WordsOfThunder

          '07 What did I tell you in 2007? The celebration of time together now done, Bent on leaving, unwilling to stay, Behind your childish eyes. I told you not to go. Rhetoric patriotic riotic feud poured From a hormone-fueled mouth, As you promised me, the tree,     our class, king country, and God That you would return safely. You promised us you would not die.          '08 I reasoned with you, I begged you, But you went anyway. Maybe it was the figure you cut     in uniform, Maybe it was the red blood blood-red     rhetoric already half false, Maybe it was a mind half rotted,     finally cracking under the pressure of a consta

God, I've been reading too much Sherman Alexie. I approach the counter with a "Ya-Hey" for the young teller who looks at me as if I were speaking Cantonese Bengali or Korean. I won't say Spanish; if I said "Hola," she'd be the first to ask me about my day my job my family. She'd be the first to catch me in that particular lie: I do not speak Spanish. God, I've been reading too much Sherman Alexie. At the gas station, watching possibly the world's most overpriced commodity drain my pockets, a fancy-old Honda – accessories worth more than the car – takes the pump's backside. There's a brotha behind the w

Never read your Frost, Naked, nude for all to see. You might get a Frostbite You won't enjoy. For Frost, a master of words Cold as fire and warm as ice, Has a power to freeze the naked Soul, not bones And petrify your very mind.

In 1996, Deep Blue beat Kasparov, The Unabomber was arrested, and I was preparing to graduate high school and go on to Texas A&M when I received a phone call at three in the afternoon as my school was letting out. In the school office, my father told me what, at the time, was the worst news I had received in my young life: Jerry Carson had died. Jerry Carson was my oldest friend. To this day, I have no idea where he and my father met, only that they did and that one of my earliest memories was of Jerry Carson and myself watching some old Western movie on the couch on the fuzzy old TV in 1981. He'd drift in and out of my memories for the next

There's something magical about baseball. The daylight dramas played out under the all-seeing sun – he's a baseball fan too – sitting behind home, down 3rd, by the right field foul pole, in the left-field bleachers. There's a rhythm to the game on the field and the fans in the stands and the umpire and the hot dog hawkers and the mascot cavorting like a lunatic. It's a festival, a carnival, a celebration of everything that makes America great. Baseball is faith. Any Cubs fan can tell you that. But the faith of baseball transcends the wish in vain for a World Series or NL Pennant. Those hopes are reserved for sour old men who have l