One Hundred and Tenth

Oddly, I'm feeling a touch, just a touch, sympathetic for Don Imus. By no means is this an advocacy of him or what he has said or his douchery in general. Should he be strongly reprimanded? Of course. Lose his job? Sure. But his life and future career is completely ruined, over three sentences. And I worry that because this guy has been ruined for something offensive, well, where does it end? I mean, sooner or later someone is going to say something offensive that's true. People say incredibly offensive things on TV and now, ever increasingly, on the internet, all the time (Ann Coulter? Michael Richards?) and nothing happens to them. In fact, sometimes the bad press can generate some activity in their careers. Also, Imus is not a newscaster, he's not an authority on anything, just a public personality. He's a sports commentator. And everyone's acting as if his comments on CABLE were a national address or something.

Just consider if the entire world heard you say one of the offensive things you've said. Would you deserve this treatment? Apparently so.

Alright, just thinking out loud, please don't kill me.

Here's my poem:

CANDLE

Here's every police officer in the country:
I'm judging their average weight and general
friendliness, cold men in a room wondering
why the music is so slow. My favorite kinds
of shampoo are as follows. My tattoo got all
messed up, now it looks disjointed, flawed,
like a broken promise written down. Play
that guitar. Play it somewhere else. This smoky
little cubicle is where the enormity of false
modesty gets hatched. Don't send this kind
of stuff through the mail. Jail is an ugly place.
The architecture is kind of oppressive, but also
just apathetic. This game is attentive to
the details, the smell of my burnt lapel,
as it thins with age and bends at an ugly angle.