Recommended reading
The New York Times Magazine ran quite a rundown by Charles Duhigg on what we had suspected has been up with the credit card companies for quite some time: psychological profiling of its customer base.
The Obama administration has proposed to do something about credit cards. We’ll see whose side it’s on. The rhetoric has [...]

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by John Goggin
Memory is shards, just broken pots and bones hidden under the ashes, middens littering the shore of the common sea; memoir is mostly archeology.
From 30 some years ago…

One early March  afternoon, a raft of co-recreants is horsing around the big dining room table. Outside, it’s bitter cold, there’s rime on the branches, [...]

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A reminiscence from Stan
I was to drive a bus. I accepted this without deep reflection. The bus in question was parked and we were waiting for passengers; we being the drivers although I now do not recall talking to other drivers. We waited. We seemed to be on Main Street in New Castle, Indiana. I [...]

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A momento from Stan

Photo: The San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

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A poem by Emily Dickinson
After great pain, a formal feeling comes
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet, mechanical, go round
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone
This is the Hour of Lead
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons recollect [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters

BUBBLES THE HIPPOPOTAMUS, led
to believe her concrete block demesne
surrounded by barker and cagéd cat
was of her natural habitat
unchanging and forever green,
is dead.  Beloved, she fell asleep,
o.d.’ed like a teen-ager in the park
she slipped into the surrounding darkness
deaf to the midway midgets’ weeping,
the sorrow of keepers who [...]

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A piano blues by Stan Raines

You call me up at nine
Ask me about a bottle of wine
You’re gonna serve to your guests
But I’m not invited.
So I crashed the party anyway
Then I find I don’t have much to say
‘Bout many things beyond whether
You and me are ever gonna be together.
And you know that I love you.
And [...]

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A poem by Stan Raines

The hill’s intolerably long and steep;
I think myself a goat.
Perhaps it’s a mountain
Without the slenderest hoofhold.

I don’t look long for the top:
Pebbles, brown and brown,
Strike my eyes
Loosened by my crabbing hands.

From time to time I imagine
I am merely crawling,
All fours flat on the land,
Unable to raise myself-

That the mist alone, shining [...]

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A comment from Stan

It appears that Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions have come to their end, her protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. She still has a loyal base that will quite probably make a show of it for her in West Virginia, the Washington Post says this morning, but Obama is likely to win a larger [...]

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by John Goggin
Pat Buchanan
thinks that he can
still pontificate.
He should stay home and masturbate.
The Right Reverend Wright, when
he was told to sit tight, then
incurred public pillory;
although he has a life-long friend in our Lady Hillary.
Chris Matthews
discussing issues
always shouts.
I never know what the fuck he’s talking about.
Monsieur Colbert
finds himself quite “cher”.
As a master of smarm
I [...]

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From Gene’s notebook

…and there I am on my bike, corner of Boca Chica and Central Boulevard, looking at the $3.55 gas, looking at car upon car and truck upon truck, single person in each …. The heat builds, near 95 degrees; the southeast wind rips bank flags. Half the drivers in those cars and trucks [...]

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A poem by Rudy H. García
No one really knows how old
She is.
But she sure does look old,
Under those Mexican dresses
She wears to school every day
She looks older
Than the rest of us,
Because her feet,
Her feet, give her age away.
Like thirty maybe? Maybe more…
You can tell by
Looking at her toes… sticking out from under her huaraches made [...]

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a poem by Eugene (Gene) Novogrodsky
Push and wind, up go the shutters,
Noisily, in Mexican shops, with morning sun building.
Young women, maybe some junior high, and
Then then pour water on the sidewalks,
Then, sweep it away … wetting gutters ….
Hit a button and up go the shutters in malls.
The women, maybe some high school, in suits,
Ready to [...]

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A Blues by Stan
Now I ain’t got the money
And the rent is due
And the man at the corner
Says my credit’s got shoes
Now the weathers got colder
And my coat’s mighty thin
I think it’s time to admit
The shape that I’m in
 
I don’t belong here
I see what you’re saying
Must be about time for sailing away
I don’t belong here
The day’s [...]

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a poem by Stan Raines
Here, for you, my lesson,
A turning of words
As light recedes:
The green has left this leaf
And leaves a fibrous web …
Here, do not guess at
That you would know:
Bend and see that
Which crawls at you
As if fleeing to the room,
Which races to you
As all would do
if they had eyes
as you do.
But the [...]

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by Justin Raines
Click for full-size Red Eye Comic

Click for full Red Eye Comic

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An opinion by Stan Raines
The politicians seem to have noticed, perhaps three or four years late as usual, that there’s a problem with fuel prices: They are going up and there seems to be no end in sight. People have been grappling with it for a while, though, not only at the gas station, but [...]

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A Declamation by Stan Raines
I pledge allegiance to the Flag
of the United State of America
and to the people and co-signers
for whose constitution it stands
to which I do subscribe-
Battered old whore as she is
in and out of bed with slavers and churchmen,
taking in nine elder opinions for a quick feel;
yes, shrunken old Eunuch as it sits
beaten [...]

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Crowd gathers for Poetry Pachanga.
Good times were had by those that wanted them last night as the major events day culminated with a poets’ dinner at the Narciso Martinez Cultural Arts center followed by the Poetry Pachanga in the San Benito Community Center Auditorium.

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a choir of leaves
makes the unseen known with soft
but forceful deep sighs
the wet, dismembered
marionettes jump up and down
on the pulled clotheslines

a herd of cotton
treks hurredly across the
blue sky darkening

a lulling dance of
blurry shadow tree limbs on
the wall leads my dreams
Poetry by Patricia A.

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When you hear it
Does it thunder?
Or bring that chill up your neck?
Does it whine in a key
you know is real?
Is the world split open
by its crack?
And did it begin
as a small worm in your heart
A throb that pulses your brain
and grows and throws
its shadow, too,
on the shapers of your world?
Well its power is
the breath of [...]

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The world and this Web log are not finished with National Poetry Month, so I’m asking local poets to send in some verse for the immediate gratification of seeing it on the Web. John Goggin, my other brother, did quite well yesterday, sending no less than three poems (or pomes, as he lovingly labels them) [...]

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by John Goggin
Foot-sore and ‘mazed on Venetian streets, my Clytemnestra points;
“I see the dragon’s tongue… just there, beneath the Lion Gate!”
“How cute,” I think. Of course, she has her axe to grind;
once more I’ve made her miss her monthly maenadic tryst
with the Women’s Will to Power Club. Just so we can wander
aimlessly in the [...]

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Read poems aloud, always. Mine anyway. If you let your mind’s “reading voice” do the work, you will miss an important poetic element, namely the vibration of the air around you and through your tympanic membrane which penetrates your brain in a mildly different place than the merely ocular reading.
Specific poems: The last one, “God’s [...]

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