Today I sat and listened to Speaker Boehner explain why he wouldn't allow the Senate Immigration Bill to come to the floor of the House,  and I thought how like the setting of a Greek tragedy Washington has become and how like a Goat the Speaker has become. Perhaps he was always a goat... I wonder what he was like as a child on a playground in Ohio... and in high school trying to take himself seriously and straining to be taken seriously by his peers... and later crying and braying as he climbed the political rungs to get to his high office, he probably couldn't have imagined he would be the character with the tragic flaw who would be unable to stop great damage from being done to his party.  We get our word “tragedy” from τράγος (tragos), the Greek word for “Goat” and ᾠδή (song or ode). 

On my study wall 

they watch me

like Greek theatre masks...

while I read

and

think and think some more

then type and think...

But the one that 

doesn’t let me forget

that τραγῳδία

inexorably finds its way

into every enterprise

Is the one

I brought home

across the border

from Mexico...

made appropriately

of grass.