[insert the why don't I get published enough lament. then add the because, you fool, you don't submit often enough. people who get published submit a lot of work. than add the, no, I doubt it, I think they are just so lucky/brilliant/well-connected that everything they submit gets accepted. now meow. jealously. say at least if I am not published in print poetry except for a few times in the Buffalo News, I will never have to give my profession as, "poet" and have people either fawn over me or avoid me like an anthrax spore. saying I do web work sounds more cool. until they find out it's unpaid. and involves -- gasp! -- art and poetry. it isn't is if I am one of those cool people who design obnoxious banner ads saying click here you have won a pink polka-dotted VW bug if you come take delivery of it in Topeka, Kansas in the next 24 hours by buying your ticket on ValuJet. And a ticket for the Bug. plus pay the overweight fee on it and submit to all sorts of hassles while they search its nooks and crannies for explosives which they might find since this is perhaps not an ad for ValuJet but a ploy, a sinister trick perpetrated by Hamas or Al-Qaeda to trap the evil American through his own greed and stupidity and blow himself up along with several hundred other innocents and their cars which they are idiotically trying to transport by airplane. No, I do not write banner ads for Al-Qaeda. Not that they have approached me and that I have turned them down. You see I am hard up for cash and if they paid cash _ahead of time_ (I don't accept web design fees in the afterlife, with all the virgins at my feet and hopefully at more than my feet or I would be sorely disappointed but you know all the virgins, well, screwing me, but really you know who wants to be screwed by a virgin? they have no technique and tend to squeal or if male just squirt and go to sleep with little before or afterplay; what fun is that? anyway, I don't accept sexual favors in the afterlife or even the pure sight of Allah the magnificent as payment for web design.) I'd need cold hard cash. So if a putative Islamic terrorist organization were to come to be to ask for a banner ad and the price were right, I might consider it, but the attendant risks are great here in this country where there is no more free speech... so better be a web artist, than a mouse for hire lest the wrong people hire you. Of course my art itself could be objectionable to georgie porgie, donald rumface and all the rest of the cabinet of fools who run this country in my name -- after all, I might use their name in vain -- the Germans did and now they are the bad guys, so much so that we have abandoned all pretext of having an Alliance with France and Germany (England's ok, Tony's wrapped around George's little finger, for some reason I've never fathomed. Maybe he likes to fish at Kennebunkport) so anyway, I might run awry of one of these great men or women (condoleeza's quite a gal -- where'd they find such a fascist Black girl? Somewhere in the vicinity of that strange place they got Clarence Thomas from, no doubt: affirmative action is good for me but bad for anybody else... and I do say "girl," not woman for she does what big daddy Bush tells her to and Republicans call all women of color "girl" unless they are on welfare, in which case they call them "slut" for doing in bed at night what everyone else either does in bed at night or wants to unless it is their job in which case they probably want to curl up with a teddy bear after a nice bath and watch re-runs of I Love Lucy while dreaming of a job as a waitress or secretary. so I'm supposed to be a web artist, another way to say I'm unemployed, zippo money, no damn luck, a real hard case, my ass is hanging in the wind. I sell cards I make as spinoff from my projects (my god! how low!) -- cutesy elephants in harbors covered with buoys like the facade of a seafood restaurant I saw. Dogs riding giant fish (stuffed of course, but I took off the back plate for the picture) while eating smaller versions, rainbow fish with bull's eyes for eyes lounging on the dunes, giant metal sculptures of mechanical men, walking on water, towards the beach-- they have landed, they are coming, they will get us. One is reading a big black book. Is it a bible? Is it a manual in arabic for blowing up cabanas? Is it the constitution of the United States, which he has duly studied, line by line, like any immigrant to our great land should. If so he'll form a strange idea that in our country freedom reigns, that power is checked, that war is declared, that leaders are elected, that we the people rule. He'll think we can say what we want to say where we want to say it with as many like minded people as we want. He won't know about the waiting paddy-buses, which contrary to the sound of the words, aren't padded, in fact have no seats in some cases, you are just stuffed in after being maced and for God sakes don't resist because attacking a police officer is a federal offence worthy of years and years of jail during which you must make license plates so that American cars can pollute the atmosphere and disobey the Kyoto treaty and commit vehicular manslaughter and drive drunk and make it so little johnny isn't safe to play outside or cross the street to Jennifer's house, yes, you can make license plates, and don't attempt to personalize with little messages like "wear your seatbelt or you might be in jail for the next 25 years if you are in California" or "one joint is the same as one murder: doesn't murder sound more fun? It doesn't cause health problems and improves your self-esteem whereas marijuana leads to an amotivational syndrome and a lack of self-actualization which can be quite harmful. So the next time you start to roll a joint, think: why don't I kill my high school biology teacher instead? It would rid so many children of suffering" If you do this you will lose your work privileges that is you will no longer get 60 cents a day which means you won't have any money to pay off the guy who is protecting you from the guy who wants to rape you so I hope you are not too tight back there or you will be sorry. But don't complain to the guard if it hurts because he knows that after a while anal sex does not hurt therefore he will gladly offer you more experience so as to diminish your pain. And don't complain to the press that the guard is a rapist because when YOU get charged with raping a guard it will be for life and ther WILL be witnesses even though you were not on top they'll say they couldn't tell (as if they were such prudes that they either weren't looking or actually did not have the visual discrimination to determine whose prick pricked whom) why you may ask are you in jail? I admit that as I write this I had forgotten but that is because you have been locked up so long that everyone but you has forgotten but you know it's because you stood on a beach and said "Fuck the USA!" and then were maced and grabbed and dragged backwards by your feet into a waiting paddy wagon off to jail on suspected terrorism charges. You of course meant no harm. You thought you were being Whitmanesque. Your English is literary but not colloquial, and you were imagining loving the whole country, the country of your asylum, where you have finally arrived, you were saying that you love it, and the greatest love is the love that man can do to a woman, in this case the woman being mother earth, Mother America (you don't realize that we have no such effeminate notion of our country. We are much more of a Fatherland like Nazi Germany), so you wanted to love, make love to, screw, fornicate with, and finally FUCK AMERICA. And in joyous but accented terms you said so. And no one knows your plight. You haven't been charged. You are not entitled to a lawyer. You can be held indefinitely. And when you are released, a kindly judge, who also was an immigrant, a Jewish immigrant from after the War who also read Whitman, will tell you how sorry he is. He will say that a great injustice has been foisted upon you. But that the law of the land, the law of Bush's land, requires that you be immediately deported even though you were found innocent of all crimes. And you cannot attempt to enter the United States (as if you's want to now!) for five years or be subject to criminal prosecution under the Homeland Security Act. Ah the joys of being an immigrant. I fortunately, am a native born American and share the guilt rather than the pain for all the injustice practiced here. It is not that we are the worst country. Even I prefer it here to -- dare I say it -- Iraq. But we are getting worse at an alarming pace. And I, a web worker with no income except for government disability, am in the firing line. Once, when democrats ruled, I was someone with a disability, someone to be protected, nurtured, and helped back to work if I chose. Now I am rather someone to be resented, someone who costs society rather than someone who brings in the dough (despite the cultural capital I produce), someone who would be better off dead, or at least off the disability rolls so long as I was not in any facility that cost money to keep up but also did not become an eyesore in the street. Moreover, with all the strange crime (not done by crazy people), it is getting dangerous to be crazy. Will we be made to register when we move in to a neighborhood in case we rape young children? Will we be denied the right to vote, to serve on juries, to become lawyers, judges, politicians? We already are, but with Papa Bush it will get worse. Ronald Reagan, for all his hatefulness, was a loving conservative. He never loved my people, the poor and disabled, but he was warm. Bush is a hating conservative. He uses words like "evil." I think the concept of evil is best left to theologians. I am afraid of being designated as evil (perhaps my condition is a punishment for something bad I did like NEVER ONCE pledge allegiance to the flag once I know what all the words meant. I wasn't going to bow down to a piece of cloth. My father had already read me about the golden calf in the Bible, and this seemed similar. And if it meant bowing down to the COUNTRY , that was even worse. All the heroes I had been taught to revere had fought the country: Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Che Guevara (I was white but in a black school). How long until they come for me? Since I am taking my anti-paranoia pills like a good girl, I have to conclude that my fear is realistic... So maybe it's better not to make waves by getting my name in print...]

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