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He was a boy
and lied about
his age. His older
brother and he
enlisting for the great
adventure. Call it
getting out of town,
call it getting out of the country.
Call it three squares a day,
call it liberation,
call it war,
call it invasion.
So it’s off to Asia
and an Edwardian education,
and Thirty Thousand Killed a Million,
wrote the humorist, raging,
and our wounded boy came home
decades before my mother’s birthing.
I remember the old man,
and how the cousins who did
live with him would sneer
to tell of his crying jags,
supposing crocodile tears
to explain an old man’s
desperate melancholy.
I remember how his belly
ached, and how his cigarettes
his breath would take, his
shouting deaf man’s voice
and how he’d be sure to buy
the first poppy of the Day
from some ancient, younger vet
of some more recent, ancient war.
What else than honoring
an Armistice would
such a choice be for?
But now? All displaced
by our cynical sentimentality.
It’s not a peace we recognize,
but an endless, veteran-making
enterprise. So here’s to this
day’s Veteran’s Day: may
all our desperate best be thrown away.
May all the chicken hawks accord
our country reap its just reward.
No child wants to grow up experiencing a struggle with mental health, poverty, addiction and prejudice. In my career working with young people there has never been an occasion when an elementary aged youngster asked for these misfortunes.
As we are about to enter a new school year let us remind ourselves of the potential that children have, as well as our obligations to ensure that they are given equal opportunity. Eventually all third graders grow up to be adults. For those who end up facing some of life’s more daunting challenges, it is important to show a bit of compassion and understanding. Sometimes it takes a child-like innocence to remind us that we are all in this together.
Macie Brown
A place not far away,
At hometown elementary school,
Children were coming back inside
Following some recess play.
After a brief refreshing snack,
Then drinks from plastic cups,
Students were all asked to share
‘what i’ll be when all grown up!’
Nicole and Armani spoke of athletics.
Tom and Sulina liked outer space.
Garrett wanted to be a fireman
And Shauna described owning mother’s place.
When nearly all had spoken,
Teacher was appreciative of the share,
Up stood little Macie Brown,
The last to leave her chair
“When grown up years from now
I want to be without friends –
Perhaps homeless, or addicted,
The last to leave her chair.
Maybe illness without end.
I’d reside in a shelter
Or prison better still,
Growing up all alone
Beneath the evening’s chill.”
Returning back to her seat
Classmates turned and stared
While Macie was merely wondering
If anyone truly cared.
Today there are many children
In each and every town –
Sitting in their tiny chairs
Who hear the words of Macie Brown.
Returning back to her seat
classmates turned and stared
while Macie was merely wondering
if anyone truly cared.
Today there are many children
in each and every town –
sitting in their tiny chairs
who hear the words of Macie Brown.
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Don’ talk to me about love and kisses
Wedding bells, Mr. and Mrs.
Marriage? What a fairy tale
Give ‘em time, they’re bound to fail
Something I’ve never understood
That wolf from Little Red Riding Hood
One date with him and look at me
The fifth month of my pregnancy
A little witch inside me grows
It’s got these ears, this crooked nose
I nourish it with wholesome meals
Bugs and insects, worms and eels
I’m making sure the child will be
A spitting image of hideous me
A sickly thing prone to disease
So I’m lighting up a lot of these
Cigarettes cause low birth weight
Breathing disorders can seal its fate
A cleft palate and birth defects
Are what a smoking mom expects
It fills a witch’s heart with glee
To deliver a kid as unhealthy as me
So light up a butt my sweet Valentine
And your baby could turn out just like mine!
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$40 million is the figure in government tax breaks and subsidies that’s being mentioned for the proposed Unicorn Center in Downtown Providence.
“This will be a world-class capture and processing facility,” said House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello. “First came the Jewelry District, then the Knowledge District, then the BioMed district, then the ProvSox Stadium, and now we’re getting ready to break ground on the Magical Thinking District.”
The unicorns were first mentioned in an earth-shattering front page Providence Journal story, “Have you seen Providence’s missing unicorn?” While on the surface it seems plausible that the so-called missing unicorns are part of a nation-wide arts project, the truth is much darker.
“It’s a corral,” said a secret informant who preferred to be known as Deep Horn. “They’re planning on rounding up these unicorns and using them for medical experimentation. If you see a unicorn, don’t call that number! You’ll be consigning these beautiful creatures to a brief life of captivity, torture and ultimately vivisection!”
“Unicorns don’t exist, they’re like pensions,” said Governor Gina Raimondo, dismissing the allegations. “And if they did exist, then they would be a natural resource, like park land, that we can use to exploit and create jobs. Jobs for people! Jobs I say!”
“When businesses benefit, everyone benefits,” said Mike Stenhouse, who seems to be mentioned in every edition of the Providence Journal these days. “When we take $40 million from taxpayers and help corporations create new products using unicorn horns, that’s money that we can’t be spending on doing frivolous things like reducing classroom size or paying for preschools.”
“I used to shoe horses,” said former Governor and possible White House candidate Lincoln Chafee. “I’d love to shoe a unicorn! But I’ve got about as much chance of doing that as I have in a presidential primary.”
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Remember when you were a teen
And couldn’t wait to make the scene
Behind the wheel of your own car
Driving made you a superstar
But freedom on the open road
Was cut short as the traffic slowed
“A sign of progress” experts said
Congestion means full steam ahead
Remember your first airline seat
Runway rumble beneath your feet
The look of wonder in your eyes
As you wing through the friendly skies
Then flying lost some altitude
Lines got long, they stopped serving food
Like sardines in a sardine can
Congestion is their business plan
Remember your first railroad ride
The panorama countryside
Rambling by on iron wheels
The club car waiter serving meals
And then one day the train was new
More frequency and comfort too
But most of all it was faster
Racing to its own disaster
Traveling is a right they missed
On our Constitutional list
We need to get from here to there
By means that aren’t a double-dare
Drive a car and the road could sink
Is your pilot seeing a shrink?
Washington, invest the dough
Make America GOOD TO GO.
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November 9th, Twenty-Sixteen
Words crawl across my TV screen:
GOP WINS THE WHITE HOUSE BACK
My chest felt like a heart attack
I called my friends so we could grieve
Some were packing, ready to leave
Others asked me, “How could we lose?”
Still others drowned their tears in booze
The only hope we could embrace
Lay with the House and Senate race
But red states were on a roll
Republicans took full control
The first sign things weren’t like before
My doc moved to a Walmart store
ObamaCare – too socialized
So now all healthcare’s privatized
Keystone pipeline that wasn’t built
Assured us that no oil was spilt
Now crude is pumped in each time zone
With fracking sites in Yellowstone
Small business climbed out of its rut
Now that minimum wage got cut
The Equal Pay for Women Act?
Big biz made sure it wasn’t backed
Immigration is finally fixed
Thanks to a border wall of bricks
Built by any Mexican who
Gets an ID number tattoo
Guns and books are now the rule
Arming teachers in every school
Bus drivers too, and postal clerks
Ready for whatever danger lurks
America gets even worse
Lucky for you I’m out of verse
Suffice to say if this comes true
The April Fools are me and you
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The frat boys from Oklahoma
Long for days when the aroma
Of burning crosses late at night
Made men like them proud to be white
A far cry from my frat house when
We made headlines by being men
Who drank too much and on a dare
Would drop our pants most anywhere
College rules there for the breaking
Morning bongs there for the baking
No ladies allowed in our bunks
Meant cozy love in steamer trunks
Students thrived on bad behavior
Risky capers were our savior
When heavy workloads made us groan
Not to mention the student loan
Today frat boys from Oklahoma
Won’t be earning their diploma
Because tradition in the south
Has left them with a racist mouth
But ask yourself, what steered them wrong
To insult classmates with their song
Like Klansmen did a few years back
Or cops who shoot when they see black?
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Doodles on a cocktail coaster
Moustache on a George Bush poster
Cartoons were how my pals and me
Unwound at night in NYC
We dreamed of getting paid to draw
A fading dream each time we saw
True artists fill a square with ink
That made you smile and made you think
But what a strange and heinous time
Murder and cartoon share my rhyme
Tragic and senseless all agree
But something has occurred to me
The artists in our magazines
Seek out the humor in our genes
The quirks, the traits, our basic flaws
Are simple truths that give us pause
Others draw with a sharper pen
Ridiculing women and men
In cartoons judging them absurd
For following their Prophet’s word
It’s time to drop the poison pens
And vow all hateful drawing ends
Let’s make our squares inclusive space
That reunites the human race
c2015pn
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Muslim terrorists want to die
Death is their ticket to the sky
Where heaven offers rich rewards
For each neck slit with ISIS swords
By killing them what do we gain?
Instead of death consider pain
Torture can take them to the brink
Soul-piercing pain to help them think
About a war where they don’t die
But wish they could each time we try
A new, improved torture technique
That makes them scream and makes them weak
Word spreads fast through desert terrain
Instead of death a life of pain
Breeds fear recruits cannot ignore
When contemplating jihad war
Torture, not for information
Torture that brings resignation.
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Following is a brief history of my research into various events in the history of the City of Providence. While I realize that these incidents seem disconnected in isolation, when taken as a whole, they paint a real and imminent danger to the citizens of our town. As I explain to my many readers, listeners and followers, this story is true, and some of it really happened.
Mark Binder, Summer, 2013
The Narragansett Indians called it Clths Slaaag, which Rhode Islands founder Roger Williams translated as The Old One.
Roger Williams joked about it in his diary journal.
After a sparse meal of fish and corn, Cannonicus, the Sachem, warned me not to build my home on the hill. He said that was where The Old One, a horrific monster, lived and fed. His vivid description reminded me of the demonic stories told by Popish priests to cow the superstitious. Most probably a rabid bear.”
Roger Williams was wrong. Seventeen years later, his second son, Elijah mysteriously vanished and was discovered three days later at the mouth of a cave concealed by a fallen apple tree. The boy’s hair and skin had turned white. Three fingers on his left hand were gone, as if they had been gnawed off. Elijah had lost his mind and never spoke again.
Roger Williams heart was broken. He spent much of the rest of his life abroad in England. A scrap of paper with a crude drawing of an anchor
In 1860 when his bones were dug from the family plot to be re-interred beneath his statue in Prospect Park, the popular story was that an apple tree had eaten through his corpse, and the roots had taken the shape of his leg bones. The truth was much darker.
In his diary, Stephen Randall, a witness wrote,
The stench that emitted from the opened grave was beyond imagining. There lay Roger Williams, looking as well-preserved as the day he was interred. Yet his eyes were open, his mouth peeled back baring his teeth in a rictus of horror. When Elder Brown bent down to close the poor man’s eyes, the body disintegrated into thousands of wriggling worms. Those who were present fled, and when we returned all that remained were the roots of the apple tree, looking strangely like a leg bone.
Moses Brown discovered the mangled corpse of a slave girl in the basement of his East Side Home in 1773. No one knew who she was or how she had died,
Brown wrote,
The corpse’s condition was appalling. Her back was scarred with lines that John said betrayed the excessive use of a lash, but reminded me of both the jagged tares rendered by an animals claw and the infected ruin of a child caught in a wave of jellyfish tentacles.
A short time later, Moses Brown freed his slaves and began working for abolition.
Edgar Allen Poe, the author, was the next to write of the thing that lived beneath the Hill. In the margin of the original manuscript for the famous poem, The Raven
Poe wrote in a crabbed hand,
Only in the form of a black bird I can indicate the monstrosity. I have tried again and again to describe the Old One, but language fails me, and the words I use seem unnatural and unreal.
Following his failed courtship of Sarah Helen Power (Whitman), Poe spent weeks wandering up and down Benefit Street in a laudanum-induced haze. Many say that he never recovered.
The most direct references to the creature came from Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who is still famous for his horrific tales of the Necronomicon and The Great Old Ones with unpronounceable names. Lovecraft lived most of his life on Providences East Side, at the tip of a triangle between the land near where Elijah Williams was discovered, and the basement of Mosess Browns house.
“ that cellar in our childhood house was my constant nightmare,” Lovecraft wrote to his brother Peter near the end of his life. “While you and Emily laughed and played, I peered into the darkness. I fear that soul-destroying blackness corrupted me somehow.
More recently, on May 1, 1993, a party thrown by a group of Rhode Island School of Design Students in an abandoned train tunnel ended in horror.
The Providence Journal reported that, After the tear gas and pepper spray cleared, police found thirteen naked students, their backs bleeding as if they had been struck with a whip. One girl was dead. Police have no suspects, but report the probability of drug abuse.”
(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Side_Railroad_Tunnel)
In 2003, when more than 30 house cats were reported missing, the Providence Journal attributed the disappearances to a coyote roaming the neighborhood, yet suggested that small pets and children remain inside after dark. In 2009, three homeless men who had been reportedly sleeping under a nearby bridge were also declared missing, by the police, but “presumed to have left the state.:
An article in an alternative The Agenda suggested in 2006 that the changing landscape of the City was bringing the horror to the surface.
“The rivers have been uncovered, a highway is shifting, and a billion dollar project has dug underground sewage overflow tanks beneath the hills where Roger Williams once planted his crops. What else have the construction crews dug up?”
The Agenda
Shortly afterwards, the sidewalk behind the First Baptist Church in America on Benefit Street began to disintegrate and cave in. It took several years to effect the repairs on the sidewalk and fence behind the First Baptist Church.
A city contractor reported in a brief memo that has since gone missing, “ every time we tried to fill it, the sinkhole beneath Benefit Street would fill with slimy brown ichor. We finally had to lay in rebar and cement in layers going down fifteen feet. It is possible that the missing day worker fell in and wasn’t noticed, but I doubt it.”
Even now, week after week, at WaterFire in Providence bonfires are lit in the river and haunting music is played while tens of thousands of people wander through the smoke as an ancient ceremony is reborn and recreated.
Less than six months ago, the mutilated body of a missing Brown University student was found in at the site of an old Narragansett burial ground. The details were hushed up, photographs of his corpse were deleted and television cameras were kept far from the scene.
When asked to comment bout the rumors that these and the other events documented in this article were the work of the Old One, the Mayor refused to answer. This was clearly the work of a sick human being,” he said. “We have far more pressing problems in this city in terms of education and infrastructure. Dont bother me about this nonsense.
Have the shifting lands disturbed the creature? Are the fires and the people drawing the monster closer, bringing it nearer and nearer to the surface?
It is hard to tell with all the noise. But if you listen carefully, as you wander the darkened streets of Providence late at night, perhaps you will hear a sound, a soft and slurping sound, as if a moistened finger was caressing the cartilage next to your ear.
If you hear this sound, do not stop. Do not turn around. Do not scream. It feeds on fear and despair.
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