William Shatner performs Sarah Palin’s resignation poem:
What? Palin was really trying to say in this poem that global warming evidence is best seen right in her own backyard. She can not come out and say it straight, for fear of upsetting her financial and political supporters, so a poem was written to ring the alarm more eloquently and safely.
Thus, we should thank Palin for her resignation poem. It shows she has finally taken a stand, albeit with thick literary camouflage, for national security through environmental protection.
Stretched in quotation marks, Times Square flares aortic in the bee-
bronzed dark. Broadcast of vendors & shoulders bustling with cannon
percussion in the retinal ring out of peignoir signage. A harmony
of women swim in the aquarium-fluorescence, unlined linen
dresses translucent beneath the yellow & claret lights. Compass
of this square fizzied orange soda sadness. Like gold teeth submerged
in a glass of green tea, a scrim between the lenticular & surreal–noble gas
marquees shift in the drizzle from flamingo to bordeaux, converge
with human activity, an arcade for the conspicuously need-to-be-kissed.
But digital billboards of nightgowns won’t hold us up when tenderness
turns to concept & is backswept from view. No more aerialist
tricks to resist, so the conductor retires to the wilderness
while the city smoke-stiched with bluing alleys writes its own discography
as its lights buzz out a new alphabet, divine a new topography.
In Youth exalted high in Air,
Or bathing in the Waters fair;
Nature to form me took Delight,
And clad my Body all in White:
My Person tall, and slender Waste,
On either Side with Fringes grac’d;
Till me that Tyrant Man espy’d,
And drag’d me from my Mother’s side:
No Wonder now I look so thin;
The Tyrant strip’t me to the Skin:
My Skin he flay’d, my Hair he cropt;
At Head and Foot my Body lopt:
And then, with Heart more hard than Stone,
He pick’t my Marrow from the Bone.
To vex me more, he took a Freak,
To slit my Tongue, and made me speak:
But, that which wonderful appears,
I speak to Eyes and not to Ears.
He oft employs me in Disguise,
And makes me tell a Thousand Lyes:
To me he chiefly gives in Trust
To please his Malice, or his Lust.
From me no Secret he can hide;
I see his Vanity and Pride:
And my Delight is to expose
His Follies to his greatest Foes.
All languages I can command,
Yet not a Word I understand.
Without my Aid, the best Divine
In Learning would not know a Line:
The Lawyer must forget his Pleading,
The Scholar could not shew his Reading.
Nay; Man, my Master, is my Slave:
I give Command to kill or save.
Can grant ten Thousand Pounds a Year,
And make a Beggar’s Brat a Peer.
But, while I thus my Life relate,
I only hasten on my Fate.
My Tongue is black, my Mouth is furr’d,
I hardly now can force a Word.
I dye unpity’d and forgot;
And on some Dunghill left to rot.
The “slit tongue” reference might seem odd today, but it comes from an ancient theory about making some birds “talk” as explained by John Marzluff and Tony Angell in the book “In the Company of Crows and Ravens”:
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
