COYOTES AND OTHER NEWS TODAY

U.S. Amerikans Attacking a Black Man (some years back in Boston):























I am happy that my friend Sharon Beals once again had one of her photos of the Bernal Heights coyote published in the San Francisco Chronicle. Sadly it is because of officials killing two coyotes in Golden Gate Park. Sharon's photo was attached to an article, "Coyote killing an uncalled-for reaction" by venerable "Digger" Jerry George. (Another of the old Diggers, Peter Coyote, also protested that killing). On the same day, we have a slight glimpse onto the widespread "sport" of dogfighting, and it is associated with someone involved with the one of the other violent sports, football -- another entertainment for the bloodthirsty crowd who don't care what happens to the gladiators' bodies. On the same day we get the news that a jury of Marines, who might have sentenced a fellow Marine to a dishonorable discharge and life in prison for murder, instead released him with "a bad-conduct discharge," although he kidnapped (evidently a random choice) "a middle-aged Iraqi man, who was dragged from his home, marched 1,000 yards and shot 11 times....Some of Thomas' squad members testified they decided to kill an Iraqi out of frustration with the legal system there that lets suspected insurgents roam free." The freed marine said, after his release, "This is not over for me. Not as long as two of my boys are out there." His "boys"! The camaderie of the violent who bond by torturing or shooting animals, or human beings, or love to see other men destroy themselves physically through violent sports. What sickness! We all grow up terrorized by bullies in the U.S.A. It is sad that it was not a man, but a woman cartoonist who made the connection in today's newspaper. Ann Telnaes shows the usual hooded torture victim from Abu Ghraib, wired, and standing on a pedestal, but we see a dog's paws and tails extending from under the hood and robe. The wire to electrocute the victim is held by the football player involved in the horrendous torture and killing of pit bulls. The American religion -- a thin veneer of Christianity over murder. Every year I ask myself, "Why haven't they killed me yet?" How many of us feel like coyotes for one reason or another? I believe the number who live in the Nation of Coyote outnumbers the number who live here as "citizens of the U.S.A." Beware -- official America is looking for any excuse they can find to shoot us or one of our fellow coyotes. In that mood, being gay, being politically on the left, being so many things that are not stamped with "Made in the U.S.A.," a long time ago I wrote the following verse (one of a few "two-headed"--at both ends -- I was writing at the time) :

WEAVE ME COCOON

Condemned to tumbleweed
a person out of grace,
motes in a whirlwind: the presence, Coyote,
I am my family’s nothing.

Tailored to shadow,
reduced to the last garden, beside
the head slag heap,
I worry my gums with twigs.

Wenchless, wasted, I place these feet
into my shadow’s feet, the midnight jumper,
white cotton’s mothermost skin
to wrap my baby’s bunting in

til it explodes. Rub skin away.
Spread wings upon a stem
until the goo is sucked off
by the sun. Then wave myself away.

SPREAD MY BUTTERFLY

- James McColley Eilers, copyright 2007