtown to a calligrapher every December to add the new kids’ names, and watched the list evolve from DeVontes, Josés and Preciouses to Kaitlins, Matthews and Scotts
.
1991 and my legs are fabulously scabbed
I'm wearing some tropical-colored garment that bowls over the bees.
Saddam, you butthole!1991 and he’s never had a woman
But the hands of men have been
inside
his thigh
.
Grandma married the postmaster of Dubuque, Iowa at the age of sixteen. They went their separate ways when she gave birth to another man's baby. There would be five more husbands to come.
It’s a hot, nasty
“Oh, honey.” She’s come from a smoky, black-windowed kafana where she learned the barmaid’s son was born with his bladder outside his body, and rushed to
“The kid is fourteen, and he has a girlfriend. All he wants is a penis, God bless him! We’re gonna raise the money. Whaddayou say? We’ll put on a grand gala.”
Hot damn. In fifth grade and already channeling the spirit of Oscar Wilde. The boots were Payless. Jeans: from her mecca, GapKids. Cirque du Soleil was her obsession, and she danced daily to the soundtrack, a shamanic - and very 80s - electrodance odyssey.He proposed under the covers, with a euphoric grin on his face. The engagement lasted two weeks. We had no time to waste. I wore an electric blue minidress to the ceremony, and when we walked out of town hall, gypsies with babies on their hips flung their palms at us, whining, “please! a little something for luck on your big day!” Our honeymoon was spent driving up the coast, sleeping in a tent or borrowing the bedrooms of his teenage cousins, making love amidst plastic fashion dolls and plush monkeys.
My latest fantasy is to take over the army. We’ll flood it with women and pacifists, bleedin’ heart fruits, singers and teachers and dancers. Why abolish that wretched institution when we can just take it over and make it cool? You always have to approach from the angle of doing, not undoing. Physical strength, camaraderie, hypnosis techniques, money and resources up the ass, dedication and discipline. Why shouldn’t we appropriate a few of their resources, and fight for our dreams?
Discipline is the foundation.
As I sat in bed sucking on my pen and contemplating my army, I heard several rifle shots and a machine gun megablast down the road.
Rosy Cowboy descended into the decaying autumn earth in his mahogany box, but I didn't see it. I was home, sitcoms blaring laugh tracks, waiting with Bobo for the vet to come. I held my cat while she died, a rubber band tied around her leg, belly patched with pee. I watched her corneas crinkle and felt her turn to matter.
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