Happenings
You’re going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day that don’t happen.
It doesn’t seem to bother people, they don’t?
It’s printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.
Everyone’s so eager to get the story
Before in fact the story’s there
That the world is constantly being fed
Things that haven’t happened.
All I can tell you is,
It hasn’t happened.
It’s going to happen.
His work, with its dedication to the fractured rhythms of the plainspoken vernacular, is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams‘. Some may find that Rumsfeld’s gift for offhand, quotidian pronouncements is as entrancing as Frank O’Hara’s.
The Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld
Recent works by the secretary of defense