We are children of the Oh’s, even those, who oh, I dunno, are not children. Every decade is always the parent of the time. If you were 70 in the 70’s you were still a child of the 70’s – at least you were during the 70’s.

The 70’s, the 1970’s, are a long time ago now (“and now for his next trick Mr. Obvious will ...”) and the Oh’s, the Two-Thousand Oh’s (the 00’s, Oh’s), are fresh. But fresh is the strangest word for it, us, them, now. It’s more of Mr. Obvious to state that “fresh” is a word that might be past its sell-by-date (from one of my own poems “I turned the world over/it has an expiration date”), but it is.

However, give “fresh” a hook-up, okay a date, with a certain word and it becomes well almost dewey. The word is blood. Oh, that’s what the Oh’s are ‘bout.

Fresh blood.

The world is blood. That’s the Oh’s. Fresh blood. In the beginning of the Century it is time for the young to die. Like some kinda strange botched cosmic circumcision we are in the days that live in the infirmary; our pride splattered in a hued bris. For all the talk of green, money, the environment, the color of the Oh’s is red, and the decade’s big machers are the dispensers of this red stream, and it’s not “arête” (this is a very, very inside-joke, once in Paris I bicycled through a big intersection, I guess past a red light, the gendarme’s voice was very profound “rouge est arête”), it’s not stopping.

The poet is a ghost on the battlefield (yes I’m quoting myself again), always coming after the carnage like a canary vulture (now there’s a mixed metaphor) to sing. I wish it wasn’t so. I wish we were the opening act not the closing séance. It seems our job is to remind people of the people that are no longer people but oh, what people they were.

Oh, here’s a thought. January 20, 2009. Noon.