Exiled Thucydides

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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

Chasing the Clouds Away

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Shapiro

Are the muppets biased to the left? Of course. That was
the point of Sesame Street, as I discuss:
provocateurs like Snuffleupagus
preach Maoist leveling while Ernie does
his LGBTQI-best to shove
both his and dear Bert’s sinful “love is love”
anti-Judeo-Christian cant at us,
telling mere children, “Mom and Dad are sus.”
Hashem forfend! Miss Piggy may be trans,
sharing Kermit’s bathroom and his bed;
Statler and Waldorf swooned for Hamilton;
Big Bird’s Khmer cabal now favors bans
on “racist” speech; The Count is dead
by firing squad for saying one is one.

An Open Letter

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Our cultural institutions now must face
a trial unlike any faced before:
@litboner69 called me a bore;
a sophomore undergrad said that my race
informed my sense of self, and worth, and place;
they didn’t put my book in the front of the store;
they added diaspora studies to the core
curriculum; now my promotion case
is held up with the provost just because
I hold a few unorthodox views:
that Blacks are more athletic by design;
true women lack men’s moral flaws;
Arabs just aren’t quite as smart as Jews.
For this you’re telling me I should resign?

Adjudicating Claims of Truth Using Math, and Not Convenience

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I don’t believe it just because it’s true.
An interim beyond a certain length
of time attenuates the tensile strength
of a claim; our years on earth, though brief and few
against history’s vast, impersonal view,
reduce the truth each rainy spring by a tenth:
T-zero times (one minus point one) to the Nth.
It’s simple math. There’s nothing you can do.
Had you told me right away, or yet
mentioned it in 1999,
or even yesterday, I would achieve
true belief, quite against any threat
to my politics’ necessary bottom line.
Your deadline’s passed, alas. I disbelieve.

Bloom

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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.

Retirement

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By 30, you should have a decent chunk of change saved for your future self, experts say — in fact, ideally your account would look like a year’s worth of salary, according to Boston-based investment firm Fidelity Investments, so if you make $50,000 a year, you’d have $50,000 saved already. By 35, you should have twice your salary, the firm said.

By the time you’re thirty-five you should have loved
one or two emotionally stunted men,
broken up, and immediately done it again.
You should have had a plantar wart removed.
You should have stood too soon and furiously shoved
your way off of a crowded plane. You should have ten
single unmatched socks. Most of your friends
should be better off, do yoga, self-improve
while you’re still at the bar five nights a week,
still smoke when you drink too much, get stoned, and tweet,
sill plan to plan to write a book, still drive
the car you bought at twenty-six, still seek
sensations strong enough to mask defeat.
You don’t tell anyone you’re thirty-five.

The Princess and the Peon

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We need a Disney Princess who one night
awakes in a sweat in her vast, cold bed to find
a prickling guilt in the back of her lovely mind:
what she has inherited is neither just nor right;
out in the fields of wheat, the peasants’ plight
is that his labor and his wealth are unaligned;
the commons closed, his status thus declined—
the owners took the surplus. Where Princess might
once have called the maid for milk and gone
back to bejeweled dreams and tiny snores,
this time she rushes to the palace’s marble stairs,
cries to the dawn that there will be a dawn,
princes brought down to raise up beggars and whores,
collective ownership, and headless heirs.

Broad Street in Lower Manhattan

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“The idea that people can then ride in on the subway with a bomb or whatever and come straight up in an elevator is awful to me,” said Claudia Ward, who lives in 15 Broad Street and was among a group of neighbors who denounced the plan at a recent meeting of the local community board. “It’s too easy for someone to slip through. And I just don’t want my family and my neighbors to be the collateral on that.”

-“In New Proposed Subway Elevators, Some See a Terrorism Risk“

Let me tell you about the very rich.
They hate their children and live in glass towers.
The simplest pleasures are beyond their meager powers
of imagination; mostly, they like to bitch
about the minor incursions of normal life, the itch
of unsanctioned human contact, the fleeting sour
stench of the breathing millions they’ll rush to shower
off in their marble hangars. A muddy ditch
or a modest home appear as misery
defined; they do fear violence of a certain kind,
not terrorism, but a reborn Terror
without the killing—like, meeting the delivery
boy, or paying cash, or waiting in line.
Mere human contact is their Robespierre.

Girl, I Want Your Body

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We’ll call this the room of love. In this room,
you get to know someone and a spark is struck,
e.g., your research assistant’s down to fuck,
and your marriage, each bitter workday’s-end exhumed
for dinner’s silent paces, then re-entombed,
is done—you haven’t told your wife, but luck
may intervene; she’ll find some other schmuck
to love, right? Sex is the bud that blooms
through every season that does not accrue
to years as age; sex is an intimation
of immortality, for him at least;
why harass when you can simply do
a book together? It stinks of limitation,
a rough but two-backed slouching beast.

A Few Colossi

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We must never, ever take anything down.
Build on top of the built world, accrete
and do not pare; fill every ordered town
with statues of its residents, and choke the streets
with statues of the statues of the statues till they drown
all empty space beneath a solid sheet
of human matter; burst the borders; frown
at the vast wilderness, incomplete
without commemorating plaques
and towers named after long-dead architects
and roads to nowhere and great retaining walls
retaining other walls; let Atlas’ back
break; he can no longer shrug, his neck
has also snapped. We’ll build a statue to his fall.