StarPoet Newsletter Vol. XII, No. XXIV

The heat.
The humidity,
The idiocy of spending
Summer in D. C.

The Colonial Congress
Went home for the summer
To their farms and families
And for their sanity.

Now, unfortunately,
They remain in session,
Posting policy positions on Facebook,
Twittering their tented underwear

To female constituents
Like some 13 year old boy
Awkwardly courting a girl
He's found on the internet.

When I was eleven or twelve,
Back in the dark days when you were lucky
To have three black and white channels
And pop music meant the Shirelles,
Chubby Checker, and some good looking
Cute white boy singing Teen Angel,
My mother gave me a book to read all about
Sex, teenagers, and the human body,
We didn't talk much about it,
She just said "Read This" and I did.
There were inoffensive diagrams
Of male and female genitilia
That I carefully studied,
Dry black and white descriptions
On intercourse and pregnancy
That I committed to memory,
A paragraph or two on disease
I now know were designed to scare me;
I remember a section for girls
That discussed periods and keeping
Boys in line and girls' specials chapters
On proper make-up and not doing
Whatever it was that bad girls do
They could not mention;
The chapter for boys talked about erections
And respecting girls but it wasn't much
Worried about the boys being good,
They were boys after all ...
Back then, no one actually talked much
About ever having sex, focusing instead
Almost exclusively on our chastity
And being pure until we met our husbands:
You had to be there to understand
How much Elvis and Chuck Berry meant
Back before The Pill and everything.

Thunder in the evening,
Rain in the morning,
Heat in the afternoon,
Perfect tornado weather,
Perfect for flooding too.

Rumble in the darkness,
Showers in the daytime,
Heavy, humid and hot,
God is in his heaven,
Humanity's stuck on earth.

Into the breech,
Over the wall,
Hackers burn
And systems crumble.

The game is afoot,
The war has begun,
Victory belongs
To the agile cyber.