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 OMAR SHAPLI |
| Book Excerpts
interview |
press release |
| Another Bush |
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| and what they told me was this the visionthing eschewed by dad lurks now in the nascent galahad ©2006 Omar Shapli | |||
| The General Is Asked His Opinion | |||
| A good idea? That question has no meaning for me. Good for what? Isn’t that Policy? Wouldn’t that be your menu? Oh yes ample stew for the pot, if that observation assists you: flesh to the shredder—much of ours, more of theirs—but that’s our slot is it not: grind the bones to prop a Policy? Not my job to tell you it makes sense. Mine’s a profession that makes sense only when nothing else does and that Sir is your call. When sense fails, tap my shoulder. And don’t think for an instant I miss the rolling nudge around the table, the condescension, the snide asides. I only request—no, beg (not easy for me)—that you track me a trinket that can damwell dent my palm: not a frail daydream of clean solutions where nothing clean abides. ©2006 Omar Shapli | |||
| Veteran’s Day | |||
| Truly my war held no great risk to me, a divisionlevel oddjobber on the hither fringe of the Punchbowl. But may I not retain a certain very humble pride in silence? Be one with the ones who shake head sadly and stare at the happyhour niblets as someone further down the bar regales with tales of bloodsoaked trails through snowblocked passes? True I have precious little to be silent about: flashes and rumbles just over the ridge and of course the constant chance of tipping my tintinnabulous Dodgethreequarter over the lip of a tentative roadway into the deepchilled Pukhan—oh not a lot when set beside the great bugout and the true horrors of nightly patrol just a few miles to my north. What I did see more than once was the flatout stare which told me this guy and I had nothing to talk about: he’d been just hours ago in a place as remote from me as some Venusian fulmination smashing through wreckage that once was a cliff under perpetual cloudcover. Tonight at this bar I vaunt my silence in merest tribute to his. ©2006 Omar Shapli | |||
| Ultimatum | |||
| We said You Must and They Did. But why should mere compliance wreck a perfectly good hunt when tire lies heavy on tarmac? No point to a kill if it’s only done for cause. Not our response they must fear but our whim: we will be like the Turkish sultan whose privilege it was to snuggle with his arquebus behind the seraglio’s lofty crenelations and pop off ten random passersby per day. Hey! And who’s to say it won’t be for the best? Even random destruction destroys some things we might best do without: it’s only apology and weakness of appetite prompts the backfire. Yes, best they should fear us not for their choice but for ours. There’ll never again be a swath of turf where our sweet lads can’t wander at will. And the speedbumps, the ones who willfully miss the point? Let them die in their dustbaked batches. No sheen of martyrdom to elevate their absence: just the blurred-out shroud of axiomatic irrelevance. And doesn’t the food get better war by war? ©2006 Omar Shapli | |||
| Apostle | |||
| a mere quarter century back when i was about to be out of a job and none of the people who’d been telling me for years to let them know if ever i found myself free to pick up stakes and come play with them seemed able to answer a thought a letter or a even a phonecall it was old sills who told me not to lose heart because the way society is now constituted it’s physically impossible to slip backward out of the middle class no matter how dismal the view down the ill-lit sidestreet and oh golly how desperate i must have been to grasp at that thought with the same sense of relief that bouyed the historybattered athenians when another paul gave them a whiff of the unknown god ©2006 Omar Shapli | |||