Poems for the happy westerners who argue abortion or global warming or shit bricks over profanity and violence in holiday movies and box office numbers quoted in the paper, with a petty testiness quickly smoothed over and additional overeating, stuffing down sweets from tins, round tins and goddam rectangular tins, all the while a 9.0 submerged in the middle of the Indian Ocean caused a tsunami of radical proportions death-toll numbers climbed for days, from twenty to forty to sixty to a hundred thousand dead; burials quick a third of them children, many unidentified: all you know is that your daughter or son’s missing, perhaps you’re the lucky one who gets to identify the dirt-and-mud body in the makeshift morgue in an old school and you see your loved mangled and muddy and purple or blue; woman wailing, unfamiliar clothes, hands clasped to her cheeks mouth open wide, teeth lips anguish, while we gorge turkey and shit-kick over boardgames or bowl games on television tonight the Independence; corporate money for these contests a funny number to know; the president said many private donors would step up, when, during this time of disaster and giving we were called the stingiest on earth.
