Because Obama has won today

Because Obama has won today
one must force change

which translates into:

cut out junk food, car pool, save, avoid the drive through, invest wisely, volunteer, turn off the TV, read more poetry, read more books. Get off oil.
Tell jokes. Help your kid with their homework.
If your hair is white
dye it blue. If it is blue dye
it pink. If you drink
too much, learn to like yoga, or poetry,
or painting, or buying art.

If you hate your body image, change it
and wear the gowns and disguises you admire,
they are no more different than boiled bones,
arrowheads and gold chains. They are no more
different than charcoal suits.

Because Obama won today
chew patience, for long
years of slow work
are paved only one city block at a time.
How long did it take to build the Parthenon?
Because Obama won today
keep it real.
Because Obama won today
allow yourself to open up,
like the country once was;
Not the geography, but the spirit.

Because Obama won today
eat color, lean your life, give your heart away.

You must change your life.

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Summer Poetry Reading in Rehoboth

If anyone's interested in a mid-summer run to Rehoboth's outlet malls, consider Tuesday, July 27th, and stop by the Rehoboth Beach Librar y for the summer poetry series. Besides moi, Denise Clemmons, poet and food critic for the Cape Gazette, and Sherry Chapplle, poet and professor. Excellent company. Books will be for sale afterwards. It's a quality series, and full of surprises. Garry Hanna has done a bang-up job organizing the summer series. Bring a few quarters to ward off the meter maid. Reading starts at 7:00 PM.

Out this week: Thirty Days: Best of the 30/30 Project. Featuring my poem "Love in Reverse"

Marie Gauthier of Tupelo Press selected one of my poems, "Love in Reverse" for Thirty Days : The best of the 30/30 Project Year One. It's one of a few anthologies to feature my work (cue haughty accent, spotlight, espresso, and French cigarettes). Hopefully you'll be hearing more from me over the next few months as projects near completion. Thanks for the support.

Vittorio Carli's work is punk rock #poetry

A Passion for Apathy: The Collected and Rejected Poems of Vittorio Carl i, a small press gem of punk rock poetry, carries poetic traditions in its teeth. Punk rock because of the in-your-face-anti-establishment irony and earnestness in Carli's presentation of his verse, traditional in the homage and muse tradition of poetry. He writes to and for those and that which enlarges his voice. Carli's work reads like a cross between cultural commentary/homage to persons as varied as Lawrence Welk to Woody Allen, to snapshots of socio-political unrest, which are flags of protest. My favorite is the “The Trouble with Librarians (for Andrea)” where Librarians are cast as the progenitors of closed information; they are “all closed books/with a couple of pages missing.” He's a poet, and I imagine him in some stacked room typing madly, or in transit, to and fro Chicago, scribbling on the back of brown paper bags. He works it. He's out there living poetry. Proof. My copy of t...

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