Intimations of the Next World

11.

"Al porvenir ya lo hundimos
En el abismo que se abre todos los días."

"We sank the future
In the abyss which opens every day."

Jose Emilio Pacheco, "El altar de los muertos"


In Bahrain a young
woman poet pits her life
against the U.S.-
backed Al Khalifa tyrants,
while Saudi women rebel

by driving their cars
across the causeway to shop,
and in Tripoli
Gadafi says that NATO
will lose their war against him.

Italian voters
say NO to impuity
for Berlusconi,
the Greek government threatens
to sink in the wine dark sea,

while the Mapuches
in Chile keep a hunger
strike for sentences
that were handed them under
laws (sic) of Pinochet.

In the U.S. a
congressman resigns after
he posted photos
of himself in underpants
in Internet, hoping to

score virtual sex,
and Chavez recovers from
a pelvic abcess
in Havana, while the head
of the ATF expects

to get the axe for
sending guns to Mexico's
drug cartels. Jimmy
Carter demands that the war
on drugs the gringos outsourced

to Mexico be
ended 40 years after
Nixon decided
that drug use was a country,
and not just a state of mind.