it's been a while

Last time I wrote here George Bush was president! Every time I read the news and see the words "President Barack Obama" my heart skips a beat. Yes, perhaps I am one of the Hope kool-aid drinkers (I bought Vogue for the first time ever just because Michelle was on the cover) but I can't help but feel that things are already beginning to be, and will soon be, better than ever before in my adulthood. He's already done so many things that I can rejoice about, from lifting the international gag order to initiating the shut-down of Guantanamo to signing the Lily Ledbetter act. Now I just wish he would just legalize marijuana, set up federal funding for free birth control, issue an executive order to build bullet trains across the country, and launch an aggressive orangutan conservation effort, then I would be one happy lady. But I guess you can't have it all.

Here is a poem (that is a work in progress):

Sometimes I think
that Franklin D. Roosevelt had all the answers
but he’s not speaking to me this evening.
There is a breath at the windows
but it’s not Frank because he’s
looking in, waiting to tell.
I read history books hoping that he
has left me a secret message hidden between
the WPA and the Yalta Conference;
a message that says,
“Taylor Melligan, this was a different life
back here. You have it no worse and no better
and you don’t know.
You have atomic bombs and you don’t know.
You have children with swollen bellies and you don’t know.
You have a flashflood of cancer and you don’t know.
Your writers are charlatans.
No one speaks the truth, and when they do
they don’t know.
No one is reading the newspaper
except to confirm their suspicions.
No one is at the movies.
Capra is dead. Preminger is dead. Bergman is dead.
There is a landfill of Styrofoam floating in the sea,
an island, and you don’t know.”

But there is no message. No FDR speaking.
No hints, no clues,
no stories.
Only lines of type and
our writers are charlatans.