Tim Kahl is the author of five books of poems, most recently Omnishambles (Bald Trickster, 2019), California Sijo (Bald Trickster, 2022) and Drips, Spills, Bursts, Tangles, and Washes (Cold River Press, 2024). He is also an editor of Clade Song [http://www.cladesong.com]. He builds flutes, plays them and plays guitars, ukuleles, charangos and cavaquinhos as well. He currently teaches at California State University, Sacramento, where he sings lieder while walking on campus between classes. [http://www.timkahl.com] [https://soundcloud.com/tnklbnny]
T. Kahl has been previously featured by In Parentheses.
Poem To Be Read on Inauguration Day
Note: The poem should be read aloud while accompanied by a trio of Native American flutes in F sharp—a contrabass, tenor, and alto—and a garklein recorder.
In the last federal election we spent more than
the previous one—twice as much it turns out.
Yet no one speaks of how to curtail the spending
but only how to garner more of their share of it.
All this in order to elect representatives to serve in
institutions more and more people don’t believe
can change their lives for the better anymore.
It seems that fewer of us have faith we can
be governed competently, and when failure is
apparent and imminent, we side with those
who claimed they told us so the whole time
and continue with their project of dismantling it.
They erode the tax base, implore us to have strength,
remind us that we have the freedom to choose
any world we want to build, but the nagging feeling
is that we are all circling the Monopoly board,
praying we don’t land on someone else’s
fortified space that will leave us penniless.
It is this feeling that staggers the imagination,
that surly apparatus assembled to overcome
the boundary between the other and the self.
It hampers the grand narrative that surfaces in
the mirror which says I need to find someone just like me.
How many can I draw in with the ancient plaintive call
of the Native American flute that gathers souls and
then lets them be — like ducks scattered in rice fields.
The people who leave others be, to loosely conform,
who don’t try to rope in stragglers will always lose
an election. A winner needs to employ discipline.
So let me be clear about this: all of you who want to
belong to money try working a few more hours
to master the mesmerizing song of the flute.
From the Editor:
We hope that readers receive In Parentheses as a medium through which the evolution of human thought can be appreciated, nurtured and precipitated. It will present a dynamo of artistic expression, journalism, informal analysis of our daily world, entertainment of ideas considered lofty and criticism of today’s popular culture. The featured content does not follow any specific ideology except for that of intellectual expansion of the masses.
Founded in late 2011, In Parentheses prides itself upon analysis of the current condition of intelligence in the minds of these young people, and building a hypothesis for one looming question: what comes after Post-Modernism?
The idea for this magazine stems from a simple conversation regarding the aforementioned question, which drew out the need to identify our generation’s place in literary history.
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By In Parentheses in IP Volume 8
64 pages, published 4/16/2024
In Parentheses Supports The Black Lives Matters and Racial Equality Movement
Freedom should be free – The Bail Project.
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