Things to do

So, I'm not spending one damn dime today & I'm not turning on the television, but of course that doesn't make it go away. The fact that these next four years have barely even started.

My sister sent me her to-do list for 2005:
1. Unite the left
2. Divide Iraq
3. Kidnap Ann Coulter and make her watch "Harold and Maude" over and over again.

Seems a reasonable plan, not too ambitious.

But mostly I feel like going back to bed, reading poetry about the acoustics of an empty heart; writing novels about the way things could be instead of news stories about the way things are.

I should be building houses somewhere, I should be armed, I should be distributing clean water instead of words. Always words.

"The only security that matters is the security of the imagination," Muriel Rukeyser said. We are against war & the sources of war; for poetry & the sources of poetry.

I'm in a bomb shelter of my own making, weathering a crimson security alert: Your dream life is in grave danger today. A looming preemptive strike against your imagination.

I'm digging a well, trying to get to the source of things.

I'm making a duct tape dress to wear to my own inauguration as commander-in-chief of my one-woman surrealist army.