beauty
as usualbeauty eludes me completelyyet i taste itat the edge of my consciousnessand dream i am drinking itthough whether wine or hemlocki am still unsurewith its bittersweet pricklesagainst my skinand caressing tendernessi suspect is the preludeto proclamations of desirei will never return you walk on streetspopulated by menseeming as treesbut plundering your depthswith glances different only in their trapped rapelessnessfrom those of their mousterian precursorsyet your footsteps pausenot an instantas…
democracy has failed us
democracy doesn’t work. it never has and it is painfully incapable of functioning in a way that leads to a good society. perhaps a better one than other possibilities, at times. but not a good one because good from a moral and ethical standpoint is starkly opposed to collective desire and democracy is simply the practical representation of desire. but that’s a theoretical issue and there are dead children on…
linguistic overpopulation
english has too many pronouns. and that’s not even counting the silly made-up ones that seem to be floating around lately that i’m not going to focus on. if we look at just the subject-form pronouns in english, what do we have? first person, “i” and “we”. ok, that seems reasonable enough, one that’s only me and another for me and others. a good distinction to be able to make.…
the second amendment
i’m neither an american nor a constitutional scholar. but i am a language teacher specializing in culture and the development of contemporary language. and if that counts for nothing reading a document intended to be read by average people and understood by the masses as a guarantee of freedom, i’m not sure what better qualification would be. not that i care as i’m going to talk about it anyway and…
