Today’s New Verse News: DANGEROUS
by Dana Yost
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Excuse me but this is dangerous work, writing in a time like this, a time when words get twisted and torn, not believed, turned into political device. U don’t mind being a political device, but with my own words my way, not picked up by a politician and run through a damned microphone in front of 4,000 flag-waving believers of non-belief. There is a man outside on the street wearing a stocking hat and long-sleeved shirt blowing hard in the afternoon wind. Is he spying on someone or just sitting on the bench waiting for his children to come outside? It is sights like this that stoke paranoia, of course, in the left and the right. But damaging a man’s skull is something no one should accept or mock or use to rally the charges. It’s sad and sickening and a crime and that’s what it is and, there, I’ve said it—a crime fueled by rhetoric, and the grocery clerks and taxi drivers in this town will either agree or hate me. This is dangerous to be a writer today, to say what is ugly, to say it plain, to walk on downtown sidewalks books lunging out of my coat pockets because there are men with guns who don’t know how to use them but think they do.
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Dana Yost was an award-winning daily newspaper editor and writer for twenty-nine years. Since 2008, he has published eight books and been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes in poetry. His poetry has appeared in several reviews, magazines and other publications, including previously in The New Verse News.