Delay Indicted (etc.) Judith Miller Still in Jail?

Tom Delay was indicted today.

Bill Frist is on the run from the SEC for insider trading.

Carl Rove is under scrutiny for outing Valerie Plame as undercover for the CIA. Judith Miller has been in jail, what?, going on four months? For not writing a story about Plame? About Robert Novak who wrote a column about Plame? Where is Novak since he imploded on CNN?

Bush crony Mr. Brown has a thing going on with a scapegoat.

Iraq is killing us faster than we can kill Iraq.

China is eating our international economic lunch (soul food take out in little cardboard boxes next?).

I think way back to 1999 when friends were telling me they'd vote for Bush not because he would be a good leader but because he had good people around him.

Where? Who?

An Old Man's Waiting Room

At 55 I’m a little hippie in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s waiting room,
City Lights, where electricians repair some sort of wiring
on the stair, of all places, leading to the poetry.

The hammering is unexpected but not out of place,
faces of Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac and others
staring from underneath their covers as charged as ever
and maybe even as electrified as Blake or Whitman.

I might have thought of eyes watching me but I was
watching them, conceitedly watching the little alcove-
hallway, and the door behind which they told me
the old man still keeps hours, thinking maybe I’ll
get a signed copy in the Coney Island of my mind.

The pounding of the hammers, drilling of the drills,
life support for poets in the marketplace of North Beach
where whole hogs hang in open doorways, hungry poets howl.

My conceit continues as they watch me for what I’ll do next,
so I get up and read a love poem to an audience of its object.

Tom Todaro
13 April 2005
City Lights Books, San Francisco