Jim Standish

Believing is Seeing, I Guess

James Baldwin told us,
Leroi Jones & Richard Wright told us,
I can't remember how many have been telling us
for a hundred years, and still we wouldn't believe it
till someone made a video tape
and put it right in front of our faces,
and even so a jury in Simi Valley
manages not to believe it yet.

                                          Meanwhile
some politician's kid from Kuwait came forth
and we couldn't believe her
fast enough, we treasured every horror, we used it
to fire ourselves up to go to war
and feel righteous about burying a thousand young men
alive in the sand.

Jim Standish's desk-top-published collections are: Pine & Peterkin, Bring Everything, Right Around the Next Bend, Because We're All In This Alone Together, Some Spunk in the Old Sport Yet, and his latest, Glad That I Ran Into You. He has had poems published in several places over the decades, including Liberation, Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts, Will Inman's Kauri, and Zapizdat. His latest poem ("What Is the Soul?") is due to appear in The Montserrat Review Vol. 2 No. 2 Fall '99. He was a math major in college, getting a BA at New York University and an MA at Berkeley. For thirty years he was a computer programmer in biomedical research, and now is retired. He's been single again almost as long as he was married, and his two sons and a daughter are all over thirty. He hosts a weekly poetry program on subscriber-supported KKUP-FM in Cupertino & Santa Clara. His poems and commentaries can often be found on the rec.arts.poems internet news group. He reads often in the San Francisco Bay Area, and likes to decorate his readings with improvisations on flutes, harmonicas, and drums (no, not all at once).