Happiness, Or Not At All

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus

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US names campaign to target Houthis
in Yemen “Operation Poseidon Archer”—
failed opening-weekend Aquaman mise
en abyme—abyssal god’s too-late departure
from depth and form to dumbass Artemis
who hurls more heedless missiles, baking sand
to glass for a domestic audience
that can’t tell Bab al-Mandab from dry land.
They asked: tell Philly Ahab, cut it out;
stop bombing hospitals, and we’ll permit
your ships to pass; in Florida, a gout-
y two-star reads the note and files it
do not reply, and cracks a beer, desires
good consulting gigs when he retires.

Endymion

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“DeSantis drops out of Presidential race
and endorses Trump.” No less surprise has ever
flowed from failed ambition; it was never
gonna happen, yet God’s good grace
brought us, witnesses, to this time and place
to see this runted, rutting, not-so-clever
Archimedes: world to move, no lever
though—and spot to stand? Yes: third place.
A scorned son will make an idol of the dad
who lured him to the sport he couldn’t play
and coached the team to make him ride the pine:
loving to hate himself and going mad
to please the man who calls him short, and gay,
and weak: loss is a howl, but defeat? A whine.

d/dx(Q)

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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.