Abundant peace from heaven, and life, for all
of us; but if not this, O God, if You
are real then grant us less, and if not, do
it anyway: that we will not fall
for the same false lessons as before; we will call
our mothers and email our friends; we’ll renew
our marriage vows and sex lives. We try too
hard to be more than simply good and stall
in our moral progress every time we think
we must defeat evil with will instead
of opening our doors and being kind, letting
our neighbors know our names, having a drink
with our estranged brothers, giving the dead
our Kaddish; those who killed them our forgetting.
Poetry
14 Things Successful People Do Before Breakfast
Economy, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, The Life of the MindRegrets the alarm; looks at his sleeping wife;
wonders if she dreams of him at all;
worries in the shower that his dick is small;
at breakfast nicks his thumb with a kitchen knife.
Pastes on a smile; says, “I love my life,”
as he pulls on his Oxfords in the entry hall,
though some days he thinks he’d rather burn it all
to the ground, make anarchy and civil strife,
smoke weed again, or call the pretty boy
he’d briefly loved in college. He will not.
Luck built five bedrooms and three cars.
Blessed by fortune, unburdened by weighty joy,
easy commute, two average little snots.
Skips dinner, makes excuse, and hits the bars.
Ronald Raven Signs a Piece of Legislation
Media, Poetry, Religion, Things that Actually Happen, War and PoliticsNever more than a few wing’s beats
away; the poor pigeons warble that
they’ve lost the parking lot where they grew fat
to the loud and faster Corvidae who bleat
an almost-human language; the raven defeats
the mere flocked and fearful flights of cat-
harassed and bread-fed winged rats
of the city by being them but more: he eats
what they eat; lives where they live; but he
collects in his nests a bright collection, this
strange habit of display, half warning
and half fetish. De-natured doves, we,
really, are the pigeons; how we miss
the lost evening cliffs. But the raven is morning.
While White
Books and Literature, Culture, Education, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, PoetryIs my job just to respect your experience and accept your conclusions?
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 PoliticsContra 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 PoliticsThe 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.
For Users Identified in the Chat Below
Justice, Media, Poetry, War and Politics“Why is the government using its vast power to identify these obnoxious asshats, and not the other tens of thousands who plague the internet?”
First we’ll mulch the judges; then we’ll bake
the ground-up prosecutors into pies;
we’ll pluck-out every congresscreature’s eyes;
for every cop, a guillotine and stake.
We mean it, pigs. Make no fucking mistake:
if not tomorrow or next week—surprise!—
some day we’ll figure how to anonymize
and route actual murder so as to make
hyperbolic rhetoric into
a magic incantation, thus commission
via mere intention, criminal
and violent retribution of the sort we spew
quite fecklessly, an Internet tradition:
untruth made true, if quite subliminal.
The Tool of Athens
Culture, Media, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind, War and Politics“Nothing matters if we aren’t safe.”
-Marco Rubio
Nothing matters if we aren’t safe; our lives
are emptied by the scent of risk; our passions,
proximate to chance, all strictly rationed;
it cannot be enough merely to thrive,
to love our families, like our work, survive;
it’s insufficient that our God has fashioned
us to perish. Ours will be the Athens
of the modern world, a reborn state derived
from the demos, although I find democracies,
even within strict limits are a bit
too chancy. Nothing ventured? Nothing lost.
Elect me! I will be your Pericles,
though rarely modest and without the wit,
without the chance of gain, but without cost.
Acknowledgments
Culture, Media, Poetry, The Life of the Mind, Things that Actually HappenIf not for her, then I could not have written
a book about man’s moral sentiments
with such precision or such elegance;
It was all her. I was merely smitten
with the fine turn of her prose; once bitten
by the sharp turn of her thoughts, evident
on my mind like a sting on skin, and delicate
and irresistible as a little kitten,
I—I’m not ashamed to say—became
a nobler man, a better author, bigger
than my critics, certainly humbler in my own life.
Can a muse be another half of the same
person? She is the sole source of the vigor
of my prose. I also thank my wife.
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.
Jacob Bacharach 