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.

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

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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.

Newton’s Worst Law

Education, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Science, The Life of the Mind, War and Politics

The gun, which had a flashlight on it, fired.
The verb to participle’s past aspired.
The bullet’s now quiescent path required
a wood-framed wall within which it retired
on its own, sui generis, self-sired.
A reporter took a note, rushed home, and wired
copy to his editor then fell, dog-tired
into a dream in which actions attired
themselves with actors: a stone, a plop;
a batty president, a malaprop;
a bunch of bratty kids who want to stop
a brutal war abroad, but mom and pop—
at home, attuned to cable agitprop—
wring hands and choose the unenacting cop.

Hilarious and Philarion

Art, Books and Literature, Conspiracy and the Occult, Education, Media, Poetry, Religion, Science, The Life of the Mind

Lots going on this weekend….join the con-
versation. Speak words. Use language that
symbolizes acts and objects: a cat,
a verb of action, adjectives. The dawn
breaking is not in fact the sun. Come on.
The sun is the sun, but Babel’s ziggurat
turned talk to meaning’s meager bureaucrat,
a laboring Lyotardian différend
whose catalog of clucks and wails and jives
must trick the brain to think it thinks in words:
the quick brown fox; the great state of Ohio;
the least shall be the first; the fit survives—
from learning speech by ably aping birds
in song to come to this: Pussy In Bio.

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.

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.

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.

Pastime Paradise

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

You must go back in time: would you prefer
to live the life of a slave owner, or the life
of a slave? Or to be the wife and/or ex-wife
of one or two cohabitating monsieurs
in Brooklyn, February dusk’s longuer
filtering through the glass: an ontology rife
with bad questions as a mad toddler with a knife:
you must answer; you cannot demur:
chair turned backwards: —look, I’m gonna rap
at y’all: you would choose, if pressed, to own
derision in your life and in your Twitter mentions
if paid for your inflammatory crap,
cool to date your ex, too bored to bone
though, and only in it for attention.