Mr. Shaumyan zeroes in on contemporary topics - war, oil, greed, political chicanery, the shock of 9/11 - and shines his unblinking light for us to see beneath the surface. He sets the tone early on with "Hope Is":

Hope is a song that lifts
A man beyond his time,
It feeds the hungry with its gifts,
Yet never spends a dime.

In "A Toast to the World", he skewers just about everything modern man holds dear, and rightly so:

Let us make this world safe for bureaucracy
And let's embrace patriotic pomposity
and intellectual precocity and Nicaraguan atrocity,

Love in all its many forms is well represented, as always, in this poet's work. I particularly liked this excerpt from "Razor-Sharp Love":

a fleeting memory
of your caressing tongue
on my chest
that's what you are
a black veil of
loneliness.

He cries out for human rights and speaks for the unheard masses. "The New World Manifesto" was brilliant. I excerpt here a small portion of his long poem:

We the people are living breathing human beings and not
mere machines manipulated by the media

And finally, he hits the nail on the head in "Politics Sucks!":
There is a deep freeze
over Washington that
numbs the hearts of
politicians and makes
them deaf and blind to
the real needs of the
people....