Echoes,
winding through time, remaining the remnants of
before, hollow reminders calling from every-
where, coming from nowhere, start sud-
denly, and slowly fading, straggling
away, disappearing, but held
for a moment, then reel-
ing and spiraling to
the place where
echoes hide
and die
crying
Linguistically Speaking
Sometimes I click on the links for Blogthings and take the little quizzes. Most of the time they’re just fun, silly things.
| Your Dominant Intelligence is Linguistic Intelligence |
| You are excellent with words and language. You explain yourself well. An elegant speaker, you can converse well with anyone on the fly. You are also good at remembering information and convincing someone of your point of view. A master of creative phrasing and unique words, you enjoy expanding your vocabulary. You would make a fantastic poet, journalist, writer, teacher, lawyer, politician, or translator. |
Wait. Did this thing just say I’d make a good LAWYER?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Please excuse me while I pick myself up off the floor.
I hate practicing law most days. I spend the day with my ear glued to a telephone listening to people complain. Often I listen to them cry. This is where I sheepishly confess that while they are crying I am usually playing solitaire, cold-hearted bitch lawyer that I am. It’s not that I’m unsympathetic, but I’ve heard it all so many times before.
If it weren’t for the clients, the practice of law would always be fun.
I have a general law practice, and I am the only attorney in the office. That is good because there is barely room enough for me here in the alcove off my kitchen. Days when Jane comes we are crowded and busy. Jane is my right hand and my left brain. I could never practice law without her. In fact, when she took two years of maternity leave, I practically shut my doors. Thank god she’s back because Jack and I were getting hungry.
I handle a lot of divorce and family matters. I also have a pretty active juvenile law side to my practice. I adore the business, real estate, and estate planning clients because their needs are normally simple and straightforward. It’s these children and their families that make me insane.
When a kid is in trouble with the law, when a couple is divorcing, when children have been snatched by the state for abuse, when there is a fight over custody and visitation, my clients are not rational people capable of reason and logic. Emotions run so high, in fact, that I hear myself telling the same clients the same information over and over and over again. They’re just too stressed out to put what I tell them in their long-term memory banks. I don’t resent telling them the same things over and over – I understand how stressed they are. But there are times when I wish they would just write down what I tell them.
Once I represented another divorce lawyer in her divorce. She asked me three times which judge was assigned to her case and then asked where the courtroom was. This woman practiced in that courtroom in front of that judge regularly! The stress of family upheaval makes people nuts.
And clients lie. Oh, how they lie. They spin their facts and mislead their attorneys and we usually don’t find out about it until settlement conferences, or worse, when we are in court. I give every client the same lecture at the beginning of the case: “Tell me everything, no matter how damaging or negatively you think it reflects on you. The other side will bring it up. If I don’t already know about it, I can’t plan a response that makes you look good. ”
I’m capable of spinning most facts in my client’s favor, but only if I know those facts in advance. Sure I can think on my feet, but getting broadsided with unexpected proof is excruciatingly unpleasant. And even though I investigate the case, no one but the client and the opposing party knows the client’s secrets, and the opposing party would rather blindside me in court to get me stuttering. If I can’t respond adequately, my client isn’t responding adequately, and no matter how hard I may have worked on it, the integrity of the case is compromised. And that is the client’s fault, not the lawyer’s fault.
Then there are whiner clients. These are the ones who call up every day because they think the “counselor” part of my title means I’m a therapist. They could find a better therapist for much less than what I charge an hour.
There was this one guy I represented in a divorce a number of years ago who called three times a day, minimum. He always “wanted an update.” What he couldn’t seem to get through his head that if I was on the phone telling him nothing had happened yet, I couldn’t be on the phone with his ex-wife’s lawyer. If I was on the phone with him, I wasn’t drafting the settlement agreement. If I was on the phone with him, listening to him carry on about how poorly he was treated during his marriage, I wasn’t working on his case. But he was taking up my time and you had better believe I was billing him.
I told him that when something happened in his case he would be the first to know. I explained that what he was telling me should be shared with a therapist. No, he wanted to talk to me. I can’t do a damn thing about his broken heart. He was taking away from time I could have been using much more productively. He just had to talk to me. Every card that I turned over in those countless solitaire games cost him money. Of course, he complained about the fees. Had he gotten the therapist it would have cost him much less in the long run. And a therapist may have been able to help him deal with his broken heart.
Some clients believe I wait in my office all day for them to come to me with their cases, and that once they leave me I will devote 100% of my time to their case until it is completed. They disregard completely the fact that at any given time I have anywhere from 75-100 other clients, some of whom actually have the audacity to think that they should have priority. The worst offenders in this category are friends and family. After all, I’m probably doing the case for free or damn close to it, so why shouldn’t I put it at the top of my list?
I have this one relative who likes me to handle real estate deals for her. Let’s call her “Auntie Itchy.” Auntie Itchy is well situated in life and has her hands in many pies, mostly of the vegetative sort that are grown here in Arkansas. She sometimes needs deeds, contracts, mortgages, leases, and the like, so she calls me.
As soon as I get off the phone with her, Jane and I are flinging files, slamming drawers, pulling out forms, looking up legal descriptions, calculating amortization schedules, and generally freaking out because we know the phone will ring again before we have everything pulled together and Auntie will be demanding to know why she doesn’t have her document yet.
Twenty whole minutes may have passed, and we aren’t moving fast enough to suit her. Auntie is very imperious and demanding. She is not at all understanding. And if I really need to be in court getting a protective order because some child is being sexually molested by mom’s boyfriend, I just need to shift my focus to the truly important thing: Auntie’s fucking lease. For the millionth time, I swear I will never again represent a friend or family member.
What do I do when friends and family come to me and beg? You guessed it. I take the case. Representing friends has cost me more than one friendship. It’s friends who sue their lawyers for malpractice when they don’t like the outcome of the case. That’s right. These friends are the clients I do listen to sympathetically, who I undercharge for my services, who call me at 11:00 at night (or 2:00 in the morning), who I don’t hassle when they are three months late paying my bill.
Those friends are the ones who threaten me and actually hire another lawyer to sue me because they didn’t get the miracle they wanted in court. Of course, I probably told them they were going to get less than what they ended up with, but still, anything they didn’t get is my fault because after all, I proved I could get more than I told them when I – true story – won their freaking case!
Clients also don’t understand that for their lawyers, the case is not personal. It is a case file that needs to be worked, investigated, prepared, and concluded. It has a beginning, middle, and end. The client’s case is not the lawyer’s life – except in death penalty cases, but I don’t do adult criminal law so that doesn’t apply here. We have lots of cases, and none of them are “life” to us.
Furthermore, opposing counsel is the person we play tennis with, went to law school with, see at cocktail parties, and hang out with on weekends. Our kids go to school together. Lawyers tend to be friends with other lawyers. That’s why we speak to each other in friendly tones. We are doing our job, but our job is not to make enemies of the people we work with or with our friends. We work as hard as we can, but we work with a detachment from the emotions that our clients are caught up in. Clients get angry because lawyers aren’t as emotional about their cases as the clients are. I work hard for my clients, but I am not going to get ulcers over them.
Practicing law isn’t all bad.
I love crafting a good argument in a brief. I enjoy the interplay of cross-examining witnesses. I revel in the satisfaction that the right person is taking the children home and that the kids are safe and won’t be abused. I like the feeling of accomplishment when the contracts or wills are signed and the files closed. I get so high when I win a difficult case in court – I go around declaring “DAMN, I’m good!” to everyone within earshot. I’ve held several leadership positions in the local and state bar associations. It’s an honor to be chosen for those positions.
It’s not like I’m some fat cat always sitting in my office collecting fees – hell, half my clients stiff me. I do represent poor people for no fee at all, and I don’t resent doing so when I see that I’m making sure someone without money has the same access to the legal system as someone who does have it. But I think it’s only fair that those pro bono cases should be my choice to take, not be imposed on me by clients who can pay but simply choose not to.
There is one woman I represented very early in my career. She still pays me $25.00 per month. That’s what she can afford to send, so that’s what I accept from her. I’m not an unreasonable ogre when it comes to collecting my fee, but if I’ve done the work I deserve to be paid.
The lows so outweigh the highs in this job. Sometimes I really wish I had become a librarian instead.
The Hunt for WMD Continues
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Terror Watch: The Hunt for WMD Continues
Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R. – Mich.) demanded in recent weeks that US intelligence agencies continue to look for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He might be another voice in the crowd, but unfortunately he is the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. The intelligence officials who report to his committee say there is nothing new to discover.
We have been in Iraq for three years now. The UN weapons inspectors found nothing in the years preceding our invasion of Iraq, and since the invasion nothing of any significance has been found. Yet Rep. Hoekstra wants to devote hundreds more man hours to continue looking for these phantom WMDs.
To be fair, some old chemical weapons have been found. Recently 300 old chemical shells were found, and there were 500 sarin shells found earlier. All of these shells, though, dated back to before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. They were in such bad condition they couldn’t have conceiveably been used for any destructive purpose.
Saddam Hussein did not possess WMDs before President Bush decided to invade Iraq. He apparently had no plans to revive his program. The WMDs that justified the invasion did not exist. We went to war over phantom chemicals.
Hoekstra insists that “there are continuing threats from the materials that are or may still be in Iraq.” The thing is, though, Hoekstra has said he wants the intelligence agencies “to more fully pursue a complete investigation of what existed in Iraq before the war.” BEFORE the war? Why? It’s beating such a dead horse! They don’t exist, and even if they do, they are in such poor shape they can’t be used! Why waste the manpower and money to continue this wild goose chase? Is he that desperate to somehow vindicate the White House? Even the White House has backed off on its claims of WMDs.
Jamal Ware, a spokesman for Hoekstra, asserts that Hoekstra’s main concern is that all munitions dumps and sites that could still pose a hazard to U.S. soldiers be found. “Any effort that chairman Hoekstra has made in this area has been aimed at insuring the safety of our troops overseas,” he said. So it’s not to make the Iraqi people more secure. It’s to make our soldiers more secure. But the alleged WMDs don’t pose a threat to our people!
There are those in the U.S. intelligence community who see Hoekstra’s demands as a waste of time. One source Hoekstra claimed for proof of the existence of the WMDs was Georges Sada, a former Iraqi Air Force general who claimed in a book that chemical weapons were flown from Iraq to Syria prior to the U.S. invasion. Sada has admitted he never actually saw any of the weapons, but his allegations were prominently featured on Fox News.
The bottom line is that more than three years into the war, the mission is not accomplished and is unlikely ever to be accomplished. There are better and more productive things to spend our intelligence resources on than a search for ghosts.
The Gift
She was gift-wrapped just for you
in the prettiest paper she could find,
and tied with a ribbon to match
the shade of her eyes.
Her small box was taped
securely shut. Inside
she was laid in a bed on soft, white tissue
because she was fragile, and might break.
One of many packages
under your tree she waited
for you on Christmas morning.
When you opened her
you cast aside the green ribbon,
and admired the paper, careful
not to rip it. With scissors
you sliced the box’s tape and
said the tissue bed was nice.
You pulled her out, then with your
scissors casually snipped out
her heart, dropped it, and crushed it.
‘Just a Comma’ on National Punctuation Day
According to the Carpetbagger Report, which can be accessed on the Think Progress website, this afternoon on CNN’s Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, George W. Bush practically said that all the sectarian violence in Iraq is irrelevant. When history views what is going on in Iraq now, Bush claims it will be seen as “just a comma.”
Is it just me, or does anyone else think he needs to go back to primary school and learn punctuation?
This is what was said:
BLITZER: Let’s move on and talk a little bit about Iraq. Because this is a huge, huge issue, as you know, for the American public, a lot of concern that perhaps they are on the verge of a civil war, if not already a civil war…. We see these horrible bodies showing up, tortured, mutilation. The Shia and the Sunni, the Iranians apparently having a negative role. Of course, al Qaeda in Iraq is still operating.
BUSH: Yes, you see — you see it on TV, and that’s the power of an enemy that is willing to kill innocent people. But there’s also an unbelievable will and resiliency by the Iraqi people…. Admittedly, it seems like a decade ago. I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma because there is — my point is, there’s a strong will for democracy.
Presumably, our Ivy League-educated Miscommunicator in Chief meant that all the mutilations, the suicide bombs, the beheadings, as well as all the senseless murder of civilian men, women, and children in the marketplaces and at mosques, will be only a footnote in Iraqi history. That would make more sense, anyway.
I find it extremely hard to believe that what is happening in Iraq right now will be reduced to some kind of punctuation mark – a squiggle that doesn’t even mention it. Heck, I’ll go out on a limb and admit that I believe that it will even merit considerably more than a footnote! The Boston Tea Party merits more than a footnote, after all, and it had all the hallmarks of a fraternity prank, the likes of which I’m sure our esteemed chief executive was familiar with at Yale. If dumping a cargo of tea into Boston Harbor is part of the legend of American democracy, surely the mutilations and murders of thousands of people over a period of a few months will be part of the legend of Iraqi democracy.
How could we have re-elected this idiot? How could this fool ever have been elected president in the first place? Oh, yeah. I forgot. He wasn’t.
Perhaps Bush decided to make this comment because today is National Punctuation Day. No kidding. It really is.
September 18, 1991
Exactly fifteen years ago I was in very hard labor. No epidural. No progress. I had this incredibly big little person inside me struggling to get out, and my body was not cooperating. My poor husband was massaging my lower back for all he was worth. The Three Stooges ignored us and went on with their antics on TV. Jack was almost three weeks late making his appearance into the world.
At about 10:00 in the morning, after 11 hours of no progress in my labor, the decision was made to do a Caesarian. My regular doctor was not on call, and young Doogie Howser, his new partner, showed up for the surgery.
“Why is my side hurting so much?” I screamed at him between contractions.
“I don’t know,” he responded with a worried look. Great, I thought to myself. Then I yelled with another contraction.
The epidural, which came after 12 hours of contractions less than two minutes apart, was a blessing. As the epidural kicked in and the pain left, I was exhausted but relaxed. It was a welcome relief.
Almost as soon as the pain dissipated, Jana, one of my best friends, breezed into the room. I don’t think she was supposed to be there, but as a federal prosecutor she tends to go wherever she wants. My husband left to grab a meal. There was a monitor hooked to my belly that measured the contractions on a visible graph.
“Wow,” she said. “That was a big one. Did you feel it?
“Um, not really. I was feeling them earlier, but the epidural made the pain go away.”
“Oooooh, check that one out! It really peaked!”
“Jana, I don’t want to know. I’ve been kinda suffering here.”
“Yeah, but you don’t feel it now. Wow. See how it starts out low and the just surges up? Are you sure the baby isn’t coming? Because that contraction looked like it went over the top of the meter.”
“Jana!”
“Oh. Sorry. But it’s really cool to watch the muscle contractions on this machine.”
At that point Doogie Howser came in and fiddled with one of the other machines I was hooked up to. “Hmmmm,” he mused.
“What?” I asked.
“Well, we ought to go on and get you prepped for surgery right away.”
“Is the baby ok? Is there something wrong?” I asked, feeling a surge of hormonal emotion through the seductive sedation of the epidural. At that moment I was almost panicked because I didn’t care – I just wanted the ordeal over with.
“No, no. He’s doing fine. We just need to get him out of you.” Doogie looked a little worried, and left the room quickly.
“Did you hear that? What he said about the baby?” I asked Jana. She had a serious look on her face and I wondered if she could see something on a monitor that I couldn’t.
“The baby’s fine,” she said reassuringly. “They’re going to do a C-Section and both of you will be fine.”
“No, I mean he said the baby is a boy. He said ‘he’ is doing fine.”
Jana’s mouth formed a silent “oh.”
My husband and I had intentionally refused to know the sex of our baby. We wanted it to be a surprise, the old-fashioned way. Now just before delivery, a doc slips up and tells me I have a boy. I had wanted a girl so bad I could taste it. Damn. My husband wanted a son, of course. I hated the name a son would have. And irrationally, I was more upset about the fact that I knew the gender of my kid than I was about the fact that I was about to have major emergency surgery.
“Whatever you do, don’t tell,” I said. Jana nodded her agreement. When Doogie Howser came back he launched into a long explanation of why they had to do an emergency C-Section. I never heard a word he said.
“Hold on,” I interrupted.
“You have a question?” he asked.
“No, there’s something I have to tell you,” I said. “When you said the baby was doing fine you used the word ‘he.’ We didn’t want to know whether the baby is a boy or girl until he’s born.”
In 1991 it was much more common to know the child’s gender before birth than not. Poor Young Doogie had a horrified look on his face. I could tell he was worried about how his bedside manner was coming across.
“Please, just don’t tell my husband, ok?” I asked.
Doogie blustered, “Well, ‘he’ is kind of a generic pronoun, you know. I just said ‘he’ for the heck of it. It might be a girl.” I knew he was lying. Poor Doogie. I felt sorry for him. But I really didn’t want my husband to have the same flash of disappointment I did when I learned too soon that Jack, not Laura Elizabeth, was to be our baby. I wasn’t disappointed that it was Jack, I was disappointed to know, before he was actually born.
The nurses prepped me for surgery then kicked Jana out. As they wheeled me and my bed into the operating room, Jana called to me, “See you in a few minutes!” That epidural sure was making me feel good.
Doogie loomed over me in surgery. “You’re going to stay awake if we can manage that,” he said. I just nodded. He made the incision. Then he went back over it. I had a vision of an X-Acto knife going through foam. I hoped he wouldn’t cut the baby.
“Wow, that’s a lot of muscle!” one of the nurses exclaimed. “Have you been doing sit-ups or something?” Yeah, I thought to myself. With a ten month belly I can do sit-ups.
The truth was, I really had done sit-ups as far into my pregnancy as possible. I have a sway back, and all my life I had been told to do sit-ups to strengthen my abdominal muscles. Because of lower back problems, I knew I had to keep my abdominal muscles strong or pregnancy would be destructive to my back. I did at least 50 a day until my belly was too cumbersome to allow me to move.
They had to lengthen the initial incision. From the comments the nurses were making, Doogie must have been sawing through pure Pittsburgh steel to get to the baby. Then Jack’s head popped out. He gave a cry immediately. My husband was standing near my head and told me, “It looks like that scene from Alien.” Alien. Yes. Sigourney Weaver’s finest acting hour. And the monster that erupts from the man’s chest and goes skittering out of the room – eeeewwww.
It did not appear that Jack would be doing any skittering, though, because the delivery crew couldn’t get his shoulders through the slit in my abdominally superior body. Three nurses and Dougie were working on the problem, and finally they decided brute force was the answer. On a count of three, they jumped on my belly. Over and over again. I felt like I was getting navel CPR. Somewhere a baby was crying. After about five jumps, Jack’s shoulders came free.
When they gave him to me the first thing I saw were his dimples. He has his dad’s dimples! Deep, sweet dimples! “Awww, honey,” I said, “he’s got your dimples. And your hair.” He had his dad’s blond hair and hairline and I already saw the twin cowlicks on his forehead.
Jack is the best thing I’ve ever done, and he is my favorite person. He is the most important person in my life. He is “Jack” because I don’t like his real name. No, his real name isn’t John. The nickname came from his dad’s maternal grandfather who had an awful name, too. When Grandpa was drafted and went to Ft. Hood, his buddies decided to call him “Jack,” and the name stuck with him for a lifetime. It seemed like an appropriate nickname for my son, who is saddled with the same name as his father and his other grandfather.
Jack is extremely smart. He tests higher than I do on IQ tests, which is saying something (I’m not trying to brag on myself, but on my kid!) He tests in school at the 99th percentile in all verbal fields, and at the 85th or above in everything else. He is creative. He and a friend are writing a script for a TV series that will be a riot if it’s ever actually aired. He is kind and good. He is empathic. He is good with little kids. He has a crush on a girl and he’s actually trying to work up the nerve to ask her to a movie. I am a very lucky mom. I have a fantastic teenage baby!
I will eventually write about all of the joys of being Jack’s mom. Yes, I adore my kid and I always have. Even Laura Elizabeth could not have been an improvement on him.
Happy 15th birthday, Jack. I love you most.
9/11 Takes to Comics – Seriously
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This goes in the category of disbelief. Or does it?
The 9/11 Commission Report was long-winded and confusing. It was written in words not every eighth grader understood easily. It didn’t have colorful pictures. So a couple of guys with some experience in the genre adapted it to the comic book format.
At first, I was not very accepting of this idea. As I have sat here thinking about it, though, I am warming to the notion. Not all “graphic novels” are comic. Take, for example, V for Vendetta. Nothing humorous there, was there? Even Batman and Superman weren’t funny. Entertaining, yes. Gripping and compelling, yes. But not exactly newsworthy stuff.
Hang on, though. The guys who did the graphic adaptation of the 9/11 Commission Report had experience working on sweet little funnies like Richie Rich and Casper (the friendly ghost, not Weinberger). They didn’t have experience working on non-fiction, or even serious graphic fiction.
The idea is to put the commission’s report into language and context that any quasi-literate American can understand. That’s a laudable idea. Any words in balloons are direct quotes from the commission’s report, claim the authors. That, too, is laudable. The authors researched the report beyond the language of the report itself, which is certainly a good reporting practice.
Now, suppose ABC had shown similar attention to facts when it created its “docudrama” that aired on either side of the president’s speech Monday night?
It says a lot when comic books are more socially responsible than a major television news network.
Gaining Respect for (gulp) Condoleezza
Lawyers and G.O.P. Chiefs Resist Proposal on Tribunal – New York Times
Selected portions of this astounding article:
“The Bush administration’s proposal to bring leading terrorism suspects before military tribunals met stiff resistance Thursday from key Republicans and top military lawyers who said some provisions would not withstand legal scrutiny or do enough to repair the nation’s tarnished reputation internationally….
“The administration officials, who agreed to discuss internal administration deliberations in exchange for anonymity, said the decision to transfer high-level terror suspects from Central Intelligence Agency prisons to military custody had been the result of months of secret debate at the highest levels of government.
“The officials said the change had been most vigorously championed by the State Department, under Condoleezza Rice, against some resistance from a range of officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, who had defended the status quo, in which high-level leaders of Al Qaeda, including the man identified as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, have been held in secret C.I.A custody.
“Brig, Gen. James C. Walker, the top uniformed lawyer for the Marines, said that no civilized country should deny a defendant the right to see the evidence against him and that the United States ‘should not be the first.’
“Maj. Gen. Scott C. Black, the judge advocate general of the Army, made the same point, and Rear Adm. Bruce E. MacDonald, the judge advocate general of the Navy, said military law provided rules for using classified evidence, whereby a judge could prepare an unclassified version of the evidence to share with the jury and the accused and his lawyer.
Senate Republicans said the proposal to deny the accused the right to see classified evidence was one of the main points of contention remaining between them and the administration.
‘It would be unacceptable, legally, in my opinion, to give someone the death penalty in a trial where they never heard the evidence against them,’ said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who has played a key role in the drafting of alternative legislation as a member of the Armed Services Committee and a military judge. ‘”Trust us, you’re guilty, we’re going to execute you, but we can’t tell you why”? That’s not going to pass muster; that’s not necessary.”
I may have to rethink my total disgust with absolutely every member of the Bush administration. This NYT article tells us that Condi actually opposes holding suspected terrorists in secret CIA prisons. She apparently even wants to give them a trial before they are executed. Yes, a member of the Bush administration thinks perhaps due process should at least be given a nod with respect to these people.
The article says she and Cheney have been in conflict over this subject. Anyone in the administration who stands up to Cheney has my attention, if not my respect. That man scares the hell out of me. W observed the same vice presidential plan as his father – pick one that would be a much worse president and guarantee no one will opt for assassination.
How should our government prosecute someone when the evidence against them is classified? The Bush administration would simply say that the defendant shouldn’t know the classified evidence against him, but should be convicted anyway. This violates the Confrontation Clause in the US Constitution, which provides that a criminal defendant should be fully apprised of the evidence against him and be able to confront the witnesses presenting that evidence.
The Confrontation Clause is part of the Bill of Rights, those first ten Amendments to the Constitution that address the basic rights and freedoms that all people should have. This is where we find the freedom of speech and religion, the right to be secure in our homes against government intrusion, the right of states to organize militias, the criminal defendant’s right to a lawyer, the right to associate with whomever we wish.
Why was this included in the Bill of Rights? We should keep in mind that the framers of our constitution were considered criminals themselves at one point in their lives: immediately before and during the revolutionary war. In crafting the constitution there were months of heated debate and argument about wehat to include and how it should be include d. The framers carefully worded each phrase so as to lay a foundation for a free society.
I think if any of the framers were alive today to see how much government intrusion there is in our daily lives, they would be shocked senseless.
But back to the issue of confrontation: When one is accused of a crime and subject to losing his liberty or his life becauseof the accusations, he must know what the evidence is and he must be given a lawyer so that he can do his best to effectively counter it. His liberty is on the line. His life may be on the line. The Bush administration would have us support keeping the terrorist suspects in custody as well as the prisoners of war held at Guantanamo Bay, just because the administration doesn’t want to explain what the evidence is.
This is the same administration that insisted Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, remember? And it says, just like when it justified going to war in Iraq, “we have good evidence, but we’re not going to tell you what it is.”
The chief executive of the United States government should support the constitution enthusiastically and without exception. This administration has sought ways around it and other laws at every turn. It diminishes my respect for the government.
Villanelle
We sat and watched the leaves, and children played
In parks where flowers bloomed and grass was green
We didn’t know for how long we would stay
To wait for autumn’s golds to turn to gray.
We clutched each other’s hands while sunlight streamed.
We sat and watched the leaves and children play.
We two were trapped by habit. Every day
We begged for freedom calmly in our dreams.
We didn’t know for how long we would stay
Together, but there was no easy way
To break ourselves apart and still not bleed.
We sat and watched as leaves and children played.
The tangled paths we wove along our way,
We thought, would give us something to believe.
How long, we didn’t know, but still we stayed
To hide in desperate lies, to learn to pray
To something other than what we believed.
We sit and watch the leaves, and children play.
We don’t know for how long, still we stay.
Departures
Tonight, I’ll level this house.
But now, to save myself, here’s a hemlock
created to keep me sane:
Valium soaked in tequila is washed away
with an Alka-Seltzer chaser.
I sit alone in a red room
Waiting for your punch line.
Your joke is not funny
And I sip the cocktail
Designed to fill me with venom.
You cleared your throat last night
In your sleep you rolled over,
Embraced your pillow. Morning came
And you said you loved me,
Pretending I didn’t feel you
Touching her as you touched me.
Today I asked about the girl in your pillow.
You shrugged and looked the other way.
You tried not to smile as
Icicles grew around your teeth.
I take another poison swallow.
It shudders through me like primed gunpowder
And I wait to explode.