After

we fall asleep cheek to cheek,
all the day's dance
dissolving into loose jaws and
untidy limbs and the sweet sighs of dreams.

we lose our definition
to each other,
as one as two in sleep.
no seeing, just being.

i like to imagine so many
of our shared breaths
leaving our lips and
coming together to
carry on an invisible routine,
of which we aren't aware.

Oh-Bah-Ma

So it's Friday and I'm at my desk at work and I know I shouldn't be blogging right now but also it's been a hard week and I've done a lot of hard work and at the moment, nothing is urgent, and, and, so it goes.

This has been quite a week with the new president coming to office and all the festivities in D.C. and watching history unfold, that oft-repeated cliche. Closer to home, my homeless friend scared the daylights out of me the other morning when he jumped in front of me (where he jumped from, I have no idea) and yelled out Jack Nicholson-style, "who's your daddy?" When I jumped in return (out of being startled, not a sympathy gesture), he then goes, "just kidding, just kidding," and walked away. Just another day in the neighborhood with the people that you meet each day.

The day after the inauguration, on the crowded 22 bus, we stop at a light and some man runs up to the bus, yells something cheerfully, and runs away. "What he say," asks some girl sitting in the back, turning to her friend. Her friend replied, "He said 'Obama.' Oh-bah-mah! Oh-bah-mah!"

Ready for Change

tonight football at a friend's, the dark light of night staved off, that sundayitis made-to-hide-us, for a few hours at least. sandwiches with roasted peppers. pita and corn chips. a bowl of sauce. the alcohol running. the child comes in, watches mommy and daddy drink beer, shits her diaper, gets taken to the back room. the men on the screen advance forward and backward in the shivering cold. and on commercials, we switch over to the inaugural concert. everybody's playing with a smile in the frigid dc air for barack obama and dc does look its gorgeous self, all those stars and celebrities and the happy crowd, but mainly the monuments so grandiose and showing off and knowing it. what a city, my former city. and there's a little homesickness and there's some tears that want to well up for the momentousness of the occasion, that the bushes are leaving, finally they're leaving, and a new regime is coming in, one that holds promise to be inclusive. never seen so many so-called minority faces up and parading across the america's stage. it is so beautiful and so long in coming and i am, i am, i am ready for that change.

Avoiding the Subject of the Devil

A silly gaggle of writers gathered tonight to hear about Tasmania. No devils were mentioned, like so many other elephants in the room. Limpid, pale people dined on abalone, shells shining bright to catch the spotlights, particularly when someone accidentally would walk in front of projector that was displaying various images from the island: all sorts of sheep and nude statues and abstract art and modern wallabies. The wine flowed as the conversation droned on, and I flittered around, on the outskirts, playing with a piece of cheese, like the mouse that might scare the elephant, so many devils inside.

Mixed Messages

it's hot hot hot out and it's stirring up all the crazies outside. the homeless man i mentioned before was standing on the street corner shouting "HELP ME. SOMEBODY HELP ME!" So this woman approaches him to offer help and he turns on her, screams at her, "you don't know me. back off bitch!"

BART and the Riots

On New Year's day at an East Bay BART station, a policeman stared at the back of one 22-year-old Oscar Grant and discharged his weapon, a shot that proved fatal. Since then, I've watched this story percolate and grow, knowing it was only a matter of time before it started getting the attention it deserved. This black man was shot in the back by a white police offer while he was lying on the ground, and so far BART police or the officer himself has offered no explanation at all. Instead they ask the public for patience.

But it's '09. There are already at least three videos virally circulating the news sites and the web taken from witnesses at the scene with camera-equipped cell phones, showing what happened, if not what went on in the mind of the officer when he took that shot. Did he feel threatened? Did he think he'd grabbed his taser instead? Or, did he just intend to cold-bloodedly fire that shot as soon as he started fumbling for his gun?

We don't know because no one has spoken up. But the public is starting to. Today, there were protests that ended up closing down two BART stations near Oakland, and at this moment, there is rioting going on in the streets. While the reaction is delayed, it doesn't surprise me, just as it didn't surprise me to hear that the lawyer who represented Rodney King will be representing Oscar Grant's family. What a terrible loss they are suffering through right now, made no easier by the BART P.R. machine (what are you thinking, BART P.R. machine, to keep asking for patience, patience, patience, like you're Axl Rose singing that lazy song?). My thoughts and condolences go out to Grant's family and friends.

The Oxymorons

Obama moved to DC today, and is staying at the historic Hay-Adams Hotel until inauguration because Bush is too much of a dick to let him stay in the residence usually set aside for the president-elect. In the meantime, Bush Senior is jabbering on about how his dear Jeb should be president next, and I just want to gag. As the "pop culture" specialist guy on Rachel Maddow said tonight, "what Bushes? why do you hate America so"?

In the meantime, I'm having major ambivalence towards Israel right now. On the one hand, they've sustained a rather unreported 300 missile fires out of Gaza by Hamas and into the southern end of the country. So I get that it needs to defend itself. It's teensy tiny and still a baby, in world power terms. But does it have to defend itself at the expense of civilians?? Or is that an oxymoron? Not to sound too hopelessly idealistic, but why is it the people who pay most for wars are the ones who didn't make them in the first place? As long as civilians are being killed, Israel's going to lose the PR war, which is so much of the battle. After thousands of years, you think they'll ever just lay down their guns, Israelites and Palestinians, and just start kissing instead, or at least laughing at themselves for wasting so much time on foolishness? Yes, I said it. I fear for what will happen there, to all those antiquities, so storied and so historied and so imbued with spiritual and religious meaning to so many, but still in the end JUST SO MANY THINGS. Isn't one life, just one, an entire world?