"MOMUS

MOMUS is the name men give your face,
The brag of its tone, like a long low steamboat whistle
Finding a way mid mist on a shoreland,
Where gray rocks let the salt water shatter spray
Against horizons purple, silent.

Yes, Momus,
Men have flung your face in bronze
To gaze in gargoyle downward on a street-whirl of folk.
They were artists did this, shaped your sad mouth,
Gave you a tall forehead slanted with calm, broad wisdom;
All your lips to the corners and your cheeks to the high bones
Thrown over and through with a smile that forever
wishes and wishes, purple, silent, fled from all the
iron things of life, evaded like a sought bandit, gone
into dreams, by God.

I wonder, Momus,
Whether shadows of the dead sit somewhere and look
with deep laughter
On men who play in terrible earnest the old, known,
solemn repetitions of history.

A droning monotone soft as sea laughter hovers from
your kindliness of bronze,
You give me the human ease of a mountain peak, purple,
silent;
Granite shoulders heaving above the earth curves,
Careless eye-witness of the spawning tides of men and
women
Swarming always in a drift of millions to the dust of toil,
the salt of tears,
And blood drops of undiminishing war."

--Carl Sandburg

Listening to: Ginastera.

The power of a poem, like the power of a mirror,
lies in its coordination. --And we think we see
another room there; another life.

A bumper sticker: smileyface "Christo Teama".

You knew this was coming.

I'm losing track: is Burning Man still cool, or has it
"jumped the shark"?

DNA that plays tic-tac-toe.

Twin Oaks is an intentional community founded in 1967 on the
ideas of B F Skinner, & is still going strong. (Their main business:
making hammocks.)

Alt-Culture from Russia.

"I got caught in a verbal slugfest between the two of them
recently in Los Angeles. The high point was when O'Reilly
cleverly riposted Franken's account of his lies by screaming:
"Shut up! Shut up!" A particularly sound argument, I thought.

Franken, in turn, said, "Bill, we're not on Fox News." " --Molly Ivins