Don't Shoot
Don't shoot the rats pillaging dumpsters, or the man with rat-like eyes and rumpled suit, who orders they be set ablaze...
Don't shoot the rats pillaging dumpsters, or the man with rat-like eyes and rumpled suit, who orders they be set ablaze...
Not the shaded table by the pool where I point out a hummingbird eating nectar and my son asks, “You mean like I eat pizza?”
I remember coffee-flavored ice cream at the Royal Scoop, how it made me long to be old enough to drink espresso like Dad. I remember stepping off the plane into the sweet humid air, the tissue-paper feel of the Lei around my neck,
Is it wrong to love this world like a newborn swaddled
in peach skin, beech-tree bark, silt at the mouth of a
stream whose headwater is starlight, is ocean-honey,
is upwell of grief? World we once called mother, how
we have aged you, your fires and floods unfamiliar now,
your Tradewinds sighs of grief, signs of awful things come
to pass: you are as though reborn in our image, gods who
invented gods to quiet our minds and
I’ve come to take for granted so much--billboards and product placements, sponsored posts disguised as honest-to-goodness journalism, apps making me the product I can search and...
I'll be brief, for we are both busy and the calendar Gods have laid waste to that idyllic peace which, if we're honest, is as foreign to our forebears as to us.
But the thing about the apologue of the frog in boiling water is that it's scientifically false
"Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.” - Shoshana Zuboff
If no one but me
profits from this walk
in the woods,
what does it say
that I'm no good
at making money?
Terns carry no pass-
port, respect no borders, write
long-titled haiku
-
Read The Family-Separation Files here
After work, I rest in the wispy warmth of a waning December sun. On the table by the window, piles of half-read books leer at me and I at them. In the fading light, a hawk swoops by, hungry. Hungry, I reach for my phone; looking down, I spot a pile of dust, make a note to sweep it up
In 2008 I was a graduate student with almost no understanding of the financial system--I couldn't even explain the difference between an interest rate and an APR!…
We are all mourners now, our clothes funeral shrouds we tear off our backs when the time comes (and it will come); in one pocket we carry brushes for tidying the graves we stumble on in schools, churches, nightclubs, concerts, grocery stores, streetcorners...