Nov 012008
I voted against Nixon; I voted against Reagan; I voted against both Bushes — this time, while I’m voting against McCain, I am also voting for Barack Obama. That’s a good feeling.
Update: Josh Corey’s eloquent call to vote for Barack Obama.
6 Responses to “Personal History”
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I agree that I voted for Clinton in 1992 mostly because I was voting against Bush, but my vote for Clinton in 1996 was clearly for Clinton. Still, I was not very excited about it. Now I’m excited.
Yeah, it’s not that I wasn’t happy to vote for McGovern or even Clinton, but in the first case it was clear we were not going to win & in the second my enthusiasm was decidedly tempered.
MAY FLOWER : AMERICA: WORK AHEAD
Mayflower shoots
into the wind hurling
the thorn haw-fruit
windward without aim
careless of obstruction.
In daytimes, people have unsavory reasons
for things of human value, need, want and use.
When night returns aisle 23B location marker
in Long’s in North Berkeley drugstore lights-up
listing cough drops, condoms and sundries.
Mayflower shoots
into the wind hurling
the thorn haw-fruit
windward without aid
careless of obstruction.
People share clean air and love, anger, happiness,
contentment as if all unaware of roses, the apple,
peach, Bing cherry, blackberry as if they are “free
riders” as if mutual gains are not problems of “the
commons” and they not beneficiaries of the commons.
Mayflower shoots
into the wind hurling
the thorn haw-fruit
windward without aid
as if careless of obstruction.
Yearly daily, hourly, every second people are hurling themselves
windward unaware of the dynamics of the most common needs.
No other proof need we like the hawthorn are related.
Mayflower shoots
into the wind hurling
the thorn haw-fruit
windward without aid
as if careless of obstruction.
EDWARD MYCUE
for Anthony Rudolf
ANT KINGDOMS
Bring your briny canvases, add Hooker’s Green to the marine ooze’s undersea’s wealth rising with a hard lemon-candy-agitation working in the head nurse’s mouth as she tells the bed-bound old lady there are no more nonallergenic diapers & can’t do much about bedsores—-a scene Vermeer
never painted, but had he it’d’ve been bathed in amber and carried like an old mirror into auctionhouses with tones of plain-man jeering at the tall galleries, pavilions, wood theaters, journeys where no one says no to the syncopations of gold and silver : here gold and silver nuzzle the empires that flail, fall in our ant kingdoms.
EDWARD MYCUE
FISH IN A NET
My life is your story. A reinterpretation.
The where’s and when’s keep turning.
A spinning plate half-dipping
into the Pacific Ocean here at Land’s End.
We are on this tilting/raked stage
where great ships foundered.
Their great sentences of life, death—
unfinished symphonies: the future
out there our audience
who’ve driven in to watch.
Ugly is a sharp paradigm shift.
Death an epistemological rupture.
Praise for a tractor, dancing
for chump change. Red armpits.
Earth jimjams a jungle, diamond skies,
long-nailed dogs cut bark, tree
rats scurry in canopies.
Telephone call, then a summary, a
sea change, playground happenings.
Alert/Vigil/ Rely/Comply/Watch/Obey:
the wheel is round; life pushes.
Photography winds over time, westering.
Over the mind a brown shale.
Everyone there is here, Justine.
It will take, it took a lifetime to flower,
to fly, to sail this sea this thickening
light here where I hear voices
under the surface of consciousness
the bungled aspirations
with here now leprosy as a model.
Roomtone, mouthfeel, Jersey Justine,
reordering parts, rationing emotions.
Grim ire, harmony’s trigger, September.
Ripening memories pressing upward.
Death ship for new sowing.
Thickening light a sea scar.
Stardust, a diminishing gusher.
Milk as it pinkens sunrise, sunset.
Roses silt down into a lake of sleep.
Edward Mycue
HORSE AND CART
Contact is crying recognition.
Like match against surface
it is not the fire.
Flint is stone cold.
A little world, selected, limited—
home—you come in
to a house another time:
maybe you’ve stopped
noticing
things.
For life
not for red gold we work
war, hunger
dying forgetting forgotten.
For life not for red gold
our new Jerusalems struggle
for simple dreams
for days to end in.
Not how it came. How did it go?
EDWARD MYCUE