Stacie

Tommy Franks (October '02)

I saw General Tommy Franks on TV
saying that his boss, our president,
has not yet decided to wage war on Iraq
and telling other lies.

His boss, our President
who for a time avoided even showing up
for his draft deferring service with the Texas Air National Guard
while my father, who did not come from money
dodged flak over the jungles of Vietnam.

I wonder if selling your baseball team feels anything at all
like the time my father evacuated a village of Vietnamese farmers?
He had finally agreed to let them bring their pigs
because that was all the wealth these people
had in the world that they could carry
and overloaded his helicopter snagged the tree line
flipped over crashed
and a 12 year old boy died.

I'm told that my father, who was then younger than I am now,
was inconsolable. That he sat down on the jungle floor
and cried.
And I wonder, Mr. President,
how many Iraqi children will die in our rescue of them
and how many 22-year-old American pilots
will hunker down behind a dune and weep for them.

Stacie Boschma is a performance poet, blogger, politics junkie, and technology geek who manages a 9-5 job in corporate America when she isn't making the world a better place. She has two dogs, a weird fixation with Batman, and a fully stocked bar. She has performed in a number of venues in the Southeast and one venue in the Southwest. She is right handed and likes apples. She riffs on the media, politics, and current events most days at simianbrain.com.

I'm affiliated most closely with Cliterati, which is not a Slam per se, but got my start in the Asheville Slam scene a few years back and hope to compete in Austin in 2006 with Atlanta's Slam Amok! team
(info: http://www.artamok.org).