Start with a Tunisian fruit vendor
who sets himself on fire. Add
an entire region which subsequently demands
that he shall not have burned for nothing.
Multiply by the shifting
of tectonic plates, factor in
water, water everywhere, some of it
carrying fire deep into Japan.
Determine
your valuation of the variable stories
of body counts, scenarios,
what the army wants, what the reactors
will do, what (if anything)
has actually happened
in these places you’ve never seen —
then,
subtract your attention.
Get up.
Go to the sink. Pour yourself
a plastic glass of water. Get
a snack of winter grapes
from the fridge. Sit back down
on the sofa
and turn the TV off,
sip the water,
eat the grapes
one at a time.
Show your work. Struggle
to swallow. Remind yourself
you survived a bad winter
and you’re working again.
Damn the oil companies
and the nuclear industry.
Resolve to call your representative,
to send money
to Egypt.
After an hour,
turn the TV back on.
Find a way
to take your mind off things.
Tags: poems, poetry, current-events
Dark Matter 
March 14th, 2011 at 8:33 am
I read your poem, How To Interpret Current Events: A Lesson Plan,
that gives me impetus to send you this poem. With regards,
NATURE’S PARADIGM
It is another wasteland
on nature’s treason
not binding its paradigm
its dictum tosses life’s surface
and all constructions delves into
cracks and ruins
across the deep sea.
Sea waves become monstrous
as tremor fills land clusters
between geo-slate moving—
that touches life’s extinction
by their thrusts of new formation
and by doing so immense thrushes
our life becomes dead sediments
for which we are not prepared
to combat with water’s dictum.
and our resistance to the waves
by building concrete walls
turns to be meaningless in its anger.
These walls are like fallen leaves
underneath the fallen tree in the wave rage
and culpable to be washed away
at the slightest move of crust’s form and move.
Our perfection has no destiny
Our dreams has no salvation
to the rage of the bounty nature.
We may beg pardon
but cannot wash away fear of tremor
from ages gone, ages at present, ages to come.
Hold the breath, look at the sky
thence comes the hallucination of nature’s paradigm
that we are dying in the great tremor
and in the amber of nuclear meltdown
by the mercy of the great composition.
-Asim Kumar Paul
14.03.2011
March 14th, 2011 at 8:55 am
Excellent, and thank you for sharing.