Apropos of everything

How can I not feel shameful and disconcerted

after reading that what led to a young Korean

mother’s breakdown was overhearing businessmen

sitting on a nearby bench while she sat sipping

a coffee with her stroller at her side cruelly

muse about how a cockroach mom

can afford a coffee?

I couldn’t stop wondering whether people

who either genuinely or otherwise

ask me how my day was and what I did today

are thinking the same about me,

especially when most of my days these days

involve exercise, walking, reading, cooking, 

all activities that don’t provide me any income

for the coffees I, too, lavishly sip.

It’s apropos of everything for someone

recently jobless at an age a bit before many 

are either retiring or close to it,

who feels decadent and meaningless

to have the great fortune to be able

to stay home reading novels like this one

while so many others are either struggling

or working to save those who are struggling.

I can’t stop feeling like the man who felt isolated

from society only to wake up transformed

into an insect in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,”

now that this Korean author has shared details 

of gender inequalities and plights of women there

because as I read it, I feel it also in my story

and in the lives of so many women here

and around the world who not only

don’t have equal opportunities, but who also

question whether they even deserve their coffees.

My take on the news
-- is it fact or is it fiction?

I’ve decided to become a news poet and to try to write a poem a day based on something reported on NPR. That doesn’t mean that I won’t also check other sources about that issue. For example, my first poem is on fact checking. I read several different major media accounts of the facts following the first debate between Trump and Clinton. The irony is that fact checkers don’t always agree on what was factual and what was not. It seems that even “facts” take a conservative or liberal slant, which is in itself an oxymoron. A fact is a fact. It shouldn’t be possible to dispute it. Oh well. Here’s today’s poem based on the story “Do Fact Checks Matter?” at http://www.npr.org/2016/09/27/495233627/do-fact-checks-matter

Fact or fiction

“Just the facts, ma’am.”
Not my opinion? What I believe? Places I’ve been? Things I’ve seen? 
Facts are so old school,
so history-book dry,
B-O-R-I-N-G 

We don’t need
truth-squadding.
We’re in a post-fact period
where alternate narratives
ring truer than truth. 

Refutation, repetition,
recitation.
Spin makes it true. 
We believe what we want to believe,
whatever supports our views,
confirms beliefs. 

Someone’s pants are on fire.
Dig in your heels
for this “constant roar of information.”