this diary is dedicated to all who suffer because of war
we love and support our troops, just as we love and support the Iraqi people – without exception, or precondition, or judgment
we have no sympathy for the devil
we acknowledge the power to act that is in us
cross-posted at MyLeftWing, BooMan Tribune, and my blog.
image and poem below the fold
Smoke rises as a US Apache helicopter hovers over Baghdad’s restive Haifa street district. A steady barrage of machine-gun fire and mortars was thundering across Baghdad as Iraqi and US forces battled insurgents in one of the capital’s Sunni bastions.
(AFP/Sabah Arar)
Crowds Surround Us
by Tom Thompson
agile founderings and piecemeal flotations.
The crowd constitutes a gravitational field
that slaps back at the ground, numbed
and maddened by ground’s constant suckling.
The crowd embodies a depression in fabric
more than an attraction. Its angled, arteried, fleet
fantasias of need sway in
a loopy, bobbing dance without strings.
It’s this sense of movement the organism uses
to believe in its own existence, the palpable presence
of an intangible parade, uncertain
planetary marches, a supernumerary of stars.
In its mania for artifice the crowd has sewn the sky
with these shiny extras. Embodied
adoration, they snap the organism shut
before tickling it open again
with reedy gestures. Breathe.
The crowd’s louche body
clings and parts in place, an ovation
rigid and adrift, alive. It is the sea
that sweeps the sea.
Broom tight with inner bickering.
A mortal scour. Meaning,
how the crowd hates the crowd.
Outwardly. It admits you or me
as an enormous lidless eye admits glittering
beams. Endless watching, washing us in.
The crowd’s object, its point,
is always vanishing into its own mass. It is a sea
with no concern for us, even as it scores.
