screenshotsofdespair:

CAVU, Roger.  You inspire me and I’m keeping it in my heart.

CAVU

“Hard Rain” by Tony Hoagland

After I heard It’s a Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

played softly by an accordion quartet

through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall,

I understood: there’s nothing

we can’t pluck the stinger from,

nothing we can’t turn into a soft-drink flavor or a t-shirt.

Even serenity can become something horrible

if you make a commercial about it

using smiling, white-haired people

quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes

in the Everglades, where the swamp has been

drained and bulldozed into a nineteen-hole golf course

with electrified alligator barriers.

“You can’t keep beating yourself up, Billy,”

I heard the therapist say on television

                                                          to the teenage murderer,

“about all those people you killed—

You just have to be the best person you can be,

one day at a time—”

And everybody in the audience claps and weeps a little,

because the level of deep feeling has been touched,

and they want to believe that

the power of Forgiveness is greater

than the power of Consequence, or History.

Dear Abby:

My father is a businessman who travels.

Each time he returns from one of his trips,

his shoes and trousers

    are covered with blood—

but he never forgets to bring me a nice present;

Should I say something?

                                      Signed, America.

I used to think I was not part of this,

that I could mind my own business and get along,

but that was just another song

that had been taught to me since birth—

whose words I was humming under my breath,

as I was walking through the Springdale Mall.