Karen Ethier’s mom passed away Monday. Here is the info on arrangments. The funeral home address is in Woonsocket; Nasonville is in Burrillville.

ETHIER

Patricia Ann (Bartlett) Ethier, 66, of Blackstone Street and formerly of Millville, MA and Nasonville. She was the wife of the late Alfred R. Ethier. Her funeral will be held on Friday at 9 a.m. from the Fournier Funeral Home, 463 South Main Street with a Mass of Christian Burial at 10 a.m. in Saint Theresa’s Church, Nasonville. Burial will be in Saint Charles Cemetery, Blackstone, Ma.Calling hours will be held on Thursday from 5-8 p.m. at the Fournier Funeral Home. Relatives and Friends are invited to attend. The Kilcline Funeral Home 304 North Main Street is in charge of the arrangements. Donations may be made to the Westerly Health Center Recreation Dept. 280 High Street Westerly, RI 02891 or the Saint Francis House 167 Blackstone Street Woonsocket, RI 02895. http://www.kilclinefuneralhome.com

For all you Kerry fans out there:

Explain, to me and to yourselves, how you were so wrong in your estimates of the election.

I suspect you will find some clues to the loss there.

+++++++++++++++++++

EDIT: This shouldn’t be an exercise in self-flagellation, by the way…more a start at learning from mistakes.

The way it looks right now, all Bush has to do is pick up Ohio and one other state and it’s all over — and he’s holding onto leads in Ohio, New Mexico, and Iowa as of this writing.

I know I predicted this, but I did not think it would hit me so hard.

Canada is no longer an option, so what do I do now?

Come back to the fight, I guess..but what form does it take now? It’s pretty clear the old forms don’t work.

It’s time for bed…and like so many others, I’ll wake up feeling dread-ful.

Let’s hope we find a useful way to translate this into fury…

Earlier tonight, Steven Colbert on the Daily Show suggested that all of the suggestions that people will be making in the days ahead about unity and reconciliation are stupid, that the American body politic works best on rage and anger translated into action.

He was kidding. I’m not sure I am.

14 people.

3 won’t reveal vote.

7 Bush.

3 Kerry.

1 Green.

I left the Youth Slam tonight at the beginning of the second round; which means I never got to see Sage’s feature, although we did speak briefly and I apologized to him before I left.

I did see him last month, so I don’t feel too bad.

I am finding slams more and more difficult to sit through. My heckling, which is usually gentle and fairly and equitably delivered (I think), felt really edgy to me tonight. I knew I had to go. I was on the verge of embarrassing myself.

I am losing my taste for the entire scene.

More and more, I just want to hear good poems read well to a crowd that can appreciate and reward good work as is merited, while still being respectful of the voices of those who need to speak without being great poets.

I don’t feel that in slams anymore.

Maybe I’m just getting old and jaded. Maybe I’m just old.

I know I have moved beyond this. And I hate that, at least for tonight.

__________________________________________________________________________

More thought has revealed to me a more succinct description of what I miss in slams, and what I want more of these days: a sense of sacred space.

__________________________________________________________________________

As for election news:

— Only vote if you have a clue what you’re doing. I’m not a person who believes you should exercise a privilege you don’t earn by preparing yourself.

— I hope my sense of dread is just indigestion.

— For the record, I voted already as an absentee voter. And I voted Green.

Hmmmm…

There’s a terrorist alert out for Americans in Nordic and Baltic countries, based on “specific, concrete information” according to the Norwegians.

Can’t imagine why or where that came from.

Esepcially not after bin Laden makes a point about not attacking Sweden.

Jesus H.

I just transferred the last batch of poems I’ve written from LJ to Word for safekeeping…

and there were 9 poems since I last updated the file.

Jesus H., yet again.

I had no idea I was doing that much writing here, thinking it was mostly a diversion from the more solitary work I traditionally do.

And I like these better. Maybe I needed the change.

I don’t understand cycles of writing — what prompts them, how they work. Mostly, that’s ok, but there’s part of me that wishes I did understand, and how it connects to my mood swings…I don’t think there’s an easy correlation, but it would be useful to know from a diagnostic standpoint.

Anyway…I printed these out so I’d have stuff to read at Sage’s WAG show tonight. Who else is going?

Something in me wants to write a poem
that has the line “the blue dogs of Canaan”
in it somewhere. I do not want to begin that poem.

The blue dogs of Canaan do not exist
outside of my reluctance. I cannot hear
their imaginary barking until I say I can.

Does considering the blue dogs of Canaan
create them, or do they have to be
breathed to be created?

If there is such a thing as a poem
at all here, there is a thing that calls itself God as well.
The blue dogs of Canaan run noisily after it.

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.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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.

Thought you might find this enjoyable…nicked from Rich Villar.

http://www.stlconfluence.org/article.asp?articleID=205

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

On what seems, somehow, to be a related note, the new Zero Point Zero is up…a gentle comparison of poetry and masturbation.

Trying to take the high road in my last few columns.

Please, dear readers, be good enough to lend a hand to my efforts here .

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

And then there were seven…only seven more columns left.

Still thinking about how to end this. Thoughts?

grey reeds grow taller now
on a dune spilling across
an abandoned landing strip. a wrecked

hangar clanking in a late fall wind
sounds like a bell to
come home, though there’s no home here.

if there are traces of
any planes at all they’re invisible,
except maybe for those two long tire marks

that curve out into sand from a
cracked runway, and those might be from a car,
some locals dragging here after sundown years ago.

do I miss departures and arrivals? hardly; I would settle for
settling here: make myself a shelter out of these ruins
and hunker down. it’s a dark world

outside these gates. you can’t really fly anywhere
these days that doesn’t smell like abandonment. instead,
I’ll sit down, build a fire, get comfortable with discomfort.

maybe, though,
I might dare to hope
to be spotted by

some last adventurer who’ll touch down lightly and let me board
as if nothing had changed here, as if we could still
go up expecting to come down to something we could recognize.

Well, ok, I did.

But I’m back.

What happened while I was gone? Did the Sox win? (Yes, that’s a joke. I was in Provincetown, not Papua New Guinea.)

Is jbradley getting his pretty on? Is he a summer or a fall?

Didja miss me? I missed you. And I brought presents for everyone. Except I ate them all already.

Hit me, my people!

we’re here till morning, so time for another post.

The Sox win another. I find I’m keeping the running box score window from SI.com open, just to make sure I can speak defensively about the games to people as they happen.

Working on a really interesting project that popped up in the last two hours — a solicitation to read at the Mystic Arts Cafe in Mystic, CT — a prestigious (read: stuffy and fairly academic) series that has traditionally scorned slammers, with the exception of Taylor Mali. They want samples, so I’m scrambling to send them something before I hit the sack.

I’m beat, but have a lot to do. Drop me a line, I need the distraction.

=+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++=================+++++++++++++++++++

By the way, since I deleted the other post: I’m leaving in the morning for a week away. Won’t be back till next weekend. Have fun.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

When I grow up
I want to be a gun
big enough and loud enough
that my son can say
“I am a son of a gun”
with the straight face
he inherited from me

Want to blow things up daily
while smelling vaguely of hell
Want to bark like a colonial relic
and figure my worth
in trajectories

When I am not a man
I still like to think I could be a gun
deathless by myself and useful
to a cause or two or more
When I am not a lover
I like to imagine a harem of daggers
with me the gun glinting thickly among them

When I am sad
I am the thin .22
When I am angry
I am the hot .44
When I am most human
I am a scope and crosshairs so
nothing need be done dirty and close

I wish I was the gun I see
at my head when I awaken
in the night
I wish I owned my fate as he does