HoopDance

_____”Librarians much prefer reading to the ‘infantry’
rather than becoming the infantry in a cultural war.”

With the sound of one small snick it begins.
A tiny fiction struck by hand across the truth,
like red phosphorous on a matchstick it conjures

A devil’s firework of intimidation from the
once inert ground of sulfur, KClO₃, and silica.
Scratch and its head spews fear

Jagged as a swastika. Sparks explode
thermals of smoke, slice through bindings,
tear quotes from context.

Stoked by the storm of pages, quartos
crumble under the acrid stink of matches.
Edges singe. Books blacken, and sanity

Sucks like oxygen from rational discussion.
Whole futures die in the heat of censorship.
Thought itself dissolves in ashes of silence.

Safety matches are only ’safe’ because
they don’t spontaneously combust. But,
all it takes is one brazen lie to ignite a mob.

© Val Morehouse, Oct. 2008

Roughnecks pound the ground like a drum.
Pumps snout in the mud. A dirge of cables hums,
and needling gauges like buzzard tracks witch
for earth-dark blood.

Seeking some faint sulphur heartbeat this
necromancer’s derrick full of men black as crows,
stabs at the graveyard of ancient tree and sweet fern
like steel rain on a coffin.

Over cold bones of dinosaurs
they work an incantation for
shale waxy with crude,
plunging bit after bit into the casings,

Grinding diamond and everything else into a sauce
of greed and desire until it erupts into light,
a slippery fishskin rainbow
sheen only death and oil give up.

© Version 2006 Val Morehouse. All Rights Reserved.

poetry

In tar beach towns roughnecks cast up,
climbing through muck like blackened grease monkeys
between sumps gummy with acrid crude.
Whole families broke down on the nuts and bolts of production,
earning poverty for their trouble and even
sleeping on ground The Company owned.

In heat only a rattlesnake could love and
breeze rank with petroleum funk they stuck
tents and shanties on ditch backs
like burr scabs on a starving dog,
stalking that next whiskey dollar the way
a lover drinks in an embrace.

Oil owned my family.
Its flare offs and blowouts they plowed into
a history of mud and fists and cable
song roaring through crops of derricks,
fields they planted for The Man, rigs
drilled like lightening bolts into the dirt.

Ruts and crushed gravel roads fed acres of hulks
raised from dust devils like some hellish corn
grinding ground day and night for a promise
of moisture, the remembered curl of spring sweet fiddleheads,
for the sound of ancient ocean surf long fallen
into a slurry of shit black dreams.

Until in sulphuric fury the tide turned
gushing back in a rumble of carbon futures,
splits of gas, and diesel, and kerosene
oozing blood of machines,
banking the metallic stink of money into
the sweaty cents of escape.

© Version 2007 Val Morehouse. All Rights Reserved.

Dear Andrew,

I salute your “from the community” peice “How Many Crosses Will It Take” in the 2/24/07 Contra Costa Times. Not only was it superbly written, but also it zeroes in on the “cry wolf” propaganda technique the Bush administration used and continues to use in their war-mongering: see my peice “Guest Commentary” from the 1/27/07 Times: “Sick of Apologia for Bush’s Attack on Civil Liberties.” That more soldiers have died for Bush and his cronies’ profit and ideologically driven war, than civilians perished on 9/11 is appalling. That is only one reason why the Lafayette crosses are important. It is clear to most Americans by now, that the “neocons” understand nothing about arabs, the Middle East, or arabic history and culture. If they had, they would have known this misbegotten aggression would be their undoing. I am old enough to remember well that that same American ignorance led to so many deaths in Viet-Nam. I grew up in Indonesia, and even as I child I had a better sense of how the South Asian cultures worked than our American leaders back home. You cannot “bring democracy” to tribe-based, warlord driven, cultures that run on ingrained corruption. We have learned nothing since The Ugly American was written. And, Henry James was right: Americans’ political unsophistication and intellectual innocence continue to get us in trouble at home and abroard whenever we encounter older, more decadent cultures. I thank you for your passionate and thoughtful contribution to our national discussion.

Val Morehouse, Feb. 24, 2007.

The Crosses At Lafayette

© Val Morehouse, January 2007. All Rights Reserved

To the Editors of the Contra Costa Times

I am tired of apologists for the Bush Administration’s attack on civil liberties, the most recent of which appeared on the Contra Costa Times editorial page as a “Guest Commentary”: /CCTimes/, 1/27/05, A18, titled “Letters on Warrantless Searches on Mail Show Lack of Knowledge” by James Hauck of Brentwood. His use of propaganda and fuzzy thinking should not go unchallenged.

First, he is a computer illiterate when he states that “the United States does not employ vast numbers of people…to open every piece of mail.” James, they don’t have to: they have computers and barcodes on mail. They have “watch lists” that may or may not have anything to do with the reality of terrorist threats. All of the above can be corrupted by (1) incompetence of the investigators, and (2) political gain. All it takes is a change of party in Washington to change the hue of everyone designated a “suspect.” James, you need to consider the bigger picture. (Read on …)