While White

Books and Literature, Culture, Education, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry

Is my job just to respect your experience and accept your conclusions?

–David Brooks

Hey, don’t blame me; you hired me to write
these several columns every week, and I
must write each in a little while. White

space is the beginning; it glares back, a bright
tease and an impossibility: for why
(and how) could I have something new to write

three times a week? Why, just the other night
my ex-wife said we’d always lived a lie:
a topic for a column? While my shrink’s white

too-modern couch exerted just a slight
cool leather pressure on my head and on my
weakening back, he averred I not write

about her quite so often. “It isn’t right
to air a private trauma; take the high
road,” he said. His great hair, while white,

is thicker than mine. Sometimes I want to die.
What harder fate than to be a man of high
moral character condemned to write
for money in America while White?

Her Rude Conquerer

Art, Culture, Economy, Justice, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, War and Politics

Contra Horace, captive Greece was captive.
The empire smashed you good and made you slaves.
Instructing some patrician’s louche, attractive
son in meter while he misbehaves
and mocks your accent; father drinks and raves
that lazy immigrants won’t take an active
hand in their own assimilation, saves
for his servants a grudging, wholly retroactive
permission to be as you were made to be:
this is the rude conqueror’s capture:
only to be burdened by your surrender, ever
to pretend to regret that you’re no longer free,
amputation cast as hairline fracture,
always and inescapable as never.

Though I Am Native Here

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

The patriarchy’s not how many drunk
and virgin girl’s fratbro Don Juan has “kissed.”
An –ism’s not the plural of an –ist.
Of all our costly fallacies, we’ve sunk
the most bad debt into this junk,
a penny-stock conclusion. What we’ve missed?
Five fingers unconfigured aren’t a fist.
A white boy? Surely troubled. Black? A punk,
a hood-rat twisted by his absent dad
and too-loud mom. But no bad man decided
these pathologies, which render each
black victim criminal, white killer mad—
a thing repeated is a thing believed
even by disbelievers, in the observance, and the breach.

Intimations of Immorality

Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, War and Politics

“Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed.” -John R. Bolton

Tucked in the Times, admonishments to war.
A general misquoted Clausewitz and
departed for a speaking gig at RAND.
A football game was paused mid-broadcast for
a tribute to Our Heroes; we adore
parading halftime troops for the drunken fans,
assume the boozehounds neither care nor understand
those boys are fighting mostly to assure
some psychotic man-shaped worm another
paid-for shouting match on CNN;
every bomb thus has the odd distinction
of killing and enriching one more mother
fucker with a moustache and a pen.
Sometimes I think the only hope’s extinction.

A Prayer for the Tsar

Books and Literature, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Religion, War and Politics

“Despite all of this, we will not witness a mass exodus anytime soon.” –Jeffrey Goldberg

The author didn’t find much evidence
with which to support his deeply dire thesis.
Journalism’s artless non-mimesis:
subjunctive mood, and yet the future tense.
It’s not just that the piece is rather dense-
ly peopled with mere anecdote; its weakness
is a sort of fallacy of psychokinesis:
motion as concentration’s consequence.
As Jews, we do ourselves no special favor
by making ourselves the shonda proxies for
the various think-tank nuts and politicians
who, regardless circumstances, labor
to pull, out of a hat, another war:
Jews are just the rabbits. They’re magicians.

I Would Prefer Not To

Books and Literature, Culture, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Religion

It is a chest of drawers within which dwells
a whole society of tiny men
unweaving, mothlike, so as to weave again
the selfsame fabric; each worker parallels
his neighbors’ motions like the sine-wave swells
of the deep ocean. Rushing toward the ten
blessedly mandated minutes when
they pause for bitter coffee, yet each rebels
at repetition and at repetition’s
repetition; isn’t it, however,
evolution, God, or devil that
bargained the soul’s wages and working conditions?
Security a curse pronounced forever.
Who slaves, at last? Maze-maker? Or rat?

Homer? Samson.

Culture, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, War and Politics

“People who live according to the pure code of honor are not governed by the profit motive; they are governed by the thymotic urge, the quest for recognition.”

–David Brooks

A writer for the Times discovers that young men
in countries we fucked up have aspirations
different from those of the occupying nations;
He thinks them retrograde, but judges them
through a philosophical conceit that’s ten
centuries older than Islam’s creation,
a Western pagan’s fascist masturbation—
Plato’s politics were monstrous when
Plato was alive! Isn’t it
ironic that a public intellect
whose Gray-Agora sinecure assures
him of a massive audience has writ-
ten that the flaw in Muslims is “thymotic”?
What is the perfect form of an inveterate bore?

Mötley Crüsades

Culture, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry

Sometime in the middle Middle Ages
Urban deuce, who wasn’t lacking for
other kings and popes at Peter’s door
disrupted Christendom with an outrageous
well-armed pilgrimage whose bloody stages
ultimately broke Byzantium
killed the Cathars and left Russia numb.
Later on, we blamed the bloody wages
of centuries of silly conflict on
the Pagan north and Muslim Middle East,
ever-lapping at J.C.’s dominion.
Even now, eight centuries having gone,
these devil-haunted slaughters are the Beast
whose dumb roar is Editorial Opinion.

Sicko Fancy

Culture, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, War and Politics

He was a monarch in an age when we believe
in billion-dollar plebiscitary
elections that are like the lottery:
grin-stuffed adverts: “Seniors will receive
the bulk of ticket proceeds.” Honey, please.
He was decrepit; woke six times to pee
each night; and murdered women for adultery;
but served the nova Roma and appeased
its idiot imperators acting out
their sandbox fantasies of being Trajan.
All eulogies for kings are wasted breath.
A king is just a man who’s singled out
to think he’ll be immune to life’s contagion.
He’s ruled, therefore, ironically, by death.

A Spate of Unions

Economy, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, War and Politics

That which wasn’t is becoming by
best estimations something we’ll achieve
within what I’m assured’s a reasonable time—
as soon as now, if I can be believed.
The past is past. The future is to come.
Mistakes, if they were made, and let me say,
I can conceive that they were made by some
impatient staffer, unpaid junior aide,
although of course I can’t with certainty
identify what they might be, because,
let me be clear, they were not made by me,
will nonetheless . . . where was I? Let me pause.
To those who’d make us choose between what may
and might never be done, I say, I say.