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.

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.

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.

Or, the Wail

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

To the American people: Our future starts around
kitchen tables just like this. With moms
and dads just like you. Although, it says in Psalms
that ma and pa will leave you, lost and clowned-
on by your enemies: a modern Jonah drowned
by mankind’s monstrous mechanized pogroms
against Behemoths and Leviathans:
no mouth to gulp us; El Elohim unfound
and missing from his tabernacle since
we lost his interest, being more concerned
with what our neighbors say on Nextdoor, what
will leave the incremental vote convinced:
Their own? Deserved—What others get? Unearned.
The world won’t bang its end. And you? Shut up.

Meine kleine Kampfmusik

Culture, Economy, Education, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Religion, Science, The Life of the Mind

“I would love to see, you know, a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins…Our solar system would be full of life and intelligence and energy.“
–Jeff Bezos

If we had a trillion humans, we would have
at any given time a thousand Mozarts
and a thousand Einsteins—but a thousand Hitlers too:
from each ocean-edging glacier calves
ship-sinking icebergs; mankind is crime and art,
both Model T and Ford who hates the Jew;
our solar system would be full of life,
Europa choked with algae; Mars on fire
like Pittsburgh riverfronts in ’53;
a zillion virgins for each fed-up AI wife
whose godlike energy demands require
the output of the sun itself, and we
last earth-born, dying-earthbound humans forced
to this end by rich men’s pattern baldness, and divorce.

d/dx(Q)

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

I’ve told this story before, but in 2008
I applied to be a scooper at an ice cream stand
with a BA from a top-25 school in hand,
a CV on paper of excellent gloss and weight,
a skill for conflating absolute change and rate
that the shift manager did not seem to understand—
his media diet and his clearly poor command
of slope curve derivations. . .—well, as fate
would have it I was one of maybe 50
applicants, sweating from the coolers’ hot
exhaust: a normal joe, a working slob,
although I wore a tie, unlike these shifty
untucked teens—it was an interview, not
some joke, my god. I didn’t get the job.

Bourbon, Dynasty

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

If not to the manor born, at least to come
screeching up its drive at middle-age:
considered by your compeers as a kind of sage
for putting into writing something dumb
that the unworthy rich would think a rule of thumb;
one thinks, that though one doesn’t earn a wage
but squawks instead for money from the lecture stage,
invests it with his friends, and takes the proceeds from
an arbitrage of rates and fluctuations
that he is nonetheless not of the sort
who could or ought to call himself a mas-
ter of the universe, ennobled, blessed by nations
and kings: he’d sell himself a little short:
He is, in fact, the upper middle class.

Unetanah Tokef

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

I screwed up. I should not have written
that tweet. I probably should not write
any tweets, but I was soused and smitten

with a half-formed joke: the awkward mitten
of a child-drawn hand; the wan fluorescent light
flattered it, but I should not have written,

although the word’s the sea, and I its Britain
borne imperially sunward, brave and bright
and soused on gin, humble, never self-smitten,

self-ruled and able to admit hard-bitten
lessons such as: if you think you might
tweet aforeflight, you should not have written,

for you’ll land, and scroll, and, panic-stricken,
walk it back, unmarry it, make light:
guys, dear readers, I was drunk and smitten

with one bon mot that hung there like the kitten
in the poster: Oh Lord! I pray to make it right:
the book of life is not yet sealed, though written:
number me among the living, not the smitten.