We’d

Art, Culture, Education, Poetry, The Life of the Mind, War and Politics

The degree to which Manhattan air is now
unseriously suffused with Mary Jane
is not a crime, but it’s a crying shame.
Has anyone given any thought to how
a father—transatlantic, middlebrow—
with two young tots might tamp this devilish flame,
rhetorically—my dears, all drugs are lame—
when, citywide, vom Kind zur worrying Frau,
each pair of human lips is closed upon
a pipe a piece a joint a glowing vape,
greedily enjoying life too much,
the smell of day-old piss dispatched, and gone
the leaking garbage-scented cityscape,
and left behind this brain-befogging crutch.

This Man’s Art and that Man’s Cope

Art, Books and Literature, Conspiracy and the Occult, Culture, Economy, Education, Media, The Life of the Mind

I only have eyes for my beautiful wife, who has been
corrupted by the greed of centralized
fiat currency; she has unrealized
my gains and cut me off from kith and kin.
Such fungible affections are a sin!
No future fortune ought to be despised,
pre-disgraced in skeptical women’s eyes
when man plus NFT must equal win.
What godlike power in one single gif:
from central bank to senator, each fears
the power of the yeoman farmer finally able
to transubstantiate a hieroglyph
through random numbers and the faith of Twitter peers
into un-money whose value is unstable.

Twilight

Art, Books and Literature, Culture, Media, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind, Uncategorized

Kristen Stewart is developing a gay
ghost-hunting reality show with a friend;
a paranormal romp through mortals’ ends,
the pure aesthetics of the soul’s last passageway
to poltergeist from final mortal day,
unclothed but for this season’s bedsheet trend—
now season after season; death transcends
even Paris’ runway protégées
and turns each twist of scarf and knot of belt
but into susurrus of spooky sound,
a cloth moved without breath, a leather snap
that’s searing like a whip on flesh; the felt-
like softness of an apparition’s hellbound
burrowing in your body like a spinal tap.

Chicxulub

Art, Books and Literature, Culture, Education, Justice, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Religion, Science, The Life of the Mind, Things that Actually Happen, Uncategorized, War and Politics

When exactly I should retire, or will
retire has many complex parts to it:
a chronometric set of gears that fit
through genius acts of unimaginable skill
and ratios whose maddening math would fill
vast desert racks of servers cooled and lit
by carbon burned by who came after it.
What tyrant lizard left by being ill,
or turned from prey to watch a meteor
descending through the North-American sky?
The seas may boil; the air itself may burn;
the liquefying stone may crack and roar.
A life’s lived best not knowing it will die,
instinct alone, and never paused to learn.

This 👇. Whee, the Verse

Art, Books and Literature, Culture, Education, Poetry, The Life of the Mind

Does morality come from science or God?
Neither. It comes from your mom and distracted dad.
They got it from grandma, who got it from bad
TV, dumb books, and the old country’s odd
belief that wrapping anchovies in goldenrod
the night before a wedding prevented mad-
ness and made the proper river spirits glad.
The moral genealogy you laud
as the unique inheritance of Western Man
is a robin’s egg that fell onto a sidewalk
in a storm; you take the yolk as augury,
back-build what moral sentiments you can,
a gurgling infant’s first attempts to talk:
I see you, Peek-a-Boo, and you see me.

22 Schnooks

Art, Books and Literature, Education, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, The Life of the Mind, War and Politics

What books should Biden read? We went and asked
some of our best of midlist middlebrow
semi-celebs, and some replied. But how
can one find time to read when one is tasked
with convincing a doomer culture to put on masks,
building past glory back, and better, now,
projecting the saintly calm of a teenage cow.
It’s enough to make one wish for a starving asp
to clasp against one’s own bared breast,
the servants, in their startled Greek, aghast,
while at the harbor, underpaid stevedores
who don’t know Ptolemy from Rameses
are loading wheat as they’ve done for the last
two thousand years; a bored scribe snores;
a librarian pilfers some scrolls and coins and flees.

The Dude A-Biden

Art, Books and Literature, Culture, Economy, Poetry, The Life of the Mind, Uncategorized, War and Politics

soul

In the battle for the soul of America, democracy
prevailed. It hauled its agèd ass across the line
winking and grinning the entire goddamn time
like a dying parent, who, despite your plea,
has spent his retirement on the lottery,
commemorative coins, fake vintage wine;
still mean as hell and obsessed with rising crime;
mad at taxes he doesn’t pay and free
goodies he thinks that someone else has got;
terrified of change and terrified
that nothing’s gonna change except for worse:
here’s what his democratic soul is not:
in love, nor young at heart, nor quite alive.
Each waning angry moment is a curse.

Exiled Thucydides

Art, Books and Literature, Culture, Education, Media, Poetry, The Life of the Mind, Uncategorized, War and Politics

As an empirical matter, democracy,
hallowed by usage and consecrated by time,
has never turned up, hastily dusted with lime
in a hole, shot in the back as it tried to flee
its own cackling imago, autocracy:
yes, some serene republics have declined,
but there their franchise was mere pantomime;
no well-begged question but can burst to be
its own best answer; the universe ordains
that if a country goes to shit, it must
be bad, its laws a sham, its votes a lie,
enraptured by its petty Charlemagnes,
pre-captured by its lack of civic trust:
it doesn’t happen; thus in this essay, I

Bloom

Art, Books and Literature, Culture, Economy, Education, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Uncategorized, War and Politics

bloom

Bring in the boss and sit him down. The head
of the table is perfectly appropriate.
It is the last head that we’ll ever let
him have. Yes, I’m saying we’ll kill him dead.
Lop off his noggin. Weigh his body with lead.
Throw it from the gunwale of a midnight motorboat.
See if all that money helps it float.
Go home and kiss the kids and put them to bed.
“How was your day today?” inquires your wife.
“It wasn’t bad at all,” you say, and then,
quietly, so as not to wake the children,
make the quick, familiar love of a long-shared life,
watch some TV, say a quick prayer, amen:
better to live than to hoard a hundred billion.

Ukraine

Art, Books and Literature, Culture, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, The Life of the Mind, Uncategorized, War and Politics

I’d like to have a single, perfect call.
You on your side of the sea, and I on mine;
I with my morning coffee, you with wine;
the flights of fleeing geese, and chilly fall’s
first breath across the window pane. It galls
me: not to be very special, very nice;
not to be able to, friend to friend, entice
you not to be a criminal at all.
It isn’t fair. It isn’t true, nor good
when friends, such as we are, cannot aspire
through conversation’s friend, the telephone,
to be vague and yet completely understood:
what is it to talk, if not to conspire
against corruption’s favorite word: alone?