Poem Of The Week: 05/22/2003

	How I Love You (the John Ashcroft Remix)

		"To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty,
		my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our
		national unity and diminish our resolve."
			–Attorney General John Ashcroft

Yes, it's true.
I have been taking pictures of you
with a camera hidden in the blue bag I claim to carry for my diabetes.
I'm not a diabetic.
I have accepted John Ashcroft as my personal savior.

See, I come out to your poetry readings
and memorize the poems you read
then write them down 
in braille, then photograph the transcript,
then burn the film, then eat the paper, then send the stool sample to the Department of Homeland 
	Security

because I
have accepted John Ashcroft
as my personal savior.

I collect other stool samples, too,
but am not cleared to go into that right now because I
have accepted John Ashcroft as my personal savior.

That's why I invite you to my parties
where I collect the beer bottles you guzzle from.  
						       No,
not for anything as pedestrian as fingerprints or saliva samples,
collected your prints and fluids years ago
off the CIA operatives you still think of as just that "crazy ex-girl or boyfriend." 

No, I collect them for your brain waves embedded in the glass.
And because they're recyclable.
And because I have accepted John Ashcroft as my personal savior.

I hope you understand
I've tapped your phones and spatulas
because I love you,				

put carpet samples up my ass
and sent subliminal commands through the thousands of emails you think are only about Russian 
	brides, mortgages, and farm teens gone bad
because I
am a patriot;

I have done all of this
for your good,
my good,
Omaha's good,
America's good:
for Coke and Pepsi, Dick and Jane,
for Apple and IBM, for J. Lo and Ben,
Barbie and Ken, Survivor and Friends,
for Al Gore and sex 
			among consenting married heterosexual adult
women and men

because I have accepted
John Ashcroft as 
my personal savior.

And don't be scared, I'm
not here to take your apartment
or employment or retirement away, that's not
my job.  My job
is only to keep you laughing, keep you
listening to the funny poem
so you don't stray too much,
pay too much attention to that stream-of-consciousness ramble some 
other poet's reading: that
sloppy poem, that overuses-the-word-"revolution"-too-much poem, that
heartfelt poem, cast-your-vote-with-a-stone poem,
register-your-sad-ass-to-actually-vote poem,
get-out-of-bed-on-election-day, put-down-the-gordita-and-actually-go-to-a-polling-place poem,
because
I
have accepted John Ashcroft
as my personal 
savior.

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