Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue: It’s Time for Poet’s Corner

Hello dear readers, you few, you happy few, you.

The site has been moribund for a few reasons, not least of which is it just wasn’t working. I don’t know how it first happened nor how, after some random clicking behind the scenes, it suddenly righted itself. However it came about, all posts on this blog are now accessible again, which makes updating it seem tangentially more worthwhile.

Early this year, while trying to write a YA novel that seemed to refuse every opportunity to be written, I found myself revisiting some old poems stashed in an obscure corner of my hard drive. I thought they weren’t so bad, and that it might be fun to write a few more. Fast-forward to roughly now, I have been firmly bitten by the poetry bug and so the energy that might have gone into pithy blog posts has mostly gone in that direction.

Will I be publishing poems here? Probably not. I’d rather let a journal (with, you know, an actual audience) have first shot at anything I produce. And speaking along those lines, my first accepted piece can be reviewed online in the e-zine Crack the Spine. My poem “The Air of the Room” can be read for free in Issue 195.

In addition, Hypertrophic Literary published two pieces, “I Love This Woman” and “New Red,” in their Fall 2016 issue. You’ll need to shell out for this. Totally worth it though.

And there we are. I have a couple more pieces forthcoming but I’ll post more about that when I have something to link to.

Story in Three Sentences

They met over artisan whiskeys in a bar that had once been a dentist’s office. With little to go on, she thought he could be kind to her, safe enough in his own skin to teach her to live safely in hers. It broke apart years later, amid tears and pleas and a final, raging silence, on the floor of a hollow space that had once been a whiskey bar.

Inspired by this challenge.

Police State

Police State

I was born in 1971, too late to have witnessed the convulsive events that characterized the end of the 1960s. I know of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago from reading about it and seeing old news footage. The massacre at Kent State I knew chiefly through the song Neil Young wrote about it. I always wondered what it must have been like to live through that, to see our country turning on itself like a snake swallowing its own tail, and ask, “What’s happening to us?”.

I’ve been following the story of Ferguson, Missouri, and the riots and unrest that have followed in the wake of the death of Michael Brown. And I think, maybe, I get it now.

The pictures that have emerged from Ferguson are the most shameful images I have seen of American life since our first glimpses of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina drowned it. If you can look at images of a garishly militarized police force training assault weapons on unarmed American civilians, and not feel some mixture of horror, outrage and despair, I really don’t know what to make of you. This is exactly the kind of thing that, we used to tell ourselves — accurately, for the most part — only happened in other countries.

It’s true that there has been rioting in Ferguson, and at least a possibility that police officers were threatened by people in the crowd. And none of that — neither threats nor rioting nor anything else — justifies the grotesque display of paramilitary zeal that ensued. A police force that properly remembered its mission to serve its community would have gone into this situation with the goal of defusing it, of letting tensions bleed off and subside. The Ferguson police seem to have made the opposite decision: to meet force with force.

Here is what Jelani Cobb wrote in the New Yorker:

What transpired in the streets appeared to be a kind of municipal version of shock and awe; the first wave of flash grenades and tear gas had played as a prelude to the appearance of an unusually large armored vehicle, carrying a military-style rifle mounted on a tripod. The message of all of this was something beyond the mere maintenance of law and order: it’s difficult to imagine how armored officers with what looked like a mobile military sniper’s nest could quell the anxieties of a community outraged by allegations regarding the excessive use of force. It revealed itself as a raw matter of public intimidation.

It’s important to bear in mind that there is another, equally important objection to the conduct of the Ferguson police. Beyond being grossly excessive, it was incompetent. They could hardly have made the situation worse if they tried. It’s staggering to think that no one in a position of authority in that town thought to wonder, given a populace severely on edge from what they considered an unjust use of police force, whether suiting up the police in riot gear and sending them into the streets in military-surplus armored vehicles with roof-mounted machine guns might be, you know, misconstrued. As Matthew Yglesias wrote, “you do crowd control with horses, batons, and shields, not rifles. You point guns at dangerous, violent criminals, not people out for a march.” The law-abiding people of Ferguson were done a terrible disservice by the people sworn to protect and serve them. And you needn’t take my word for it, as a cursory glance at the Storify page Veterans on Ferguson reveals. A few of the more on-point comments:

In the USAF, we did crowd control and riot training every year. Lesson 1: Your mere presence has the potential to escalate the situation.

 

Also, we contained riots in Baghdad next to mosques with less violence than the police are employing.

 

A lot of vets, me included, would go to Ferguson and gladly teach some classes on crowd control and patrolling[.] You are fucking it up.

I do not write this from any kind of anti-police animus. I’ve relied on help from the police several times in my life and was grateful each time; civil society could not function without them. By the same token, I do not recognize the generous, selfless police officers I’ve encountered in these images from Ferguson, and I’m confident that were I a police officer myself, I’d be every bit as appalled by what has occurred.

As of this writing, it appears cooler heads are starting to prevail. The Missouri State Police have taken charge of the situation, and its captain has taken the radical step of opening a dialogue with Ferguson citizens to begin to undo the damage of the last four days. I am relieved. Maybe Ferguson will escape its name being inscribed alongside Kent State and Chicago on the list of the grossest abuses of state power in America. And maybe, as the dust settles and we begin to take stock of what’s happened, we can have a long-overdue conversation on the wisdom of arming local police forces like platoons of Marines. And, of course, there is the matter of Michael Brown: how he died, why he died, and what could have been done to prevent it.

So many conversations to have. Just so long as we do have them, that all this might not be for naught.

The Final Report of the Smell Committee

The Final Report of the Smell Committee

A few years ago, I wrote this story. It’s long and odd and has no chance of finding a paying market, so I thought I would finally just put it out there. You’ll find an excerpt below. The full version is available for sale on Amazon, bundled with some other pieces I’ve already published here. Because Amazon does not allow you to give Kindle books away, I have to charge $.99 for it. If you don’t want to pay, you’re welcome to download the free versions linked below; they also contain the full text of the story.

THE FINAL REPORT OF THE SMELL COMMITTEE

TO: The Board of Directors

FROM: Mr. A.V. Jascowitz

Mr. B. Sykes

Mrs. E. Drake-Avilas

Mr. T.S. Holm

Ms. T. Burke

 

BACKGROUND

On Tuesday, September 8, 2012, Joseph Schultz reported a strong, musky odor near his workstation in the payroll department of the Dubuque office. Schultz claimed that he had begun to notice the smell days earlier and had assumed it would dissipate of its own accord. Instead, it had grown increasingly palpable and had begun to significantly impact his ability to work. Facility Services investigated and noted a “faint” odor, which they traced to some old food in the nearby kitchenette. That weekend, the refrigerator and all fixtures were cleaned vigorously, and the issue seemed to be resolved.

The following Monday, September 14, Schultz reported that not only had the smell not been eliminated, it had actually grown in strength; he claimed he could now smell it in a radius of 20 feet from his workspace — a distance that encompassed nearly a quarter of the building’s third floor — and that its character had changed from a simple food-related odor to a fouler, more pungent stench altogether, one that Schultz described in a garrulous stream of emails as a “stink of death” or “what hatred must smell like.” Several of Schultz’s coworkers began reporting the smell on their own, attributing it variously to paint, cleaning solvent, new carpeting or other prosaic sources. In response to the volume of complaints lodged with Facility Services, a professional steam-cleaning service was contracted to clean every square foot of the payroll department. This operation was performed on September 22, again to no avail, and the payroll staff reported to work the following day to find the smell had returned undiminished.

With no options apparently remaining, Facility Services had little solace to offer Schultz or his colleagues, who resorted to their own methods to attempt to restore comfort to their workspace. Payroll Director Dot Freidburger organized a floor-wide effort to improve the work environment, with employees bringing in, at their own expense, a variety of air fresheners, air purifiers, potpourri sachets and other similar items. These invariably proved ineffective: potpourri turned dry and brittle within a few days; a potted fichus plant took on a peculiar chalky texture before crumbling into dust; and chemical air fresheners either had no apparent effect at all or else made the odor worse. Freidburger and her colleagues abandoned their efforts, and no further attempt was made by the employees to combat the smell.

Several emails from this period subsequently reviewed by the Committee reveal instances of poor work performance, unusual behavior or cognitive difficulties whose potential severity went unrecognized at the time. Payroll Specialist Amelia Beakman filed a quarterly Paid Time Off Usage Report that actually consisted of a thousand-word description of an erotic dream; she later claimed to have included the material through a simple cut-and-paste error and was not disciplined. Several employees were cited for failing to report to work, explaining later they had confused the day with Saturday or Sunday, though one in particular claimed, with no lack of embarrassment, that she had forgotten she was employed by the Company at all. Formerly outgoing men and women were observed to become quiet and withdrawn, and several emails sent to Human Resources took on an ominous cast. “I can’t sleep at night,” one employee wrote, “because all I think about is having to come back here and work in this smell.” Another wrote, “Do something. If you don’t, somebody will. This isn’t any kind of a threat. But you don’t understand how people are feeling here.” Continue reading →

We Allowed This to Happen

We Allowed This to Happen

That is all I could think as this horrible story unfolded. Sure, some of us speak up every time a new outbreak of violence occurs while others of us make excuses. But we all settle down afterwards and, in effect, shrug our shoulders. Yeah, there’s some nutcases out there. What are ya gonna do? We’re horrified, and then we get over it, and then it happens again, each incident somehow more senseless — and in an appalling way, less surprising — than the last.

We have decided, as a culture, that these endless massacres are an acceptable price for what we choose to interpret as “freedom.” We’ve decided this because a substantial number of us feel that without free access to weapons, our liberty is not guaranteed — and that any effort to restrict gun ownership is, ipso facto, a direct prelude to enslavement.

We as a culture have to un-decide that.

There are legal remedies that would help prevent these incidents, were they properly enforced. But laws can only go as far as the culture will allow. There is a faction in this country — and yes, I am shifting from first person to third at this point — who have long ago made some kind of accommodation in their hearts to the mass murder of their fellow citizens. I have no problem with hunters who want to be able to take out the occasional deer or pheasant; it’s not my thing, but I don’t begrudge it. I have a huge problem with Second Amendment absolutists who talk tough but who are consumed with fear: of their neighbors, of other races and religions, of their personal existential powerlessness, and most of all, of their government.

It’s dark moments like this that lead me to think the American experiment has failed, and that there really are two distinct and incompatible cultures striving for dominance in this country. One is pledged to the values of the European Enlightenment, embracing one of mankind’s finest inventions — secular representative government — as a means of expanding the potential for success, happiness and progress for all people. The other is permanently stuck back on the frontier, believing that man is essentially ungovernable and that the only liberties you have are the ones you can defend with your own hands.

“We have met the enemy,” satirist Walt Kelly once said, “and he is us.” How is it that the thought of the government taking away your assault rifle is more frightening than the thought of another group of kids being senselessly cut down? How do we stop choosing to let things like Newtown happen?