This Connection of Everyone with Lungs Read Online Free PDF Page A

for all of us to leave the nation to whatever strange fever has overtaken it.
    The unanswerable questions of political responsibility.
    The call to act despite the lack of answers.
    As I thought about this, life went on.
    As I thought, the shuttle crashed on its return home, North Korea restarted its plutonium reactors, two close friends broke up, another tried to kill himself, another checked himself out of rehab for the third time in order to return to his ice habit, and water continued to be wantonly used despite warnings that a lack of water will probably lead to severe crop shortages across the globe in the near future.
    Beloveds, before all my hope is burnt up, I should also remember that eleven million people across the globe took to the streets one recent weekend to protest the war and this gave us all a glimmer.
    We talked on the phone about this glimmer.
    We read each other’s reports.
    We said optimistic things.
    Those who broke up suddenly discovered new lovers and their new sensualities in this glimmer despite all the burning.
    Friends got arrested for posting signs and they were suddenly heroes.
    After the protests, I flip through as many images from as many different cities as I can find on the Internet.
    Picture after picture, crowd after crowd.
    The images differ only in the surroundings.
    City streets or town squares; bright light of heat or the clear light of snow; naked or clothed protestors; mittens or halters.
    Those on the space shuttle sent back images of the calm quietness of the planet before they crashed.
    Those images give the comfort of distance, a lack of detail.
    These images of the protests are busy, detailed with all the glimmers of individuals.
    There are crowds covering blocks of city streets and squares, taken from above.
    I imagine the bodies of friends in the crowds of various cities, feel moments of connection with the mass as I imagine it down to individuals.
     
    March 11, 2003
     
    Beloveds, the UN resolutions and counter-resolutions have become so endless that I can’t make sense of them anymore.
    One day Turkey will not open its doors to US troops, the next day there is an election and negotiations start all over again.
    Our hopes that the inevitable will not come true are endlessly dashed.
    Bush keeps saying he will go it alone if he has to.
    Huge protests continue, protests without alone and against alone.
    It is the word alone, beloveds, the word alone.
    When I speak of alone I speak of how there is no alone as Pakistan claims it is moving in on bin Laden, as Iran’s nuclear plant is nearing completion, as Oscar organizers announce that the show will go on in the event of war.
    I speak of how there is no alone even with fuel cells and the deloder worm and the car lover’s brain.
    I speak of David Letterman’s shingles, which he got from someone else.
    Even the Broadway musicians are on strike together.
    There is no alone as the Sri Lankan Navy sinks a Tamil Tiger ship and eleven are killed.
    There is no alone in the food shortage in North Korea and Bush apologizing to Karzai.
    It is an uneventful day overall as we sit here waiting for the news.
    The television promises updates on the situation with Iraq on the half hour.
    Our apartment is small and is buried between two other apartments, one above and one below.
    Beloveds, my desire is to hunker down and lie low, lie with yous in beds and bowers, lie with yous in resistance to the alone, lie with yous night after night.
    But the military-industrial complex enters our bed at night.
    We sleep with levels of complicity so intense and various that our dreams are of smothering and drowning and of the military outside our door and we find it hard to get up in the morning.
    I try to comfort myself with images of exile on this small piece of land in the middle of the large Pacific.
    That view from space, this view now that seems so without promise, so empty of hope.
    But I know there is no alone anymore here in the middle of the