Here’s an interesting link to two contrasting translations of the recent bin Laden tape.

I find the distance between these two fascinating. The difference between “If you do not attack us” and “If you do not play havoc with our security,” for instance. Subtle but telling.

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Tonight, I did what I always do: I dressed up as a normal person and sat outside with my guitar playing bonehead arrangements of John Prine and Townes Van Zandt and Joan Baez and Robbie Robertson for the neighbor kids while I handed them candy.

I also figured out an even more dumbass version of “Time Warp.” Lemme be clear, it’s not a great acoustic arrangement candidate. In case you were wondering.

The girl who figures prominently in my poem “Dispatch From the Home Front” came by and said she’d seen me reading the poem on TV.

I asked her if she liked it. She said yes, and then asked me to play the song for her again, the one I’d played back in 2001, the one I quote in the poem.

That was “Ripple,” by the Dead. So I did. She thanked me and left.

I suspect it’s her last year trick or treating with the young kids we get here; she was dressed as a “pirate lass” (I asked her) and the outfit was far more sexy than scary.

She was, in fact, the last trick or treater of the night. Seems about right.

Happy Samhain, all.

So.

There I was in the bunny suit again,
having an out of bunny experience,
seeing my own ears ruffled
by the breeze as I floated above me, lying
there on the tar all flat and freshly
killed.

How many incarnations
had it been — ten, twenty — since
I began this bunny cycle? All were short
and filled with babies and copulation —
and oh, the copulation:
it was a pleasure each time to be born
and see the bunny suit waiting and know
that puberty lay just weeks ahead.

So, there I was in the bunny suit again and
it had ended about the same as always and I
expected to end up back in a bunny suit again
as always when the Director of Lives stuck his head in
and said what I’d been dreading:

“Congratulations! You’ve been promoted.”

Well, how they think this is a promotion is beyond me:
no wiggling nose, no cute tail, at least eleven more years
before they’ll even let me think
about getting busy. No speed, can’t turn on a dime,
no ears to speak of and
if I even look like I want to burrow in the yard
they haul me in and wash me hard enough to scrape the fur off me —
if I did have it, that is.

So
I dream of the bunny suit
and talk to myself about the bunny suit because
I cannot explain the bunny suit to anyone, and
I know from past experience that it’s futile and
any day now, I will forget it ever happened —

except, maybe,
when
I run.