Somebody's Mother

Early on in her life, Susan Sanders found she was left out from the Marxist revolutionary activities of her parents, while her older, aggressive brother was earmarked for significant participation. Disenchanted with her parents’ social vision, she rebelled against the rebellion, and her father turned a neglectful shoulder while her mother became abusive.

She attended Clark College briefly, but soon fled the institutional stagnancy in order to follow a young man who shar...

innate people

i have waded through the ancient nile
and driven north to the end of roads.
why She asked and i told
her about it in a letter.

not everything
is a beginning, i write.
worlds wrap their way around
the old, withering bend,
a ruinous, curving blue
that is sky and sea
and also nothing, always
the same, circling like the ancient Eagle
around the fact of death.

there are people whom i love, but
such people are ideas with blurry faces,
silent reverberations of promis...

illusions

Bright brows, rising and waiting,
you wed my moment to silence;
a darkness that brings beauty,
that is what you mean to me.

You lower blond locks over your lips
smiling and saying illusions aloud;
these illusions i hold to me as truth.
They are all i see of you.


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Survival of Atrocities


Emmanuel Levinas writes that horror does not derive itself from Presence, but rather from the negation of Presence: "Horror is the event of being which returns in the heart of this negation, as though nothing had happened." (The Levinas Reader, P.33) You face a marvel or an atrocity. Are you a conservative when Kepler and Newton eliminated the notion of uniform circular motion? Then you have faced a marvel that is revolutionary in thought; a marvel that will chan...

Sad

I can see things the way they always were:
once, her stepfather mowed their yard with a push blade
just two wheels and the rusted blade
churning up the grass
and when she touched the clippings
the color was like cider on her fingers
and he let her try to push,
the handle high above her head,
the heavy iron weighted irrevocably to the earth.

It was like that with everything after awhile,
pushing hard at things much too large,
her young body too soft to understand
things like ...

Ten Minutes

little or no time at all
this boot comes off
and candle lit like so;
something moves on the wall
something in your eyes
pillow propped
blanket dropped;
our last night spent
in ten minutes.

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End of Something

It is monday or anyday
on the sidewalk summer’s end
a young woman smiled at me from her porch today
as I was walking my way to work.

Monday like any other day
and I am where I always am.
The wind attends to the leaves
and the shadows diffuse without the sun.

A hundred people walking today
at the end of summer’s month
young woman sips her cooling tea
and watches where I pass.

Copyright ©2004, ©2005, ©2006 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved.
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I'm in this way. It's like a way, sort of, when things happen over and over and you begin to suspect that this is the way things are. It's not good. But it's not really bad. Or, at least, it's not as bad as you expected "bad" to be. You're not way out there, you're not on your way; no, you're just in this way.

When it's like this, you have to begin. You have to look for some place to start and then, when you realize there isn't any place, you just, you know, start to begin. You ju...

Freedom and productivity. Let's agree that both are important concepts. Yes? I'm glad.

Before we go on, though, hand-in-hand, skipping harmoniously through a field of daffodils, let's define these important concepts:

Freedom: The state of being at liberty rather than in confinement or under physical restraint; or the power to determine action without restraint.

Productivity: The state of having power to generate, create, produce.

Are we still braiding daisy chains for each other? ...

Thanks for the times tables. Nine multiplied by seven? No worries. And I can spell "subpoena" correctly eight of ten times without a spell check. Pizza crust? Marinara? Let's just say Emeril looks like the chef at Alcatraz.

Unfortunately, you neglected to instruct me in some fundamental concepts. Perhaps you don't know the answers yourself. Well, I've reached the cold, clear moment in my life where I refuse to accept ignorance any longer. To quote one of the most significant visionar...

This aggression will not stand, man.


The Dude is just a guy. His rug really tied the room together. Now there's no rug, and his life is a mess.


Was his life a mess before? I'd say yes, and so would you. But it was his life, and he organized it brilliantly. He's lying on his back, on top of his rug, smiling blissfully while listening to the crystal clear sound of bowling balls striking the pins. Everytime that beautiful sound comes through, the perfect strike, his lips twitch. H...

Part I, Quantum Religion: Proof is in the Proof Link discussed aspects of new theory relating to the Creation vs. Evolution debate. Part II discusses the concept of faith.

Random House Webster's first definition of faith unfortunately reads as follows: "Confidence or trust in a person or thing."

Some faith is fatalistic and goes beyond sensual reality. Such a faith suggests that humans are incapable of recognizing truth, of understanding Divine Purpose, and of obtaining such value as to ...

Here's a debate that's going to go on for some time: Creation versus Evolution. People love to choose sides on this one, as the recent JoeUser post, "HERE'S THE PROOF THAT GOD EXISTS" by Marvin Cooley and subsequent postings demonstrate.

The author and sympathizers make some effort to debunk evolution. By using creation to polarly oppose evolution, they justify their argument when a logical step in the theory of evolution cannot be proved, or has been proven false. This argument style see...

You're peering too deeply into a mirror you use for shaving or for viewing the street you've already seen. You're on the street and you think you recognize a woman through the cafe window. A thought takes you but you can't remember the words when you're waiting for the "Don't Walk" sign to pass and now you're really pissed.

But the light changes and the thought goes and now you feel pretty silly. You're cooking supper. You're starting the dishwasher. You flip on the news and you want to ...

Once, I typed "Humor". Results= useless.
Another time, I tried "Political Satire. Results= 1 of 20, maybe. Then I became bored of clicking "next".

The "good stuff" sites must be out there. I believe it. I do. But at the moment my total link inventory is simply:

Link, or the Onion. And the Onion is a hardcopy paper I grew up with as an irreverent kid living in Madison, Wisconsin. The web site was excellent for a while. Now it's only very good. Still, I recommend it.

But there ...