we all came from the same primeval stew god once stirred, with a dash of pandora, a pinch of what-have-you. or, if god plunged his mighty fist into the dirt and molded man, bush and saddam alike are both speckled with the same dirt-spots, the same twirly genes, the same selfishness. the living knew themselves just sentient puppets on god's stage, TE Lawrence was to say so much later, afterwards, after god sent his first beings into mesopotamia (modern day Iraq). these are our origins. it was here, now shimmering with the rubbly dust of war, where tools were first used, where animals were domesticated, where the structures of culture developed. literature has its own merry origins in this place.

in the vast wake of the world's breath, I sit here, sighing, spinning around the sun. trying to understand. the fate of so much of the world now lies in the hands of a rumpled-suited, indelicate administration that has never seen the stained pain of war, the suffering, the juxtaposition of dazzling white bone against dirty blood, bombed buildings, fatal rubble. just think! had donald rumsfeld been born some-odd eight thousand years ago, he might have been in the very country that we are gleefully raping, wiping sweat off of his pallid brow, tugging impatiently on the rope of a rather cerebral donkey. juicy justice that will not, for all my longing, occur. a man that has no understanding of Iraq, homosexuality, or world policy now controls the fates of all. and so I sit amidst the self-sustained squalor of the squabbling seven million others, and I try to be apart, I try so hard to be apart from it.

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