Sir, we know we
might sound unhinged.
So much has been
set at your door.

We’ve spun and sought,
cut loose sad strings,
painted our walls
to match our hearts.

We’ve stumped and sung,
tried and tracked, stood
and stayed and prayed.
We’ve come around.

Now things turn on
you. Now you are
our lens. And now
there will be fire.

We will end up
burned or burnished,
colored, consumed,
or cauterized.

What will we do
with the ashes?
How will we clean
the streets and clocks?

Although we know,
we turn to you.
We ask that you
stay who you are.

Sir, we know what
turning sounds like.
Everything has
already changed.

Scott Fogel
20 January 2009

Poem On Inauguration Day by Scott Fogel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

I’m going to try my hand at it again, and hopefully get past the few hundred abortive wordfarts I managed last year. I think my problem — one of them anyway– was that I attempted science fiction, and I started to panic that I was being derivative, or Pynchonish, or Dickian, or Varleyesque, or Pratchettical, and so I started reading too much Pynchon, Dick, Varley and Pratchett in order to stave off simulacrism, and therefore stopped writing altogether.

So.

This time around I’m just going to do a little piece about a clinically depressed almost-forty-year-old bald guy who works at a coffee shop / art gallery in the city and doesn’t know what the fuck to do with his life yet.

Sound familiar?

At least I’ll have material.

Don’t worry Mike.

Art trumps ignorance.

If I could, I’d follow the Hodg-Man’s advice and go.

UPDATE: Things are not always as they seem. Still.

We are Virginia Tech.

We are sad today and we will be sad for quite awhile. WE are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning.

We are Virginia Tech.

We are strong enough to know when to cry and sad enough to know we must laugh again.

We are Virginia Tech.

We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did not deserve it but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, but neither do the invisible children walking the night to avoid being captured by a rogue army. Neither does the baby elephant watching his community be devastated for ivory; neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.

We are Virginia Tech.

The Hokier Nation embraces our own with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong and brave and innocent and unafraid. We are better than we think, not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imagination and the possibility we will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears, through all this sadness.

We are the Hokies.

We will prevail, we will prevail.

We are Virginia Tech.

And she knows what she’s talking about.

Used in a sentence: “Mil Millington, almost no matter what he decides to write about, makes me laugh until I micturate.”

Go: buy his books

And so it goes.

From Fates Worse Than Death:

Q: How would you like to die?
A: In an airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro.

From God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater:

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’

From A Man Without A Country‘s Requiem:

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.

KV

RIP

Bokonon

Shalom.