Being? There, there

Culture, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind, Things that Actually Happen, War and Politics

Trump is experiencing anxiety.
Lake Worth Lagoon to wine-dark heaving sea.
Two deaths escaped, and thus fearful of three
or four or ten. This violent century
flailed fast into absurdity:
gun-barrel glints behind each bush and tree—
yet their large target? Fate’s full escapee.
The grave? Evaded. Crimes? Committed. Free.
God grants good luck to those least sure to be
deserving, and laughs above alone, and we
flit quick as seasons to the elderly,
are born, live, love, vote, flee
beyond life’s being-boundary.
Unless if cursed to immortality.

Pax Yo Momma

Conspiracy and the Occult, Culture, Economy, Education, The Life of the Mind

We tried peace for 2 years, now
it is war: the troops are mustered, galley slaves
lashed to the oars crash through the crushing waves
to distant shores, and, from the glistening prows
cry out a thousand lookouts: Carthage! Thou
hast pulled thy banners from my Forum: unto graves
you go—O! blessèd Roma Mater craves
your pickup trucks, weird diets, middlebrow
bad movie trailers; you must advertise
or we’ll invade—well, we will sue
and shop a friendly judge who’s sure to spurn
all precedent and law and will devise
some heretofore unheard-of detinue
though it salt our own destruction in return.

Brown vs. Bored

Books and Literature, Culture, Economy, Education, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, The Life of the Mind

I also get really irritated by
“you should send your kids to bad public schools,”
depriving them of those essential tools
of learning: whom to bribe and when to cry
foul online over some invented guy
whose claims, once conjured, undermine the rules
we’ve set like Stanford nerds in polycules,
that it is not our brief to rectify
inequities we caused when we withdrew
our funds and families from the social order—
you’d have us put our smart, precocious, bright
boys and girls into the burbling stew
of urbanites and migrants from the border?
What good then’s being rich, apart, and white?

TINA

Books and Literature, Culture, Economy, Education, Media, Poetry, Religion, Science, The Life of the Mind, War and Politics

Effective Altruism is flawed, but what’s
the alternative? Think of a trillion lives
unborn, moon-dwelling boys and AI wives
alike snuffed out because you’d rather futz
with annual gifts, remainder unitrusts,
bequests in probate—ifs and ands and buts
of FASB recognition rules. What drives
man past extinction unless nerdkind strives
to stack its bills and bust its nerdy nuts
early and often; grow rich and populate
the stars and worlds and iron asteroid belts
lest we die out: our species’ prophylaxis
contra death itself; there’s no debate:
for now, the world can burn, a pole can melt;
we do not want to pay our share of taxes.

Terrible as an Army with Banners

Books and Literature, Culture, Education, Justice, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind, War and Politics

My wife is fond of flying flags. I
am not. Ani l’dodi v’dodi li,
except insofar as it’s implicated me
in her shit. Interlocutors will cry
foul, but Justice—I am one—won’t shy
from fighting’s fighting words: Yes, dear; I see.
It’s as the saying goes, that women be
inverting flags; Senators, please try
to grasp that staying married’s long required
through long gray years to learn just how and when
to pay the bill and wait out in the car
while the missus tries to get the waiter fired—
we rib-robbed Adams, what are we, but men?—
admitted to, and drinking at, the bar.

Happiness, Or Not At All

Art, Books and Literature, Culture, Economy, Education, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Religion, Science, The Life of the Mind

Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create.
A world uninfected by pianos or paint,
deliciously cleansed of the dull human taint
of art, taste, fabric or having to date
to find love: swipe left, iterate
out the meet-cute desire, antique and quaint,
this filigreed species of devil and saint,
to be human, alive. Too soon and too late
we got and spent; Proteus rose and we capped
his dumb ass; we clogged old Triton’s seas
with facewash beads: choler and spleen
replaced dull talk—the gods napped
and the vile monkeys did as they damn well pleased:
crushed the planet’s sand and made a screen.

Literalism Against Itself

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

Okay, maybe there is U.S. fascism.
It’s now affected me, therefore it is.
A parlor-game’s gray host transforms when his
parlor is the pitch, and many a church-door schism
turns out to be mere book-to-sell tourism
when cops turn up and—holy shit!—mean bus-
iness! Doktorprofessor’s Niemöllerian quiz
sucks snake tail—O, Ouroboran tropism
of contrarian come-down, what hast thou wrought, O Lord,
cracked skulls foundation babel’s ivory height—
the tower sways; the scales of judgment creak;
he didn’t really care, he was just bored,
better by far to be bruited than right,
until the boxcars open, and you freak.

Poster? Child.

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

Is it gauche to wear your own blog’s hat
to the trampoline park? Not necessarily,
though other parents look away and warily
grasp the fleeing hand of their own brat,
head for the door and text their husbands that
DC is done. They moved to town primarily
for work; she never thought they’d more than temporarily
live like this, astew in techno- or gerontocrat,
schools too expensive, all their neighbors weird
and weirdly wired all the time—they think
in numbered paragraphs; a legal brief
is better than a poem; they believe a beard
an edgy look, and though they love to drink
their boringness will beggar your belief.

Mother, mayday

Culture, Education, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind

All this brings us back to Sydney Sweeney’s
boobs: her honkers, mommy milkers, grands tétons—
our remaindered reputations avalanched upon:
castrating coup de foudre: we’re all weenies,
heart-battered, wracked by liberal meanies
whose elitophile noctes and successful spawn
out-Freud, out-Jung us, even out-Lacan
the shrinks who told our moms, Your Mussolini-
manqué sons have but two paths in life:
in one they kill a schoolyard full of kids;
the other?—disappointed crypto-Waugh;
in either case, they never get a wife;
they’ll masturbate to low-res Twitter vids;
weird hairline, creepy eyes, a Habsburg jaw.

Rectified and Readymade

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

The idea that “anything can be art” is a
destructive notion that devalues art:
equating pop-cult’s levelling Cuisinart
with masterpieces like that Mona Lizza:
I stood in line to see her once, La Giaconda;
room 711, cheek-to-jowl, nose-to-fart,
but her behind her glass, a world apart,
petite, obscure, untroubled by wokisma,
modernism, deconstruction, Yale
and Harvard, Palestine, Marcel Duchamp,
bugbearless belle who proves my thesis that
beauty is truth, and truth is always pale—
life in images d’Épinal my psychopomp
and heaven as suburban habitat.