money

when i was a child, i saved
my five-dollars-a-week
to see what
$100
looked like.
at the time i thought
it was all the money in
the world, those crumpled
bills, nearly war-torn
from tours in my pockets.

my father lost his job, and i never
saw his shoulders slouch like that.
i pushed my money
in his hand and he said,
honey, this wouldn't feed us for a week.

.what's.he.building.in.there.

Did you ever have Tinkertoys as a child? Or K'nex? Of course you had Legos. Everybody had Legos. Especially sons of clockmakers.

I built little houses
at first. And cars later
down the line, followed
by ships, and tanks, and subs
and I grew weary of
human transportation altogether.

I wanted to build something, not to move me around in this universe, but something that was an aspect of the universe itself. I wanted to build something pure and unarrogant, something that was prescribed by the universe, and not imposed upon it.

So like all little boys
I looked to the
stars:
blueprints for a grandiose machine

Have you heard that Tom Waits song, What's He Building in There?
That might as well be about me. What am I building in there? and out here? and everywhere. The stars are a subtle plan, but there is method in the madness, and as I narrow down the possible connections, my great device inches closer to completion.

::::::

"What's he building in there?"
"A celestial machine from the stars.
And he's not constructing it.
It's building him."

.the.juggernaut.vs.the.blob.

After Netanyahu flaps his right-wing agenda in the Knesset and receives the blessing of President Shimon Peres to become the official Prime Minister, he does the unthinkable and schedules a diplomatic talk to resolve the whole tired Palestinian affair with an all-star cast of Israeli political raptors: Livni, himself, Lieberman, Barak. He even goes so far as to invite some Palestinian officials. Nothing too radical, mind you. We'll just ask that Abbas fellow if he wants to attend.
He doesn't.

And as the meeting starts, off the record, someone begins on an off-kilter note, perhaps hoping to break the ice.

"Did anyone read comic books growing up? I was a big fan of the X-Men, and I talking about one of those typical all-star crossover fantasy battles. Namely, what would happen if the Juggernaut ran into the Blob? An unstoppable force colliding with an immovable force?"

"Strangely enough, I asked an expert once the very same question. And don't ask me what his expertise exactly was. His answer was quite simple, if unintuitive: both parties would simply do what they weren't supposed to. The Blob would be sent reeling, and the Juggernaut would stop dead in his tracks."

And a third voice chimes in impatiently.
"Oh, don't be preposterous. They solved that very question in the comics, when the Hulk, who admittedly is stronger than the Juggernaut, was able to pick up the Blob. And I suppose Blob's immovable nature is only defined by his relation to the ground beneath him, because when he was hoisted up he ripped up a great deal of ground with him."

"How interesting. So in a sense, the Blob never moved, as he was still stationary to ground he was upon. How clever a solution to move an immovable object by displacing the entire system it is immovable within."

"Yes, yes. But let's move on to politics."

.obtaining.mass.

Not to give you the wrong impression about my habits and obsessions, but I was reading an article the other day about the race to find the Higgs Boss. There are only two contestants really: the LHC at the CERN in Switzerland, and Fermilab in Illinois. In case you're not aware, the LHC had a supermagnet malfunction back in the fall or winter sometime, and is offline until maybe September, giving the fellows at Fermilab a bit a cushion.
And let me add that by race, I want you to imagine asking a 6 year old to draw you a treasure map for something he may or may not have buried at some point.
Not to say the Higgs boson doesn't exist; it's just still hypothetical, if not predicted.

In any case, what is it exactly anyway? Well, I can't give you any technical answers, and I certainly couldn't draw you a picture, but as with most things, I can describe it to you via its effects on its surroundings.
So, all you need to know is this:

The Higgs boson is a hitherto unobserved massive scalar elementary particle that would explain, if verified, how massless elementary particles acquire mass.

And here our ship is dissolved into flotsam and jetsam, and we cling by on timbers of splintery intuition. Massless particles? Acquiring the property of mass?
And what if we go one step further? What if we say sayonara to the lab coats altogether and talk about emotions and relationships closer to our hearts and lives:

Is there some minutia that explains how love acquires the virtue of passion?
that explains how hope is seeded with desire?

Maybe if we keep crashing against each other with all the force and velocity of modern life, we might be able to sort through the wreckage one day and say,

"Yes, life did acquire living."

name that abstraction!

define happiness:
a warm gun, according to The Beatles.


define your life's philosophy:
to let the world blow my mind

define passion:
let's touch eye balls

define neediness:
squid's wheel of wellness

define wonder:
a cave

define hope:
the holly tree on my mother's front lawn

define hate:
sexual repression

define heaven:
two pools of golden lava

define hell:
the shit garden that is my backyard, only with little gargoyles prancing around instead of my dogs

define god:
the north & south poles and all the electrons in between

define lust:
smelling the scent of a lover on your pillow

define violence:
wearing a codpiece at a milk bar

define health:
celery = negative calories

define mad:
Beakman's World

define sadness:
a puppy underneath a raincloud

define love:
codependency

mosquito

got caught in the sticky jelly of my eye,
whizzed in like a kamikaze man.
destroyed with a blink. see a wing
float on the crest of a hot tear,
the ruin you brought here.

.the.sin.in.syntax.

I attended a linguistics talk today, in a room where the linguistics faculty numbered the linguistics students (even including me). Or maybe it was about equal. Maybe even greater, because it'd be nice to think that we're all still learning.

Judith Tonhauser and Cynthia Clopper - whose exact academic titles escape me at the moment, but rest assured that they are highly esteemed and qualified - were giving a talk on their field work on the Guaraní language of Paraguay. Most notably, Judith (it's not as if I'm reducing the women to their given names; we like to be on a first name basis in the department) had spent a few years working on a thesis in Paraguay dealing with the supposed nominal tense markers (in actuality, she concluded in her research that they are actually aspect markers). Following that, she wanted to find out if there was phonetic/prosodic marking for conveying contrastive semantic meaning. Being a semanticist-syntactician by trade, she enlisted the aid of Cynthia, who proceeded to fly down to Asunción.

What does that all mean?
Essentially, Guaraní has morphological markers that can be added to nouns that give them temporal meaning, in the same way that tense can be attached to a verb (i.e. "-ed") to place it temporally. The distinction between tense and aspect lies in some murky waters, but essentially, it comes down to felicity, in that one can say "Fernando was a teacher and is now a teacher." (tense), but cannot say "Fernando is a former teacher and is now a teacher." (where "former" is serving as our temporal nominal aspect marker). Using this test was how Judith determined that the markers were aspect markers and not tense markers.

And maybe that doesn't really clarify things. Linguistics can be a bit of a headfuck, and so as Julie said to me tonight, let's put the 'fun' back in phonetics and lift the theory off the paper a bit.
(On a side note, we decided that I like to put the 'sin' in syntax. And we won't speak about semantics...)

A translation of the sentence, "Fernando is selling a cow." might be rendered into something along the lines of "Fernando is selling future-meat." Unfortunately, I don't have the glosses to give you a true sense of what's going on, but let's say that "cow" is hypothetically translated into a word "FPXK". In that case, let's further assume that "-DZ" is our future aspect marker. What Fernando is selling then, is "meat", translated not as a third morpheme, but as "FPXK-DZ".

Starting to get it a bit?
Maybe this is all a bit too technical still.

Can the things that surround us undergo fundamental changes without any action, any 'verb', acting on them? Can a standing tree simply lay fallen in the forest without falling? Does the world even need us?
So maybe on one hand, the self-confident lobbyist of humanity can claim that we people make our worlds occur, that we bring motion and change into the world around us. His more humble brother in the field of quantum physics might nod his head in agreement and add that just our observation of the world causes the static universe to collapse into verbs.

But if we're the verbs, what about the nouns? The cow, the trees, the cups. What do they care? Maybe the speakers of Guaraní know something that we don't:
everything in the world has its own sense of purposeful and purposeless past, present and future, and frankly my dear, it doesn't give a damn if we're here to put it into words or not.

boy in tree

he stared at the branches knotted skyward
like his father's raised fist. the lawn was
trashed again, another night tallied by beer
cans, and inside he heard
his mother in the kitchen, methodically
opening and closing
drawers. he dangled from the first branch
and held his legs to his chest, then kicked up
to a higher stoop, up and up,
his perch over the quiet street.
he watched the sun sink
below the evening's quicksand.
he could stay here unnoticed, webbed
in leaves and dark, his loneliness
like a cloak.

.american.apparel.statement.of.interest.

Not that I ever really expect to hear back from them.

"
Is it a biting irony for someone with questionable beliefs in America to apply to American Apparel? Certainly not. Is it something of an irony that American Apparel hails to labor practices that are contradictory to the outsourced slave labor that most of corporate America has invented and sustained? Certainly not. Any hipster that doesn't stare in the face of self-contradiction and scoff apologetically has revoked his scene points. Because let's face it, I'm a hipster. And if you are an American Apparel employee reading this, chances are that you are too.

Everyone wants to work for American Apparel because of the totally rad non-slave labor and stuff. I'll skip over that. No doubt, I hold fair labor practices close to my little leftist heart, but there is no need to rehash something that you already try so hard to publicize. Instead, let me talk about what I would hope to get out of this job, other than a paycheck and the shirt off your back(room).

I am unabashedly a student, currently waiting to hear back from graduate schools. My intent, as a graduate student, is to study the changes undergoing Modern Israeli Hebrew as a result of language contact. And before you decide that that is totally irrelevant, think about who it is that is responsible for modernizing language. Young people? Good, keep going. Young hip people. Cool, groovy, hip, epic, sweet, awesome young people.
Each generation is reinventing language word by word. They aren't just recycling their old vocabulary; they're importing words left and right, PBR cans in hand. I have heard a literal Hebrew translation of the phrase "da bomb", direct from English. The borrowed Arabic curses would burn your ears. This demographic is my demographic, whether or not I slipped into the skinny jeans of hipsterdom myself. If I'm going to understand the linguistic neologisms that occur because of these people, I'm going to have understand the things that motivate them. Sure, I could float around parties, you say, but that certainly doesn't give me an structural insight on an institutional column of hipster culture. If hipsters prescribe to the medicine of fashion, and American Apparel is the doctor, I want to be the pill-cutting pharmacist.

Ok, so maybe it's still a stretch. Maybe you think that being able to interact with a social subculture responsible for language change is a rather flimsy excuse to get hired. That's ok. I have other skills. I can do a skid stop with a leg dangling over the handlebars; I can play the obscure music game with the best of them; I can name drop existentialist philosophers like a pledge of allegiance, and even compelling argue for or against their works. Wii Fit even tells me I'm underweight, but we'll just pretend I'm tall.
Perhaps more importantly, I am amiable and resourceful, important factors, no doubt, in working with customers. And for someone applying to a fair labor employer, I work like a slave, with high expectations of myself with regard to diligence and efficiency. Computers are yesterday's news, and I can work with them natively.
So if you don't hire me, don't do it on the pretense that I'm an ostentatious pseudo-intellectual, but by all means do it on account that I can't grow a beard.
"

what is it about the last load?

the chores i half-finish: laundry,
dishes, dog walks. the list is
half crossed out. doesn't count.

i'd be half a lover if you'd
let me. fake a headache every
two nights. put out the light.

a.coastal.road.in.central.spain.

It was all happening again, or at least, I was convinced of time's duplicity. There I was in a two story apartment building set up in Southern Spain, in a room overhanging the parking lot and a spiral staircase leading up into the centre of my living room, like a giant drill bit boring its way in. The name of the town is unimportant and forgotten. I wasn't even sure what I was doing there, but one thing was for certain: it was a set up.

And was it the government? Mine? Theirs? Am I actually a Spanish citizen? What year is this anyway?
In any case, the guard at the parking lot gatehouse doesn't like my looks and I think he needs to stop smoking. I'm positive he's keeping tabs on me with that notebook of his, and so what? What have I done.

And just like that, I don't what sets it all off, but I'm under house arrest. Maybe they told me via letter, sealed and stamped. Or a phone call. What drove it home was the guard's twitchiness as I inched down the spiral staircase to the ground, before changing my mind and footing my way right back up.

After some time in the apartment, long enough for night to have settled in sleeplessly, as I lounged around looking at the parking lot and waited to see if dawn would bring any revocation of my arrest, a small car or motorcycle collided into one of the columns supporting my overhanging apartment. Nothing collapsed, but the driver sprung out of the metal and ran up the stairs into my apartment telling me that my window of escape had come. I suppose she must have simultaneously taken out the gatehouse with her collision.

In any case, I took her advice and took off, following the highway leading north, avoiding the road directly, but keeping it in sight as I ran along the hills to the side of it. My unprisoner was hot on my heels, and with the removal of whatever outfit she had been wearing as a driver, turned out to be my friend and former coworker Beth. Lord knows what she was doing in Spain springing my ass from secret house arrest.

We sprinted down the hills for awhile, cutting through the tall grass like scythes, staying low in case any government vehicles or curious people saw us from the road. Daylight had switched on like an interrogation light, and I tried to calculate how far we had really run.
Far enough.
We descended to the highway and jogged down it, residual momentum, I suppose, and I stuck out my thumb, gaining nothing but an obstinate look of disgust from a white haired woman careening down the highway. I jogged backwards, staring at Beth and held my thumb out hopefully, not bothering to wonder if the Spaniards had the same hand signals for hitch hiking.

Rather quickly, two figures on scooters in red and blue pulled over to the side of the road, and with nothing more than an excited greeting beckoned us to hop on the back of their scooters. I took to the back of the guy's and Beth to the girl's, and frankly, in retrospect, I don't know who was wearing what colour anymore. I don't think they were even curious where we were coming from, but simply where we were headed. Wherever this road is taking us! Madrid!

We drove down the road, overlooking some large expanse of azure water, reclining like a femme fatale. What are we going to do now, Beth asked. No worries, this road will take us to Madrid, which is about 12 hours from here, and from there, we can go anywhere. In fact, there are plenty of small towns along the way, since I doubt we'll be on the road for another 12 hours anyway. We can disappear in the towns for a bit, or find rides anywhere we need to go. I think we've put enough distance between whoever's behind us. And fuck it all, after Madrid, maybe we should just keep barrelling down the road towards France. We can cross the Pyrenees and be having champagne in no time at all. And don't worry, believe it or not, this exact scenario happened to me recently, just a summer ago. These roads are like old songs to me, and we were going to sing along to the last refrain.
Our drivers were rather excited by the whole concept as well, and if I didn't know any better, I would say that they didn't have much of a destination themselves. They seemed rather content to drive us all the way to Madrid, and just to show their enthusiasm, instructed us to grab tight as they roared their scooters ever faster down the highway.

valentine

gray day, the kind that never lives up
to its expectations. rain promised
in the pregnant clouds never comes.

look what America taught me:
i can measure your love
by the carat.

my father married my mother
on valentine's day
with the ring her mother gave her.


but you look at me across
the table, your hands turned
up, an offering.

.the.sound.of.hands.clapping.

If you ask my friend Gianna what her favourite memory of my youngest brother is, it might go something like this.

On a trip our families took to the various countries of the Levantine, her family and mine, as well as other family friends happened to all be in Lebanon. There was a day trip planned for Syria in the near future, as well, but my family didn't secure the visas in time, so we were on our own that day.
Or maybe we were still in Jordan when the story happened.
In any case, we were in motion. We had stopped at a hotel, and were in the process of checking out of it, and amid the hustle and bustle, we succeeded, launching ourselves out of the parking lot and further into the sands.
At some point, we stopped at a rest stop not too far down the road, and as everyone exited the cars, Gianna will give you a tremendous impression of my father yelling, "Where's Steven?"
We stuffed ourselves back into our cars like hot little peppers into olives and made our way back to the hotel. Sure enough, Steven was seated in the lobby, and upon seeing us arrive, leapt up vigourously, not towards my father, but away.
Gianna starts laughing uncontrollably at this point, joined in by her sisters, should they be present. They mimic the hands of my brother clapping over his ears as he runs around the family car apologizing with my dad in hot pursuit.

And just so you know, there is a precedent for this. Discipline in my family came in only a few ways, but they were generally effective at instilling us with a certain Pavlovian terror. My mother went through more wooden rulers than I can remember.
In any case, their favourite technique for use in public, faced with unarmed combat, would involve my father pinching our earlobes and tugging upwards, half dragging us and half leading us away.
I was no stranger to this, and I have my own memories of being on the alert for my dad's pincer grip. When I still lived in Texas, I must have been no older than three at the time, I was taken to a shopping mall with my parents. My brothers hadn't been born yet, and my parents had not yet assumed the role of shepherds of their offspring.
Predictably, at some point I became separated, and lost in the sauce of shops and shoppers. I don't remember how long I was lost for, but I know a few things: I never cried. I found either a mall guard or a police officer and somehow informed them of the situation. My parents were summoned over the intercom (as if it weren't bad enough that these coloured people were reproducing, but they were letting their brood run rampant as well!). One can imagine the officer flapping over the foreign consonants like an injured bird.
The true terror for me, though, shouldn't have been being lost, but being found. As my parents materialized, I ran over to them, relieved to be reunited, and more than a little proud of having recovered them on my own.
My ear were immediately between my father's pincher pincers. I was being told to not get lost again in the future. They had, I supposed, worked hard to fling themselves out of poverty and over the ocean to squeeze me out into America.

So maybe it is Pavlovian indeed that, today, the mere mention of having my own children sends my hands over my ears, filling my head with nothing more than the incessant ringing of the too many and too loud concerts of my teenage years.

IT IS YOUR BIRTHDAY.

so happy birthday, jon. you can watch an hour of TV or take an hour nap.

.small.cabbage.worlds.

Health magazine considers kimchi to be one of the healthiest foods you can shovel down your gullet. For those of you not in the know, it is a red mess of fermented cabbage and carrots, "loaded with vitamins A, B, and C, but its biggest benefit may be in its 'healthy bacteria' called lactobacilli, found in fermented foods like kimchi and yogurt."

I have some vague memories of either trying it, or simply being around it as a child. If anything, Asian families seem to love all manners of foods, pickled and preserved into eternity. The smells of these exploits, especially those involving the infamous fish sauces of that noxious dragon of the Orient, are legendary, and I should qualify that even if I didn't directly consume fermented potions, I surely experienced them all the same.


My real memory of kimchi in recent memory was when I lived about ten blocks and three years down the street, in a small brick apartment complex, half sunken into the grass, but threatening anyway to topple over into the parking lot and roll down into the Olentangy River. With a messy grin, the dumpster in the lot loomed greedily over a sad plot of what appeared to be a failed pepper garden.
My roommate at the time was half Korean. His mother, allegedly, was a descendent of the Korean royal family: a numbered child of a numbered wife. I was told how her brother and her used to go up into the mountains early in the morning and practice traditional tae kwon do and tang soo do. That is to say the mystical sort of legends, taught by white-browed masters grunting approvingly as dishevelled students punch trees and thrust their fists into sacks of grain.
As far as I could piece together, Paul's father, scarred by chemical fires and dirty blood left the Korean War with a new bride in bag, a silent wife ready to take leave from her homeland, and like Orpheus, resisting the temptation to look backwards. Only there was no lover hot on her heels - indeed, she was the Eurydice as soon as this story crosses the ocean - but only the body of her brother, with an arrow in his chest, like the last coloured belt to prove his martial arts achievements.
Dirty blood ran in the family, however, and Paul was told his kidneys were failing while he was in high school. He was expected to maybe have a year left. He chose to keep it to himself. Maybe he wanted to spare his teenage friends the distress of worrying about somebody else's problems, greater than their own. Maybe he had come to terms with it. And after all else is said, after all logic has coursed through one's veins like the flu, there is maybe that fear of mortality.
It was enough to turn anyone into a God-fearing Christian.
And so he somehow made it into college, sitting next to me in my first university math course, wherein I discovered what my future didn't hold in store for me, and I devised ways to derail myself from the tracks my father had waved me off on. I don't remember the first words we really said to each other, but desperate for friends after having been displaced for the n-th time in my life, I was ready to concede to the first awkward engineering student talking about something other than the major. We spent our freshman year playing video games and cooking pasta in his rice cooker, the only legal heating element in the dorm rooms.
So when we moved in together, I don't suspect it had much to do with anything other than our relative isolations in the sea of alien undergraduate students. It was convenience. It was a year in which I discovered other friends, found a bike to get myself around, and struggled to push myself out of the womb of my freshman year into the hands of Columbus's closed-door parties and shows. Paul was an umbilical cord to my freshman year, the last real connection I had to those days, and rather than riding out on my ankles like Jacob and Esau, I saw him turn more recluse over the next year, becoming more involved with World of Warcraft and talking about transferring schools, or dropping out altogether. His eating habits deteriorated from a daily stint at the Rally's down the street to leaving giant bagfuls of chicken wings in the freezer for months at a time, and barbecue sauce in the pantry that I eventually used in semi-secrecy.

In any case, one of the times that his mother came down to visit us, I found out at the last moment, not only about his mother coming down at all, but also that it was Paul's birthday. It put the visit in context, but I was surprised to not have known about it beforehand.
She took us out to a sushi restaurant in the Short North, happy that I was Paul's friend and roommate in Columbus, and was more than happy to pay for everyone. In fact, she made sure to push her beer over to my side of the table when the waiter was gone, urging me to drink like a white-browed gong fu master, or just a mother hosting a three person birthday dinner party. I picked through the food, unsure of what was vegan and what wasn't, and tried my best to look full and content.
When we returned to the apartment, she was in good spirits and revealed a bottle of sake the size of my shin, declaring that the party was just getting started. Paul never drank, and shrugged off the invitation, leaving me to go shot for shot with his mother, who was becoming increasingly belligerent. Paul had long since retired to his room, to entertain himself to who knows what ends, only emerging occasionally to try to join in on the conversation briefly before returning to his lair.
His mother, in the meantime, had become insistent on the idea of feeding me, and made a pot of rice, and revealed some of the food she had brought down to give to Paul (who would invariably allow it to grow wretched and moldy in the refrigerator). Sure enough, she produced some of her homemade kimchi, and served it with the hot rice and sheets of nori. She assured me that it had not been prepared with fish sauce or any of the like, so I enjoyed it tremendously, although in retrospect these days, I have some doubts about the whole scenario.
In any case, it was delicious, and I finished the plate, until it was replaced with another. The bottle of sake was becoming lighter and more transparent as Paul's mother was growing flusher and rambunctious. She had eventually come to the point of slapping my ass every 15 minutes or so and shouting out "Gay boy!".
I retired to my room as politely as I could, and immediately called a close friend, not just to tell her of the absurd direction the night had taken, but more so to prove my preoccupation in my room should Paul's mom insist on finishing the bottle altogether.


Recently, Sam stole an issue of VegNews home from work, having caught glimpse of a recipe for bánh bao, or perhaps more accurately, baozi, as well as a recipe for kimchi. I looked it over and was pretty excited about being able to make my own kimchi, and was even more excited to see that it didn't take nearly as long as I had originally imagined. I joked that, being jobless currently, I could probably only afford to eat a diet of rice and kimchi from now on.

The first batch I made a few nights ago ended up being far spicier than I had planned. As my roommate Stacie pointed out before trying it, "It's hot for you?".
It's still edible, even enjoyable, in my opinion, and I'm still working through the batch, now that it's been transferred to a plastic container. The move was actually spurred not by better accessibility to eating directly from the container, but because the Ziploc bags I had made the kimchi in turned out to have slowly been leaking inside of our produce drawer in the fridge. The last thing anyone wants is the smell of pungent Asian food overwhelming their entire refrigerator. No amounts of baking soda would help.
So now, I have a burning in my belly, reminiscent of my first taste of whiskey. I picture the fiery kimchi working medical wonders in my intestinal tract. I think about all the bacteria transplanted into my body on cabbage arks and the wings of scallion doves. And as my insides broil with their heat, like rolling magma in the bowels of our planet, I imagine a small world beginning to take shape within the darkness I will never pierce.

material girl

the diamond is made of carbon, the conflict
of blood.

i'd wear the teeth of men
if they could spit light

out again.

.hip.on.face.

squid

with your two arms and two legs--
what kind of squid are you?


aren't you terrified
of the sea?


no beak, no cone head.
just those ocean-deep eyes.


but maybe your name
came another way:

when you were young,
i'd wrap my arms around you

so no one could tell
my arms were not yours.

.a.conservation.of.momentum.

People
writing
autobiographies are
like slinkies.
They stretch
forwards and backwards,
trying to recall passing
days
like stairs.
It's a race to one end or
another.

Or maybe, it's
more like a contest of sorts.
Not exactly a tug
of war, but like
trying to peel off one's
mind like a sticker
from the skin of
an apple.
Let the ripe flesh obide
gravity
and
replenish the
earth.
Let the sticker blow
away in
the wind, unable to cling
to much of
anything anymore.
Let it tumble to
the ground in
time, and with
the final compression of
empty silver
coils
it will also come to
rest illegibly
under the
dirt

.elected.day.

It was rather easy to separate the loyal, the faithful,
from the dissenters:
they wore their own yellow stars often,
patterned kuffiyehs like cloth waterfalls.
More importantly, they spoke with a harsh tongue,
as if all their stories and memories were thrashing in their throats
like fish writhing in nets.
And it was rather easy to remove their spines,
filleting muscles from organs, disposing of the heads
as children challenge each other to touch the unseeing eyes.
Their branches were pruned,
to keep the faiths apart
within a people already walled up
like a reversed siege.
The fallen olives were smothered into the dust,
the pits picked out from the treads of the bulldozer,
the oil seeping into the earth.

It's all rather easy when, after all,
God has chosen you.