unused condom
litters LBJ - aborted
assault or un-"lucky"?

thinking about how
over generations an artery
changes its name

from Nathan Forrest to MLK

"coming Fall 09"
Concho Commons Spring 2010:
still an overgrown lot

choose your battles

the half hour it took
the peasant-skirted protestor
to chalk a hundred library
stairs with missives
re: atrocities in Gaza,
this morning's major
clean-up task for minimum-
wage earners, sweepers
from groundskeeping
& maintenance

Earth day in Seattle:
make a papier-mache piñata
in the shape of a globe

use recycled copies of
The Stranger
& club it to a pulp

Earth day: TxState –
Ride your bike to work & get
a free bottle of water

"some people have difficulty getting numb"

off of SSRIs for one week
Dr. Dean tells me
how the oral health
of a mother affects
the weight of an unborn
child, why treating
an abscessed tooth
can lead to complications
when novocaine must be
traded for lidocaine

"sometimes it is not enough"

to take the metal probe
to recognize what hurts

Some notes on vulgarity:

"In Victorian fiction, to show excessive distaste for vulgarity is to betray a fatal character flaw: a concern for style and class at the expense of ethics.... to value social distinction over moral discrimination- is to prove onself not just a bad reader but effectively illiterate, father beneath the community of fellow-feeling that every Victorian novel summons into being than a monkey is beneath a margrave." - Joseph Litvak in "Vulgarity, Stupidity, and Worldliness in Middlemarch"

"The quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity lest we die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence" - Middlemarch

after she announces
the break-up, I think twice about
her third dislocated shoulder