Hella Roma

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

A new social media trend where women ask
their men how often they think of ancient Rome,
its aqueducts and baths and concrete domes,
its wars and slaves and plays and funeral masks,
amphorae and Mary the Jewess’ flasks,
hillside temples and haunted catacombs,
naval battles and horsey hippodromes,
reveals a gender shocked by simple facts:
their mundane husbands rarely dream of sex;
they contemplate instead cement and lye,
the Tarquins, Carthage, Nero, Christ’s own rood,
Lucretia’s rape to Peter’s pontifex,
triremes, floating bridges, Caesar’s die—
in short, dominae meae, they are dudes.

Beauty School Cop-Out

Conspiracy and the Occult, Culture, Education, Media, Poetry, Science, The Life of the Mind

Young men today feel they must be six
feet tall, make six figures and have six inches
downstairs to get with any basic binches
whose blonde ambitions won’t put up with dicks
or dudes too small and weak to make the Knicks:
picky as cats and flighty as flocks of finches,
they will eschew the sexual-nuptial cinches
of poor short men with decent politics,
a loving nature, kindness, murderous rage
that they were once passed over for the prom,
a perfectly normal love of firearms,
a set of calipers with which to gauge
which race should rule the rest, a wonderful mom
who’s reassured it’s no call for alarm.

Snoozin’ Sontag

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

I have determined that generation Z
doesn’t believe in criticism of any kind;
they haven’t the discipline or habit of mind;
their brains are poisoned by too much irony.
None of the foregoing applies, of course, to me.
I only read text that’s found between the lines
and ferment images as grands crus wines
derive from simple grapes. They flee from me,
these stupid kids, these motherfucking geeks;
they won’t pull up their pants; they won’t improve;
they do not say their daily affirmations;
O Muse! in whose once mighty song one seeks
interpretations enough to fill a Louvre
with the prized wall texts of all the modern nations!

Oh, Yay!

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

Amid the attacks on the 2023
SCOTUS term I started reading the
significant decisions, and: I liked them, duh.
It’s true they don’t pertain at all to me:
I haven’t got a womb, and I am free
from past discrimination’s algebra
of sundown’s trade for safety, inshallah;
I am not married, but could always be.
Hysterics is the art of wanting more
than past tradition binds to boundaries now
so well-won, worn, and granted they are no
more needed: what present-sounding horror
can cakeless fags, and Blacks, and pregnant sows
claim that’s worse than my discomfort, bro?

Minecraft Kampf

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

Whenever I’m on a career advice panel
for young conservatives, I tell them to
avoid, if possible, the rootless Jew;
and jokes that use the N-word more than two
dozen times; extolling Hitler’s blue-
eyed soldiers for the zillion Slavs they slew;
that rib-born woman is God’s after-chew;
or Atomwaffen’s Twitch your favorite channel.
O, son-born sires of sons of Edmund Burke!
Thou must in this needs be but more discreet:
do not DM your friends what you believe—
that rape is good, or Hungary over Turk,
that Christina Pushaw ought to show more feet.
The left’s perversions, you cannot conceive!

Platyrhynchus

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

Congress must join the AI revolution,
feed every thought it has into a box
that talks the way a congresscreature talks:
mirabile binomial distribution,
concatenating prior elocution:
a talking ducklike ape of real ducks’ walks
that you, recumbent turtles, see as flocks
of fowl in flight instead of consecution.
The ducks themselves are flying overhead.
Their unsemantic calls inure to no
rack of sweating servers; parliaments
of mallards lived, flew, swam, and bred
themselves anew—no need to beg and grow
backwards out of dire senescence.

Fishers of Men

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

As for the flight, Mr. Singer and others had already made arrangements to fly to Alaska when I was invited shortly before the event, and I was asked whether I would like to fly there in a seat that, as far as I am aware, would have otherwise been vacant.
–Justice Samuel Alito

And I was asked whether I would like to fly
there in a seat that, as far as I
am aware, would have otherwise been vacant.
O! Pale Alaskan sky! O! noctivagant
permafrosted critics of the fourth estate
who would tear down the stars to punish great,
deserving men: dear honest, worthy friend
I barely know—Temerity! to send
to me, mere umpire, damned and stinking sulphurous
lists of did I this? or did I that?—
What man, born under Christ’s blood-borne domain,
his rod in hand, a Peter, under fulgurous
flashing sky, would let some man-shaped rat
inquire about pecuniary gain?

for us at every moment in time & certainly this one

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

to see the moment in time in which we exist
and are present and to be able to context-
ualize it: the river now becomes the next
river by flow alone; a moment missed
recurs as déjà vu : the lips you’ve kissed,
a child’s first word, some fumbling first-time sex—
the lighthoused shoals we’ve shored against the wrecks
of time’s tumults and tides; the curses hissed
at all our disappointments; the absent gods
and flocking angels; the death, the flesh, the blood
baked in the boot-stomped sand—O Lord!
that formed the hand that held the dowsing rod
and made the time-perceiving mind of mud,
give me thus your cause, and gift: the word.

for Vice President Kamala Harris

That’s Fine

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

“The Nazi stuff” is literally one one hun-
dred thousandth of the things my boss collects.
He owns many non-genocidal texts.
He’s not quite sure the good guys really won
a certain war when all is said and done,
but, that aside, he is in all respects
mere amateur of Volkish analects:
mere millions spent on Adolph’s art for fun.
Yes, he honeymooned at Babi Yar,
but only to feel the breath of history;
his iron gates are simply meant to warn
the liberal Jews they oughtn’t go too far:
otherwise, they’re fine, and should stay free.
For this, the Twitter mobs uncork their scorn!

L’Article 49.3

Culture, Economy, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, The Life of the Mind, War and Politics

I never understood the French desire
to retire as soon as possible and then
live on. I thought I’d work until the end,
each day arising to the orange bankèd fire,
a silken full-length gown—my work attire;
my blistered fingers to their plow: a pen;
a morning hour’s work, a nap, again
a forty-minute afternoon; then hire
an ungrateful ex-colonial Uber driver
to bus my wife and I from our chateaux
into some village’s pretty pristine square
for the entrecôte reward of any striver
and a glass or ten of ’96 Margaux—
for if I did not labor, I’d despair.