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The Church of Reasonable Doubt 
1. Trial
After a year and a day
the serfs free themselves
in four hours.
Ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent
guilty, so they spit
acquit.
But today we celebrate
The Church of Reasonable Doubt!
Any live body in America
can join, regardless
of race, creed, sex
glove size or national celebrity.
Now we can return
to Another World.
2. Test
"It's medically impossible,"
he tells us,
"but you could be pregnant."
Assaulted by hope,
we're old enough to believe
in anything--
even this cell
that couldn't legally open
a beer till we've retired
even innocence
even this strange, reasonable creature
who's smiled before us already
with our own blood
on his hands.
Thought Tanks
Their greatest grandfather was a stroke
of genius to end
World War One
in 1916.
Oops.
Now, they stop whatever
steam locomotive has brought them
to this station, and bend
the rails
into their treads.
They overrun PBS
while nobody's looking
on the other side
of the glass.
In sharkskin
suits week after week after week
they stomach but never digest
William F. Buckley.
No water, no tank tops,
only these ivory turrets
of elephants, cursing the donkeys,
shooting the bull.
Brochure
It's 86 degrees outside
and 99 percent
relative humidity.
But the au courant
within The Pegasus Hotel
this New Year's Eve will be flying
on frozen daiquiris, dry ice,
and air conditioning.
Leave Times Square to the lunatics!
See frost on jaborandi!
Bring string bikinis and your furs!
Our snow is cotton candy,
styrofoam and manna!
Winter in Guyana!
In Praise of Lions
King of Beasts? My ass. Singular,
plural, they beat up on
lost babies and the straggling sick.
A Young Republican
of Kenya does spare the unborn,
whom she adores, but taste-
fully, without demonstrations,
regarding words a waste
of the grace before which all else
vanishes, like self-doubt.
Why apostrophize your future
blessings? Prides go about
their business. Lions purr
I love you, raw as you are.
Postcard from Purgatorio
One married his Moll,
one gilded his Gonne,
both determined to mug
Her imagination.
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