Behemoth, somewhere around the
mid-seventies, with the blessing
of avaricious trickle-downers,

began to devour mom and pop,
the town square, the church
on the corner and field, after

field, after field, after field. The
cemetery has become a dandelion
garden, not taking up any more

space than it did before because
there aren’t anymore bodies for
family plots. There aren’t any-

more families. Where did those
people go? Behemoth, growing ever
larger with an all-consuming appe-

tite, needed to be fed more and
more and so more fields were con-
sumed, and chemicals were used to

grow bigger seeds, faster and
Behemoth consumed the poison
seeds and became sterile because

of the seeds and could never produce
hybrid Behemoths, so more and more
seeds had to be made to feed hungry

Behemoth to keep him alive to
consume more and more and soon the
world was full of rotting, one-time,

one-purpose, poison seeds and no
more Behemoth with no family to
bury him in a family plot in a

cemetery on the edge of a town
that doesn’t exist anymore and
so, Behemoth rotted in the fields

filled with rotting one-time,
single purpose, poison seeds
near a dandelion garden.

The dandelion man worked the
acres with well-worn implements,

some left over from relatives re-
siding in the town cemetery. He

would go for walks in the cemetery
thinking of poems he would pen

later and instead of asking the
grounds keepers to put some

herbicide down to kill the dande-
lions, he would pluck some, and

lay them on the headstones of
family members. If he found a

dandelion that had gone to seed,
he would carefully pluck it, hold

it close to his lips, breathe deeply,
hold his breath and then blow as

hard as he could on the seeds
scattering them all over those

headstones and a few of family
friends. He would chuckle

thinking about his grandchild
doing exactly the same thing.

A white kid with an AR-15, a trench coat,
wearing nothing else, shot and killed
four black and brown kids in a restaurant
in a southern state.
He may be delusional,
but surely, it should be seen as a crime of hate.
Perhaps, he should have been in a
mental hospital run by the state;
whatever, he had his guns taken away,
but daddy gave them back to him
thus securing the stupid, white kid’s fate.
YAY, DADDY! You, go, NRA.
Shoot and run away
and come back with more guns
to shoot another day.
And what did the black kid do
to save his and others’ fate?
He grabbed the rifle, threw it over the
counter and chased the lunatic,
naked as a jay, away.
He didn’t grab the rifle and shoot,
which would have been the
choice of the NRA.
He just threw it away.
The white kid has been captured
without anymore deaths
by law enforcement officers who know
how to hunt best.
So, take that NRA.
Why don’t you and the rest of
the loony Second Amenders
join the National Guard,
the only militia that is
constitutionally A-okay?

“I have to learn to eat healthy in moderation,”
he said looking for more medication.
“When we go to the grocery store,”
“I’ll have to pick up some Pepto-Bismol.”
His wife asked, “Don’t we have any more?”
“No, I just guzzled it all.”

The evangelical having spouted certitude
on matters beyond this life,
anxiously pleaded for mercy
from the Grim Reaper’s scythe.

Looking right into death’s open door,
“After this turbulent, troubled life,”
the agnostic mumbled, “No more;
eternal nothingness and blessed silence
might be just right.”

The man read that a university professor of Muslim
faith spoke ill of a former First Lady following the
First Lady’s death, something about racism and a

war-mongering son. Well, the old adage about never
speaking ill of the dead, one hardly ever observed,
wasn’t observed and you could hear the gasp across

the land. The man flinched when reading it even as
he thought to himself, she’s probably right. Like
when the black preacher in Chicago shouted during

one of his fiery sermons regarding national hypocrisy
and racism, “God damn the United States of America.”
Another gasp across the bow and the man, a minister

in that preacher’s denomination, flinched when he
heard it as he thought to himself, he’s right. The
female, tenured, Muslim professor is on a leave

of absence from teaching and who ever hears from
that black preacher anymore? They crossed the
culturally polite line and got off pretty lightly

when they spoke truth to power. The man thought,
not too long ago, the culturally and politically
polite practice would have been lynching.

by the time you reach seventy,
lord willin’ you do, you will
have flown through the strato-
sphere, been on a journey with
jules verne including to the
center of the earth (which
may sound like fun from your
young perspective, but it is
very dark down there), been
twenty thousand leagues under
the sea (where it is also
very dark). if you are lucky,
you will have resurfaced,
breathed deeply, and then
journeyed around the world
in eighty days, taken a nice
long, hot shower, petted and
been kissed by a chocolate lab.

A lot of time is spent trying to make up
for previous sins. Think of Twain’s Gilded
Age and the avaricious, capitalistic exploiters

who spent tens of millions of jaded dollars
and ill-got gains in philanthropic efforts
to assuage guilty consciences and cleanse

reputations. Well, that was easy. How
about lately? Former president George W.
Bush continues to help Africa deal with

HIV following the deaths of approximately
a million humans during the US war with
Iraq, for God only knows what reason unless

you ask Bush’s VP, (I hesitate to name the
demonic name) Cheney who wanted all the oil
but didn’t get it. Okay, let’s bring this

closer to home. I had a half-beagle/half-
dachshund for fifteen years and, while I
loved him, in all honesty, did not treat him

very well. Some say “Happy,” the dog, will
be waiting for me at the pearly gates to
have “A Come to Jesus Moment.” So, what

have I done? Loved five Chocolate Labs
beyond all reason and allowed them all
to get away with way too much, all of it

being worthwhile and due penance. Damn,
I didn’t think I had so much in common
with Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan,

John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vander-
bilt, George Pullman, and George W.
Bush, the 43rd President of the US of A.

I receive a poem a day from “Poem-A-Day,” and the poets
comment on their poems. I’m always interested in the
poets’ own take on their poems especially if I haven’t
a clue what the poem is about.

I have never done that, following the notion that
poems should be interpreted by the readers.

However, I’m breaking with that practice for the first
time concerning my poem, “Life in the Golden Mean.”

I set up a contrast between the Midwest and the east
and west coasts relating to global warming where it
is assumed to be “safer in the middle.” This, of course,
can be extended out to most “middle of the country” attitudes
toward the flaky coasts (born from a sense of cultural inferiority?).

The Leviathan, the pollution, is a scary reality for the Great
Lakes (the world’s greatest bodies of fresh water and increasingly
important for global water needs) and it is also a metaphor about
judging others without noticing the flaws of one’s own. We “hick”
Midwesterners have our own snobbishness. We look down our untutored/
unsophisticated noses at others.

I pastored two churches at the same time in southern Kentucky.
The country congregation of farmers and the children of farmers
was much less sophisticated than the county-seat town congregation
of merchants and professionals even though the farmers’ farms
made them much wealthier than the town folk. However, they could
always be “spiritually” superior to their more urban brothers and
sisters (read corrupted) not seeing, of course, their own sin of
spiritual pride born of a sense of cultural inferiority.

She happened to see Joan
Lunden walk into a downtown
restaurant in Naples, Florida

on a Friday evening twenty-five
years ago. She said she wanted
to go to that restaurant the

next evening. Tragically, be-
tween that announcement and
the next evening, she died,

seemingly out of the blue,
of a subarachnoid hemorrhage.
He saw a commercial featuring

Joan Lunden, twenty-five years
later, and he wanted to say
to Ms. Lunden that his wife

looked a lot like Ms. Lunden,
blond and blue-eyed, and was
so star-struck that she wanted

to visit the same restaurant
and so he said into the T.V.,
“Hey, my wife wanted to go to

the restaurant you visited,”
but it was a quarter century
too late to say that and who

would know if the restaurant
was even there and he wouldn’t
know never being back.