they got a name for the winners in the world


charles a. kraus, peace, freedom...are they one in the same?

man walking to work
-- by denis johnson

the dawn is a quality laid across
the freeway like the visable
memory of the ocean that kept all this
a secret for a hundred million years.
I am not moving and I am not standing still.
I am only something the wind strikes and clears,
and I feel myself fade like the sky,
the whole of Ohio a mirror gone blank.
my jacket keeps me. my zipper
bangs on my guitar. lord god help me
out by the lake after the shift at Frididaire
when i stop laughing and taste how wet the beer
is in my mouth, suddenly recognizing the true
wedding of passage and arrival I am invited to.

only one set in the singer's eyes
- frank stanford

He got drunk looking at a woman from his past
And this is what he wrote down on a paper sack
In the tavern one night while I watched him:
Your body is a plantation
I worked on for seven years, all of them solid,
Deep in summer it's uncleared timber, backwater
Ditch and slough, the years of the bad-assed
Sax, the years of bad cotton, nights and crops
I went shares on, evenings with gars,
Lord God Almighty didn't it rain,
So long, say love, say night honey, pull
A stump, court with your crowbar,
The bedrooms like trembling bridges,
Like women holding mirrors in the spring,
And here I am, the snow all around me,
A match in my mouth, like the high water,
Crazy, sad, and dangerous, a log
Chain on your floor, what love
There was, bee on the rose, buried in the year
Book in the attic, common and pretended sleep,
No one loses their shadow because no one
Is a boat on a river without wind,
And there are screws on the window sill
Never will be sunken to hold a pane,
You can listen to the rain, you can lie
Yourself back into bodies you never
Touched, cruelty, cruelty, cruelty,
That's what I told her.

jade rabbit
-- by tina celona

i consider writing about something
i have written about before
but am interrupted by something outside
very wet because of the rain
and it occurs to me i will never
say convincingly "lets go swimming"
because you know i dont like swimming
though we go often but because
i always say "so should we go
swimming" doubtfully
looking at my jade rabbit
his humid posture and placid posture
as he nibbles the orange ground
of a book by john ashbury
rivers and mountains

called war
-- by Richard Brautigan

I never want
to go away
to a place
called war

i don't think
you want
to go there either.


* Holla Copter's You've Changed is a great, great summer song. Check it out on their myspace page. It will make your weekend more enjoyable.