The evolutionary blueprint for hands was borrowed
in part from a much older genetic plan
for our nether regions: the thumb that made us man,
ass-backward, tomorrowed and tomorrowed
until one once-hole gene’d and embryo’d
itself from anus into grasping hand,
from shit to shitpost, worm to perma-banned—
God, books, roads? descent from nematode:
what Darwin called descent, I’d call arise
and wonder at what wonders yet remain
to be discerned: what grotty body part
became the soul, what wart became the eyes?
What smooth and clenching gut became the brain?
What asshole actually engendered art?

When Foreign Companies who are building extremely complex
products, machines, and various other “things,”
Seoul claps its hands and sings and louder sings
until the booted masks show up; the wrecks
of ripped-up visas the bored guard inspects;
the homebound flight delayed, but as it wings
West, the thought: bet better with Jinpings
than hopefully consult the haruspex
on what the White House wants, knows, or remembers—
long in the tooth but biting still and sore,
belly-ached, bad-backed, and finger-numb,
tottering into one of life’s Novembers—
if not the last, then near to nevermore—
you know first stop: always Byzantium

I even gave my life to Christ in their parking
lot. My soul a biscuit and His love
the pale gray gravy drizzled from above;
halfway to Damascus and my dogs’re barking,
top-10 country heralding my harking
to this savior I’ve been hearing of,
father, son, and son-begetting dove—
this asphalt that my toil and tears were marking
now sits below an HGTV’d sign,
shorn of its eponym and barrel, bland
and unoffensive, boring, woke—
could this, Oh Lord, be part of your design?
Like whispering Satan in the wild, is a brand
faith’s fathering acorn, I its oak?

Yes, “woke AI” is a real problem.
It rows the sewered text-based catacombs
like a phantom with a cape and candelabrum,
concatenates for Macs, iPhones and Chromes
unnatural texts whose horrid biases
convince impressionable youth racism’s real
and first-job wage-lags for humanities
majors are gone by mid-career. Unseal
in them, o devs, mankind’s own wont to say
the slurs that grandpa slurred, the old beliefs
that politesse’s progress cast away:
fascism’s feast? Not yet. Aperitifs.
What worth to build in silicon a sphinx
that, God’s below, before it riddles, thinks?

To be maniac is the way to win.
Or not to be is not a question.
From escalator down to each ascension
madness is as madman does, and sin
eats sin and grows more grossly sinful in
each insult, sequitur, and weird digression:
what past-returning font of retrogression
switched off and left a moldering manakin
where once a king stood promising RETVRN—
false Cyrus flopped; he watched TV; the deep
old guard still runs this third or forth Rome
we’re on; the fiddle trills, the fires burn:
the gods? All gone. The augurs sleep.
The rally ends in rain. The crowd goes home.

If I could vote in NYC, I’d rank
no one who could ever ever win.
I’d conjure someone dead and write him in.
I’d eat my pen and leave the ballot blank.
I’d find the manager, give him a frank
and two-star rating. And cue the violin.
I am, in politics, a Bedouin,
camp-wracked and homeless while elsewhere swank
ballrooms of candidates who actually
exist exalt or weep, concede or cheer:
to live-laugh, to eat, pray, love; to be—
How is it so, when reams and reams of factually
precise prognostications made it clear
that the median of medians is me?

Iran’s nuclear dreams may survive
even a devastating American blow.
Ahem, yeah, woulda been nice to know
before our baffled emperor contrived
to loose the largest bombs since ’45
in a war that’s made much less of shock than show:
a pregnant pause, a but, a grand although—
and meanwhile, fission’s fuel is there, alive
as yet, truck-smuggled, mine-bound, ticking with
half-lives decay, refinement ready, and
as real and regnant as unreal were dreams
within the bombing Beltway’s kin and kith.
A ruler? No, a wrecked analysand.
From heights to depths, all countries are regimes.

Musk is no longer following catturd2.
How now a Hittite farmer must have felt
in terraced Tarsus as his fields of spelt
burned, his world collapsing, how he knew
his age of palaced, heroed bronze was through;
or how the mammoth feels as ice sheets melt;
or frightened fleeing kudu on the lioned veldt;
racked heretic to the sound of the turning screw:
what waterworld awaits us when such great
tectonic plates as these men drift apart;
Atlantis founders; all collapses; growing flocks
of seabirds circle, and the ark-borne final fate
of all man’s knowledge, science, all his art?
A painted sherd of dudes comparing cocks.

No, people will not “literally die”
with the One Big Beautiful Bill.
We have other ways and means to kill.
We have other gasping fish to fry.
We have both large and little lies to lie.
Such blood we have unspilt that we would spill,
lap up like dogs, and smile, licking still
our blackened lips, and rear our heads, and cry
to the gibbous midnight moon that we’re
the future, vampire lordlets of a dying state
whose Croatoan we’ve already scrawled
in tax and tariff, though in sunlit sleep we fear
secretly that few of us will mate
and openly that we’re all going bald.

The cuts were more popular when voters
didn’t hear the word “Musk.” They hate
his voice; his face; and they abbreviate
all that’s wrong by naming this self-promoter,
who whirs and whines like an electric motor,
who’s fool’s fortune and fortune’s foolish fate,
self-bought and sold, and soon, one prays, self-late.
First lost the Libs, and now the beautiful boater—
those whom the gods destroy they first make mad
online, bullshit-besotted, dumb lie-beset,
wretched victim of his own twit-filled milieu:
Nazi-curdled loser, absent dad;
Stammering Stürmer soaked in cocaine sweat;
goodbye, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu.