“expert textpert choking smokers” / John Lennon

1.

––The petition’s been signed by ten thousand.

It might have gone to ten million.
It's been going around like strep throat.
all it takes is one, then another.

Regardless, it will get its measure of play.

––It says in essence: “not suitable.”

Priest signs the petition calling for "not suitable."

2.

––Yesterday, from someplace out there, a guy with a gun in his mitts
shot a young woman walking her dog at the tree-line to his property because

she looked like a deer walking a dog and not a young woman walking a dog.

––The night before her death by gunfire, she listened to

“Tristan und Isolde” on the radio broadcast from the Met,

dog at her side as she considered the merits of added grains in dog chow.

3.

––The petition was presented in protest to a Balthus painting hung

for the public good of a cat lapping milk from a plate alongside a seated

adolescent girl, one leg raised far above the hem of her dress exposing her

underwear, daydreaming through the earth-tinctured atmosphere of a silent interior.

4.

––It was Barenboim, a Jew, who under fire brought “Tristan” to Jerusalem

in an effort to slap some sense into it.

5.

––When Andres Serrano piss-dunked
the star-crossed Nazarene for the sake of its exhibition,

observers from the jurisdiction of the "Holy See"
saw themselves as pissed upon by Andres Serrano,
dispatching a representative to bop its glassed enclosure
with a ball-peen hammer causing some shattering.
––As for me?

I'm fully inoculated. My papers are in order for the most part,

I was fast up the first base line, and I don't hold any grudges.