Wants and Desires...

I empathize with the sentiment if not the actual want...

Costal Farmlet
"A man wants nothing so badly as a gooseberry farm."
—Chekhov
I want a costal farmlet.
I desire it very much.
I saw it advertised
in the classifieds and I presume
that coastal means our land
comes right down
to the sea with the whitecaps
lashing romantically, and farmlet
means we can grow
gnarled trees on our headland
and let sheep roam. It is about cheap
enough for us if we borrow, beg
and steal, pawn a few poems, also write
a harlequin romance or two, and it's
only 9000 miles from the place
we call home. There's not much
of a hitch except the Immigration
would not let us stay in the country
to live in our farmlet. But still,
I want it and think we should go
look at it, right now, this moment,
while tangy sweet gooseberries glow.

"Costal Farmlet" by David Ray, from Music of Time: Selected and New Poems. © The Backwaters Press.

The farmlet in my wants resides on the side of a mountain not a sea and it's blueberries not gooseberries that call me there. But, other than those discrepancies, this poem could be mine, not by the writing but by the desiring...

Source:The Writer's Almanac for Wednesday, March 28th

Other links to David Ray:

• Howling Dog Press: Xray
• From Amazon.com ~ Music of Time: Selected and New Poems
  

Support The Troops?

With all of the rhetoric flying around Washington these days, with the President claiming that if you don't support the surge you don't support the troops, with Congress fighting over when to end the fighting (or if to end the fighting), is it any wonder that the American People are getting confused? I have been continuing my informal survey and so far I have run across all of three cars with those magnetic decorations of self proclaimed patriotism in the last week.

Now granted, this is an informal, casual, eyes open when I think about it survey of one commuting route. My interpretation of the results isn't a lack of support for the troops. My interpretation is, the American People have woken up to the trick being perpetrated upon them. These outward displays of hyperactive patriotism that really do not do anything to support the troops or prove your real ideals are just show. You really have to walk the talk. And the President is failing in the polls proportionate to the number of magnetic ribbons that aren't replaced on cars. Yet he still blusters and accuses others of not supporting the troops...He threatens but his actions are what America (and the World) watches. And by virtue of the fact that they "serve at the pleasure of the President", it is the actions of his surrogates that America watches.

The President has failed to walk the talk, all of the President's men have failed to walk the talk...And the American people have seen how they have been played for chumps. And guess what, they don't like being taken for fools. And as he runs up a debt that will take generations of hardworking Americans to pay off, he has the audacity to tell you and me how hard he "works". Well, Mr. President, your "hard work" has failed to move me from my position that you do not belong in our White House. You were not elected. Without 9/11 you would have been a one term mistake foisted upon us by a Supreme Court who overstepped their charter to appoint you. And from the look of the evidence, America woke up in November of 2006.

Mr. President, when are you going to wake up? We, the American People, can not afford for you to sleep much longer. Do you hear that rumble? It is the beginning of the alarm that is running through America at the failure of your Presidency...Mr. President, you don't want to be the "War President" that went to war with America. You sir, will lose...