[Newspoetry] PLAINLY SPEAKING AN EXECUTIVE LAW

[Donald L Emerick]

www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/national/15JUDG.html?todaysheadlines

PLAINLY SPEAKING AN EXECUTIVE LAW
Some courts find opinions by verse offensive:
the law itself may have its reputation lowered
when opinions invite one to read their jingles
rather than hack through jungles of phrases
when meaning defies any ordinary language
by self-encapsulation in special terms of art
whose understanding may require education
in the schools of law and lawyerly practices.

Some courts say other values are at risk
when opinions settle into a form of words
that is used in child's play or making love,
or overheating people to buy hot products:
litigants may feel sting from a word string
when forty lashes from a tongue are cruel;
unusual punishments are by law forbidden,
but not forbidden is the effect of an opinion
that says "yes" to one and "no" to another,
that takes and gives, or leaves undisturbed
a relationship that was called before justice
to justify itself as to how persons as parties,
putatively, were just by a law of an allegation
of what a then-said relationship was about.

And, perhaps, lawyers, most of all fear verse
will make the law somewhat worse than it is,
for now their skills of never speaking a truth
have to be extended to rule one more form,
to silence times when opinions are poetic.

Forensics aims at dead things of the Past,
as to how we shall give them proper burial;
but Politics aims, if I borrow the target talk,
at what also lies on the other side of Now,
as that which we say-do now shall be law
of the time which is yet to come to being,
when present saying now is large enough
to have voice that can be heard tomorrow,
distinguished from all other voices in time,
the last voice speaks law by its last words,
by its words being most definitely latest,
most certainly relevant, and accurate, too:
then a definitive law is determinatively just.

EX-STANZA EXTEMPORARY EX-SPEAKING:
Thus, when the law of the land plainly says,
"Persons of some certain racial, or religious,
or age-related, or gender(-orientation), or ethnic,
or cultic, cultural or group-personal attributive
must be treated fairly in government contracts"
and when a President says, "Faith-based-work,
we ignore the law and discriminate for the faith"
we can be fairly sure that President is wrong,
that his acts call for harming the less faithful,
the less holier than thous, even the unfaithful:
power to reward with carrots is a mighty stick,
made up of words, spoken in secret places,
by determiners of all that they may deem holy;
never gainsaid by a people against its priests.

Turn bureaucrazed states back to theocrazies,
where state power aligns again with god power,
to hold the people down in a willing ignorance.

Nothing in verse alters mangy manger scenes
sitting on courthouse lawns, side-lit by menorahs,
bracketing ten commandments by two-by-fours,
scaffolding for the sacrifice of the last scoff-laws.

Politics speaks of all nothings that do not exist,
or else politics would never be a political thing:
isolation study of emptiness, distance, separation,
of gaps, aporias, ghosts and goblins and spirits,
and other un-things that are never-never not true
nor yet ever present to us so as to be the false.

NOT_FOR_SPEAKING_NOR_SPOKEN_FOR
This may be why versification does not matter
to people who hear nothing but verses all day,
for all verses work by reminding us of a past,
they being forensic, not political nor its news,
and thus newspoetic theaters of this absurdity
fill with silence when it drains meaning away.

Thanks for listening,
eXeXeXeXeXeXeXeXe,
Donald L Emerick
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