Prufrock's Lair: Citizenship and Nationality: List of Links

Morbid Thoughts

But, seriously, who really cares what Helen Thomas thinks about anything? She's like that crazed and deformed aunt (the obscenity-spouting elephant girl) one might hide away from the neighbors in one's basement for most of the year and only briefly let out, though tethered to a chain, for spring cleanings. Fortified by a stiff shot of whisky and wearing a face shield to protect the eyes from errant sprays of spittle, one would then drive her back into the dark recesses with a cattle prod while the eldest son stood by with a double-barreled shotgun . . . just in case the old battleaxe broke free of its bonds. —Michael David Rawlings

Picture Mussolini: jutting jaw, ramrod, arms akimbo, theatrical bellicosity. Picture Hitler: blazing eyes, flaying arms, convulsions of sweat and spittle, a stream of obscenities and lies and banalities, an ecstasy of religious dementia. Now picture Reverend Jeremiah Wright: ranting, raving, pounding the podium. It all blurs together into one, continuous montage of crazy before a sea of Sieg-Heiling zombies—all sexed-up and mesmerized, jabbering Orwellian ghetto like victims of tourettes syndrome . —Michael David Rawlings

ASSORTED STUFF

User Profile Questions & the Inner You
By Michael David Rawlings

As many of you know, in addition to the routine prompt boxes on the User Profile page regarding one's interests and hobbies and such, Google provides a box in which one may type a response to what might be an unlimited supply of penetrating questions. These questions are aimed at our psychological processes. The inner you. With our answers we further reveal ourselves to our adoring fans. Now, I'm fine with that. I'm down. But most of these questions are deep, as deep as the Mississippi is wide.

In a dark, secluded corner on the basement floor of Google’s corporate office building, a team of crack psychoanalysts are pouring over the millions of dossiers the company has gathered on us over the years and are busily churning out these questions for our consideration. They've acquired the goods on us from the Internet and from the microwaves crisscrossing the air above our heads. These questions are scientific, informed by years of experience. I need more than 400 characters to do most of them justice. The following question, for example, at the bare minimum requires 1400 characters:

Your pajamas have duckies on them; why did you switch from choo-choos?

Right. Here's the thing. It was just too much to live up to. I mean, I'm long on machismo, real long. Strapping even. My chest hair has hair. My knuckles don't just drag, they convey me. Hence, my legs are atrophic coils of calcified bone and shriveled flesh. But like the rest of me, they're resplendently hairy. Macho hairy. We're talking about a bushy, comb-breaking pair of appendages here.

Hence, my arms are bazookas. From shoulder to callused knuckle, they're massive columns of muscle, man sweat and bulging veins, akin to the steroid-inflated guns on Sylvester Stallone, only mine are for real and don't have stretch marks. But, still, at fifty, the choo-choo ain't what it used to be. Sure, the drive's still there, but sometimes the fires won't stoke.

Duckie pajamas convey a sweat, whimsical sense of humor, a certain endearing sensitivity, but not one that is overly sentimental. They're the stuff of tenderness fortified by a stolid consistency . . . sans high expectations.

Mine are silk, and the duckies have little red hats with tassels.

__________

A Tiny Brown Moth and a Little Gray Sparrow
By Michael David Rawlings

A tiny brown moth, believing his heart above all else,
Battered himself against the window pane,
Thinking to embrace the morning air—wings a-flutter.

A little gray sparrow, believing his hunger above all else,
Battered his sharp beak against the window pane,
Hoping to spear the tiny morsel—wings a-flutter.

Eager, persistent, furiously tap, tap, tapping.
Bemused! Frightened! Angry!

"What is this?" the sparrow exclaimed. "His soft belly bruises my beak!"

And still the tiny brown moth
Battered himself against the window pane,
Eager to embrace the morning air—wings a-flutter.

___________

Private Alters
By Michael David Rawlings

I have seen the blood that flows from Private alters;
That glistens on wasted flesh and bone.
I have seen the tiny severed Fingers—pink, adrift in murky, black waters.
In all my feverish dreams I hear their muted screams,
And in their eyes, those bewildered eyes turned on callous faces, I see a plea . . . and the wounded face of God.

"It is our Right!" they rant. "Our Right!"

"Yes," I whisper, small and foolish,
"But the Babies, the little Babies."
___________

Washroom Meditations in Blue
By Michael David Rawlings

Have you ever stood in crowded halls and listened to the footfalls
That approach you and pass you and leave you stranded?
Have you ever sensed the faint and weightless drift beyond the temporal stream?

Did you touch it?
Did you taste it?
Were you frightened?

Have you ever stood in the pouring rain?
Or felt a Dread so acute that you believed yourself to be teetering
On the very edge of the blackest hole in your brain?

Did you fall?

Have you ever walked on a rainbow?
Or felt the touch of a child’s hand—frail and tiny—
Wrap itself around your smallest finger?
Did the air hold its breath?
Did time stop?
Did you stop?

I should have been a monstrous insect, with fetid breath,
Hanging on your bedroom wall.

Bluemoon's Favorite Poem

DOVER BEACH

by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast, the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land.

Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breach
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Edmund Burke

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites. Soceity cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there is without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

Freedom, and not servitude is the cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true remedy for superstition.

John Locke

Whenever the Legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or reduce them to slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people.

Government has no other end but the preservation of property.

The end of the law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of laws, where there is no law, there is no freedom. For liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others; which cannot be where there is no law.

Any single man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrent obedience or resistance to the commands of the civil magistrate; we are all qualified, entitled, and morally obliged to evaluate the conduct of our rulers. This political judgment, moreover, is not simply or primarily a right, but like self-preservation, a duty to God. As such it is a judgment that men cannot part with according to the God of Nature. It is the first and foremost of our inalienable rights without which we can preserve no other.