Thursday, June 25, 2009

America: the plum blossoms are falling.

(10/29/06)

I just read that in Iraq, pilgrims making the hajj to Mecca were open fired upon. Sectarian violence. I feel sick.

I just want to wake up and have it all be over.

I remember the first time we invaded Iraq. I was 10 and my father was away working in Indiana. My mother, sister, and I stood in our living room listening to the television. Night vision images blared into the room. Targets hit. But who were they killing, really?

Collateral damage. That's the way you say that people got in the way.

I felt sick, 10, even then.

I had dreams where soliders marched endlessly. Over and over again, lines and lines of faceless men who went everywhere and nowhere. I woke up and it was all over.

Maybe I should just consider myself lucky: I can sit and sip tea in the quiet of a cheap apartment. Feed myself, work, plan a trip to Ireland, go to graduate school at a private university. I'm not scared of 24th Street, of Lyndale Avenue. I don't worry about random acts of violence or about my family's atoms being scattered by a car bomb.

And isn't that what we're fighting for?

Well, then I guess I owe "W" a big goddamn thank you. I hadn't realized that Iraq was such a threat to my ability to sip Lemon Zinger and listen to Leonard Cohen.

Collateral damage.

I think this freedom has become a liability.

"America when will we end the human war? / Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb." (--"America" by Allen Ginsberg)

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