Lexicon (The Way It Looked in 2003)

By politicide I mean a process that has, as its ultimate goal, the dissolution of the Palestinian people’s existence as a legitimate social, political, and economic entity…. Politicide is a process that covers a wide…

Some of What’s Not on Your CV

Your allusive ode to your soul-pal (“I am because you are”) That incendiary haiku you gave to Mona on the porch What prompted your most intense torrent of tears That photo of the blissed-out Hindu…

Disobedience

U.S. historian Howard Zinn once said, “The Holocaust might serve a powerful purpose if it led us to think of the world today as wartime Germany — where millions die while the rest of the population…

Minutes

1. The factory inspectors had to confront the problem of how the working day might be defined in practice. At what times should laborers get to work? Is the start-up time inside the factory or…

Lexicon/21

Sumud, Arabic, noun, state of perseverance; samid (masculine form): the steadfast, the persevering, samdeh, feminine form; samidin, plural. Sumud is watching your home turned into a prison. You, Samid, choose to stay in that prison…

A Journalist/3

When this conscience wakes And speaks out in thunder tones as it must It will need facts to use as a weapon Against injustice, barbarism and wrong It is for this reason that I carefully…

What Some People Say

Dear Rob Figured you’d enjoy this Since You’re motley like me Getting my near worthless 1976 BMW 2002 fixed at the AutoHaus I was sitting in the waiting room going over my Yiddish vocab When…

The Typewriter Is Holy

Later this summer at Cafe Ventana, I’ll be facilitating a reading group of the new book, The Essential Ginsberg.  I was just rereading Bill Morgan’s history,  The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat…