Yesterday, I told a friend that I am through with writing about war on this blog. It’s just been draining too much of my focus, and is too taxing emotionally. I’m a poet, and I starting this blog to be about poetry, writing, art and culture. And philosophy, metaphysics. Metaphor, metaphysics. Same difference? No. Anyway, regrettably, I started it right before His Arrogance commenced with the shock and awe, which has been a compelling and ready diversion. Oh well.

This is not a post about war. It’s a post about peace, in a sense. We could say it’s about the rule of law and the peaceful endowment, withdrawl, and transition of national power. It’s about time.

It’s about time that we, with gravity and circumspect sobriety, begin the essential dialog of impeachment of President George W. Bush. He has committed high crimes and misdemeanors, failed in his oath to uphold the law, and acted to the manifest injury of the American people. I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Today, The Nation magazine, which has been published since the time of the Civil War, proffered an article calling for investigation and impeachment. [Link]

It’s about time.

First there is grass at the bottom
of the stairs, and a tree. Just
a generic, unnamable tree.
The street, black with a yellow
stripe, has a name which
doesn’t matter, a family long gone
and their land divided to us who
do not care. Now a field, thirsty
again though it rained last week,
when for days I thought of nothing
so much as of the dead. Then the sea,
which is blue steel, winter cold
and hungry, in need of sleep.
Boats, oil rigs, islands, sea birds
lost and homeless, sick to death
of fish, and then the setting sky.
Ruby, saffron, tangerine, shouldering
cobalt and lapis lazuli. And beyond
the day’s grand finale of water
and terminal light is the great backstage.
Clouds line up for tomorrow’s overture
or tonight’s bland drizzle. Stars fidget,
clear their throats to sing the evening
hymn. Then a thousands dusty scenes
of memory – grandparents, school yards,
car wrecks, sex – all deconstructing
in the dark, and on pages just like this.
The gestures of my dying are rehearsing
there, you know, beyond the sky
and the mind, already breathing, born.


© 2006 by J. Kyle Kimberlin
all rights reserved
2nd Draft January 11, 2006

Recently, I wrote to Senator Barbara Boxer, opposing the confirmation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Today I received this response:

Dear Mr. Kyle Kimberlin:

Thank you for writing to me about President Bush’s nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito to serve as Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s moderate and careful approach to the law made her the crucial swing vote on a deeply divided court.

I am very disappointed that the President did not choose a successor who would unite our country.

Judge Alito’s record raises serious questions about his commitment to the rights and freedoms that define us as Americans.

On the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Alito was the only judge to uphold a law enabling government to force a woman to notify her husband before obtaining an abortion, even if she fears him. Thankfully the Supreme Court, led by Justice O’Connor, held this requirement unconstitutional.

In other cases, Judge Alito has said that state employees cannot enforce their rights under the Family and Medical Leave Act; tried to make it harder for victims of employment discrimination based on race, gender and disability to have their day in court; and, argued that Congress does not have the authority to ban the personal possession of machine guns.

The Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on this nomination began on January 9, 2006. With the stakes so high, we must thoroughly evaluate all of Judge Alito’s record. Rest assured, I will only support a Supreme Court nominee whom I believe will safeguard the rights and freedoms of all Americans.

Again, thank you for writing to me.

Barbara Boxer
United States Senator

I’ve really had it this time.  I just don’t see how there’s any hope.  I didn’t eat any blackeyed peas on New Year’s Day.  How could I forget?  You gotta eat ‘em, for good luck!  Now I’ll probably wind up living under a bridge by July.  Dang.

a love story

He is sitting at a table by the door, and stands to use the restroom just as she comes in. She looks at him as if startled, confronted, as though he rose to challenge her, stop her from entering, or keep her from reaching the counter alive. Then she looks away, then back again at him as he follows her by sheer coincidence past the shelves of mugs and bagged beans. She won’t relax until she has one hand on the counter itself – Safe! You’re it!

It could have been a trick of lighting, her curious reaction; just the harsh dark of a midwinter’s late afternoon. Or a lie of the devil in her long brown hair. Maybe something new about his face, which she had never seen before, which surprised or bewildered her. Or something old but lost in fog: resemblance to a teacher from childhood, or a neighbor where she used to live.

It brings him down, like the water circling the drain as he stands at the sink. He doesn’t know her, just the shape and motion of her. But those eyes, with their tincture of worry, of innocence, would be a good place to dream. Maybe a good place to die.

Washing his hands, he remembers his grandfather, who made the children scrub their hands before eating; “You’ve been petting those dogs, so go wash up;” who knew little of women, save one, but knew the want of them will leave a man’s soul spent and dusted with ash.

He needs a shave. Maybe that’s what set her off. This is a classy place, lots of brass, glass and polished wood. She works for a doctor or a dentist and likes to find her own kind here. Men with neckties still knotted after work. No poets in jeans, faded to show where their wallets ride, potbellied in old sweaters, unkempt and existential.

So he may go mad, here and now in this coffeehouse bathroom with its overflowing wastebasket and silent buzz of wireless Internet. His grandpa always said you should wash up every time, and there’s a sign beside the mirror demanding it in two languages. But he wishes he hadn’t; that he had hurried back out to see her again. There’s a post he could hide behind, supporting a rack of funny greeting cards – blank inside – and from there he could see her pay and go. Her shoulders and the small of her back receding in light blue cotton, turning beyond the glass doors, into the night.

He shrugs, and watches himself do it – so it goes, we make what we made since the world began – and goes out. Back to his table, his notebook, and his fine point gel ink pen. And sees that she’s not gone, not sitting at a table avoiding his impecunious eyes by feigning interest in the empty street. She’s behind the counter now, in a burgundy apron, commanding a thunderous blender. Checking his cup, he doesn’t need a refill now. No, not just yet.


© 2006 by J. Kyle Kimberlin
all rights reserved
2nd Draft 1.11.2006

I seem to have gotten rather vividly off track here, as has been brought to my attention. Strayed some distance out of my element. It happens, when one forgets to look into mirrors or up at the moon. Sorry about that. Let’s see if I can’t pull the sleigh back into it’s defensible ruts.

When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,
and when we escape like squirrels turning in the
cages of our personality
and get into the forests again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don’t know ourselves.

—D. H. Lawrence

In the dark of the moon,
In the flying snow, in the dead of winter
War spreading, families dying, the world in danger
I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.

—Wendell Berry

“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

— Mel Brooks

The New York Times: Into Charles Bukowski? Hard to be, isn’t it? And I’ve tried. But there is a genius there, and this is an interesting reviewing of “Come On In,” the latest posthumous publication. He ain’t Wordsworth, but it’s art.

While aesthetically brutal, these considerations have a way of exposing pretense, even the pretense of exposing pretense. Bukowski makes Allen Ginsberg look like a mandarin. That his poems get an F for craft doesn’t bother him; since his life gets an F too, he achieves an extraordinary correspondence between word and action. And perhaps this is what he was after, with the headlong effort to kill himself with drinking and brawling – pummeling his life into simple enough terms to be within reach of a limited art.

So Friday I stopped by the local video store and picked up two five-day rentals: Gingerbread Man starring Kenneth Branaugh and People I Know, starring Al Pacino.

I started watching Gingerbread, and found it a little hard to buy Branaugh as a Savanah lawyer. He’s a good actor but I didn’t get far into it. Got bored. I had the feeling the director was bored too, and maybe the cast. Possibly the writer, John Grisham, is getting bored writing about people like Savanah lawyers. (But please, John, not another Painted House.) A quick google proves I’m not the only viewer who wasn’t caught up in it. It’s got a hell of a cast, though, including Robert Duvall, so I’ll probably try finishing it. It’s paid for and not due back until Wednesday.

So I popped it out and put in People I Know. Al Pacino as a has-been NY publicist. Not far into the film, I found myself watching Pacino and Tea Leoni suckin up some opium in a swanky whorehouse. God preserve me from movies that make me feel like I’ve just stepped in something that’s gonna need hosing off.

In short, I think I’m off movies for a while. There are just a few that have been recommended by people I trust, and I’ll watch those as the Winter goes by. (I liked March of the Penguins.) But for the most part, it’s time for a few — dozen — good books.

* I spelled weak that way on purpose. It’s a pun, get it? Ha ha .

Well, not literally.  I’m just wondering, why does it appear there are little crumbs of food under the keys in my keyboard?  When I do not eat at the computer.  I do eat in this room!  I have a dining table in the dining room, and a coffee table in the living room, and no food comes into my home office.  Is some sort of elfin nocturnal miscreant using my computer while I sleep?  Some hacker in Asia, with a cracker problem?  Dang.

OK, you gotta read this post on Bush’s overreaching of his powers, at Nothing But Love. Good stuff.