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But be fore-

Warned:

It may remind you

Of Painful scenes, the 

Kind you

Thought you'd hid

“Won't happen to me!” I said --

It did.

The Police Dog

I am a police
Dog – happy, strong
I stand testicle-high and
              (about)
Javelin-long
(God – created me with
This limited view
So sometimes I forget he
Created you too)

Ahem

Ahemplease excuse me
Yes you, Professor Thou

(That goes with Comma, H.T.
And in the index you see
That those two initials stand –
For Mister Holier Than)

Three Poems

Where I come from

In the place
Where I come from
There was a school
Just down the street.
A girl got pregnant
So
They made her stand
In front of class
And
 “Apologize

Conversions

In working our way through a self-assigned (-inflicted?) program of religious subculture-themed movies, a friend and I recently came across the unexpectedly good 2000 Mormon missionary film, God’s Army. I wouldn’t say it bears up well under all standards of judgment—it is the sort of film, indeed, which seems from the first few minutes to be flying directly toward a mountain of sentimentality, but which has enough emotional honesty in it to make you think it is bound to pull up and away before it reaches it. When it disappointingly plows straight ahead into the mountain, however, in the last thirty seconds, you realize that there are limits to the realism that can safely be incorporated into a Mormon movie and remain within the bounds of orthodoxy. Bearing that it mind, however, it comes about as close to being earnestly self-searching and self-questioning as a film on this subject could without challenging any formal tenets of the church.

Passing: A Poem

From center stage-lit, high-browed 

Face, with hue

White as any, context of offering apologia

Biographical, words come 

Confess some

Mixed bloodline of race—for purpose serves

Our Friend, the King

Kings are good transmigrators-- so skilled in fact that some have been known to get themselves reborn as democrats and "reformers" without even having to undergo any discernible change in their regime. King Hassan II of Morocco was such a soul-changer (I in fact swiped the title of this post from a book about him by a French journalist (which I confess I haven't read)). Another would be the monarch of Greece during the civil war of the 1940s, who in a single three-month period in 1947 went from demi-autocrat propped up by British imperialism to hero of democracy, who needed to be supplied with arms and money under the Truman doctrine to resist the Communist advance.

But of course, when we say "Our Friend, the King" today, there is only one person we really mean. We can only be referring to the one who reigns in Riyadh, the "regional partner" and "counter-terrorist" par excellence, scion of the House of Saud.