Starpoet by Lisa Jain Thompson
Newsflash:

Starpoet Newsletter Vol. VII, No. XXXVI

Sunday, 03 September 2006 07:52 Last Updated on Saturday, 09 September 2006 07:19
The
Starpoet
Newsletter
Vol VII, No. XXXVI
 
 
There is an elephant in the balcony
And pandas are parading on the deck,
There is a lesbian in my bedroom
Mumbling metaphors in her sleep.
 
"Has anyone seen Lisa yet?
The starship is running late
-- make sure Lisa is on board her,
I need to know she's safe."
 
Have you ever see the sun rise
From high atop the Himalaya,
Or watched the moons set one after the other
On the shoreline of Centauri Prime?
 
I have been there, back and gone,
As I lie awake next to Sharon.
 
 
Lisa Jain Thompson c. 2006
 
 
 
 
 
 
__/\/\/\/\__
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<><><><><>
 
 
Dissent is not Disloyalty
 
 
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Labor day weekend after the tropical storm blew through.  Power's back, as is the humidty.
 
one year from Katrina.
 
 
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verything starts with love
 
High Noon With My Darling
 
If I were to believe all the naysayers,
I would not have ever even met you,
We would not have ever talked
Over various epicurean delights,
And we would not now be married
In all but god’s grace and eye.
 
I would might be dead
And you still lost
Between box and overpass,
The field would be surrendered to our foes;
Instead we are here, hand in hand, going on,
Daring the world to forsake us once more.
 
Lisa Jain Thompson
September 2006
 
 
 
__/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^
 
 
waiting out the power
 
Drifting
 
The intoxicating thunderstorms
Give way to this gray drizzle
That hangs forlornly around my soul.
 
The once bright sun
Withdraws behind the clouds
To leave the hours uncounted.
 
The damp walls close in,
Binding me to inaction
And the dark musings of self-absorption.
 
Lisa Jain Thompson
September 2006
 
 
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^^\/\/\/\/^^
 
 
Glenn Ford
1916 - 2006
 
 
Gilda (1946) ....Johnny Farrell/Narrator
  • black and whilte film noir directed by Charles Vidor starring Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth in her signature role as the ultimate femme fatale.  There never was a woman like Gilda.
 
Blackboard Jungle (1955) .... Richard Dadier
  • Introduced Bill Haley, Rock Around the Clock, and rock 'n' roll to America.
Superman (1978) .... Jonathan Kent
  • The seminal Pa Kent.
 
U.S. Marine
 
  • In 1941, months before Pearl Harbor was attacked, Ford joined the Coast Guard Auxiliary, where he was on duty some evenings and occasional weekends. Already a movie star, he asked for "regular duty", to be treated as one of the guys, not a celebrity.

  • Later put his acting career on hold to fight in World War II, serving in the U.S. Marines from 1943-45 and seeing action in the Pacific. When he was discharged he signed up with the U.S. Naval Reserves, where he served for decades, rising to the rank of captain.

  • He visited U.S. troops in Korea and Vietnam on well-publicized morale-building trips during those wars. And in a 1993 interview Ford confided that he had also been sent on five secret missions into Vietnam during that war. Asked for details, all he would say was, "They asked me to go, and I went".
 
 
 
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^^\/\/\/\/^^
 
 
What we do
 
 
Magic for Moderns
 
The mind is good at reconstructing its past,
Making it agree with today:
 
When I was a little girl I did not miss that third strike,
I gave up my virginity to Lennon, Harrison, and McCartney,
My father had plans to build the first transistor,
Grandpa's blood had noble roots in Palermo.
 
Even presidents are not immune:

There are weapons of mass destruction still in Iraq,
I am not an alcoholic, I never used drugs,
I served in Viet Nam flying for the Air Force,
Fundamentalist religion does not drive my decisions.
 
We are constantly revising the scripts of our lives,
Doctoring the scenes, turning the light off on our mistakes:
 
My gradepoint was perfect in high school and university,
I intended to get pregnant with this child,
Smoking doesn't cause cancer, I can drink when I drive,
I nevert even think about skin color.
 
Black, White, Brown, or whatever,
Humanity is consistently inconsistent:
 
All men are brothers except that bastard,
Women are equal to all men but me,
Love one another but not the faithless unbelievers,
God is love and damns you for eternity.
 
The mind is good at reconstructing the past,
Justifying its actions by demonizing others:
 
Mohammed was a terrorist, kill the white satan,
Jesus was rebel rabble who the Jews put to death,
Lincoln was an ape, the south had all the slaves,
White people are evil, black ones shiftless,

Brown ones lazy, and asians inscrutable.
The devil is in the details which the mind rearranges
Then argues with the world outside
About the position of the deck chairs.
 
 
Lisa Jain Thompson
September 2006
 
 
 
__/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^
 
 
if you listen, you can hear the whistle blowing
 
 
City of New Orleans
 
 
Waiting for the President in New Orleans,
A million a vote but no one’s keeping score,
Katrina came and washed away the Big Easy,
The rich rebuilt and the devil take the poor.
 
But all along the river’s course,
The people watch the fingers point,
Politicians try to shift the blame;
 
The gulf keeps forming hurricanes,
The houses lie in shattered chains,
The city’s gone and no one gives a damn.
 
Good morning, America, how are you?
Don’t you know he really doesn’t care?
He’d rather be on his ranch than in New Orleans,
When evening falls he’ll be a thousand miles from here.
 
Waiting for the President in New Orleans,
Playing keno in the Casinos off the coast,
The music’s drifting in from the French Quarter,
While the homes of the poor lie broken in the mud.
 
Good morning, America, how are you?
Katrina’s come and gone a year ago,
She’s ruined more than just the city of New Orleans,
Somewhere in her flood waters we lost our soul.

 
Lisa Jain Thompson
September 2006
 
 
 
__/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^
 
 
Handle with Extreme Care:
 
 
This Product Contains Minute Electrically-Charged Particles
Moving at Velocities in Excess of
Five Hundred Miles per Hour
 
 
 
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^^\/\/\/\/^^
 
  
before the storm hits
  
  
The Streets of Old Town
  
Here comes the hurricane,
Running up the coast from the Carolines,
Coming down on North Virginia,
Flooding the runs and biways.
  
The Potomac rises over the streets of Old Town,
This year, last year, twenty years next;
Waters fall from southern skies,
Washing all our rebel sins away.
  
No one needs to pretend,
We are prepared to be unprepared,
Time moves slowly if not at all,
The storm too quickly for our ancient ways.
  
  
Lisa Jain Thompson
September 2006

 
__/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^
 
 
 
Warning:
 
This Product Warps Space and Time
 
 
 
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^^\/\/\/\/^^
 
 
State of Affairs
(Reported by BBC)
 
 
An architect of Iraqi descent has said he was forced to remove a T-shirt that bore the words "We will not be silent" before boarding a flight at New York.
 
Raed Jarrar said security officials warned him his clothing was offensive after he checked in for a JetBlue flight to California on 12 August.
 
Mr Jarrar said he was shocked such an action could be taken in the US.
 
US transport officials are conducting an inquiry after a complaint from the US Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
 
 
'Authoritarian regimes'
 
 
Mr Jarrar's black cotton T-shirt bore the slogan in both Arabic and English.
 
He said he had cleared security at John F Kennedy airport for a flight back to his home in California when he was approached by two men who wanted to check his ID and boarding pass.
 
Mr Jarrar said he was told a number of passengers had complained about his T-shirt - apparently concerned at what the Arabic phrase meant - and asked him to remove it.  He refused, arguing that the slogan was not offensive and citing his constitutional rights to free expression.
 
Mr Jarrar later told a New York radio station: "I grew up and spent all my life living under authoritarian regimes and I know that these things happen.
 
"But I'm shocked that they happened to me here, in the US."
 
After a difficult exchange with airline staff, Mr Jarrar was persuaded to wear another T-shirt bought for him at the airport shop.
 
"We Will Not Be Silent" is a slogan adopted by opponents of the war in Iraq and other conflicts in the Middle East.
 
It is said to derive from the White Rose dissident group which opposed Nazi rule in Germany.
 
 
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Out of time
 
When The Levee Breaks 
 
 
Well, they burned my barn, and they stole my horse
I can't save a dime
I got to be careful, I don't want to be forced
Into a life of continual crime
I can see for myself that the sun is sinking
How I wish you were here to see
Tell me now, am I wrong in thinking
That you have forgotten me?
-- Bob Dylan
Working Blues #2 from Modern Times 
 
 
Listening to Bobby Dylan on my CD,
Remember the smell of vinyl thirty-threes,
We've come a long way since the sixties
When we thought we'd beat down war and hate.
 
We all ran away to join the circus
But ended up with the Cirque du Soleil,
Twisting our minds in festering contortions
As we watched from St Thomas and St Croix.
 
Now our stock options are all a comin' due,
And our mountain retreats are in need of major repair,
The jester is sixty five pushing seventy
And there's still no way out of here.  
The priests and all their dominions
Are laying out our crumbling tombs,
The fortune telling lady
Has taken all her things inside.
 
The only thing we've left to do
Is to get ready for the show,
Between the windows and the mermaids.
One last carnival before we go.
 
With everybody shouting
"Which Side, whose side are you on?",
It's time we stopped counting holes in Albert
And change the way the wind blows.
 
Once more our bodies should stand a tip-toe,
Shake some windows and rattle some walls;
There's a battle outside and it's horribly ragin',
We need to get re-involved,

Transformed and reinvented,
Leave our houses and our rich rewards,
Before the waters grow even deeper
And we drown in our indifference.
 
 
Lisa Jain Thompson
September 2006
 
 
__/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^
 
 
New Orleans
 
 
Call me cynical, but I didn't really expect this administration to come up with serious Marshall Plan money to rebuild a poor, mostly black city that was already in decline before Hurricane Katrina and the Army Corps of Engineers administered the coup de grace. (They still toss in a lot of French words down here.)
 
So, as everyone understands but no one wants to plainly acknowledge, New Orleans will become a smaller, whiter city. The Big Easy once was home to more than 600,000 people and had around 450,000 residents as Katrina approached. Now the population is under 200,000. A major city has become minor.
 
The Lower Ninth Ward -- poor, black, utterly devastated and cursed with precarious geography -- will never be the same. Some hard-hit white areas, such as parts of Lakeview, also may have to be written off. But for a variety of reasons, including the remorseless logic of the marketplace, black New Orleans will lose more. For-sale signs abound throughout the city, and as its infrastructure gets put back together, some parts of town will even experience a real estate boom. But a flooded cottage in the right neighborhood might be worth good money to a developer, while the same cottage in the wrong neighborhood isn't worth what it would cost to haul the debris away.
 
Those homeowners who have resources will rebuild and get on with their lives. Those who have no resources will not rebuild, and their neighborhoods will be lost. Those poor black people we saw stranded on roofs and trapped in the Superdome will get on with their lives, too. They'll just have to live those lives somewhere else.
 

Eugene Robinson
Washington Post

 
 
__/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^
 
 
sex dreams and such
 
 
Here I am
 
 
So here I am,
        A lesbian in a committed relationship,
A post-op transsexual
        Whose GYN can’t even tell,
A fallen away catholic leader of tomorrow,
 
An agnostic poet mystic
        Versed in scriptures and astrophysics,
A master of classical rhetoric,
        Shakespeare and Sappho’s lyrics,
A political activist well schooled
        In Jack, Bobby, Caesar, and Martin
 
 
-- Jesus, that’s a load –
 
 
… So here I am …
 
 
Fantasizing about a large muscular body
        Lowering itself on top of me,
A faceless lover
        Penetrating deep between my thighs,
No particular man,
        No particular person,
Just a warm throbbing dildo
        Filling my vagina,
Driving me into orgasm
        And wet trembling exhaustion.
 
A proper bi-girl fantasy I suspect,
        But not one to be shared with a girlfriend
Who might properly be expecting
        A more traditional dyke image
Than a fully erect penis
        Topping her wife In the old in and out.
 
 
Lisa Jain Thompson
September 2006
 
 
 
__/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^
 
 
back to the start
 
 
The Wheels Are Flying
 
When the deal goes down
I want you here beside me;
When the sun comes up
I want to be the one who wakes you;
When the tide rolls out past the Farallon Islands,
I want your help to build my sandcastles;
When that last tsunami comes rushing in,
I want to feel your warm breath upon me;
And if ever we find that closing vortex
Drawing us towards its wheeling circle,
I know you would risk yourself and everything
To deliver me to the shoreline
Where I would remember my precious days
In Blue Mongolia where you loved you.
 
 
Lisa Jain Thompson
September 2006
 
 
__/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^
 
 
In the dark I hear the nightbird's call
I can feel a lover's breath
I sleep in the kitchen with my feet in the hall
Sleep is like a temporary death.
-- Bob Dylan
 
 
__/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^
 
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