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.

The Defeatist Reviews 2014

Books and Literature, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Science, The Life of the Mind

Several years ago some guy named Pinker
wrote a book, which said that human kind
has now become less violent, more refined.
I pictured him composed like Rodin’s Thinker,
but sitting on the can leaving a stinker.
Here’s the triumph of the counterintuitive mind:
to pitch the fruit of knowledge, eat the rind;
fish proud to have caught that hook and line and sinker.
Was last year the worst that’s ever been?
I doubt it. What’s a good year? What is bad?
History has no progression. It
only accumulates, and no one wins;
to think it otherwise is to be mad.
Care less. Do nothing. Fuck it, man. And quit.

The Law

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

As a general rule I’m not the sort of man
who thinks our world’s best served by putting other
men into jail. This one Jewish brother
who got famous later on, he said, I stand
with the least of you, the whores and lepers and
the murderers and thieves. Of course, his mother
knew who he hung out with. She discovered
that’s what mattered when the Roman cops ran
into the garden and hauled him out and strung
him up; shouldn’t one of them, at least,
have spent at least one night on a concrete floor?
The question outlived her son’s name on her tongue.
Did he deserve to die like some dumb beast?
Even the beasts—even then—got more.

The Cathedral

Culture, Economy, Media, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind

Last at the altar, first to the door, the pale
young priest asks his congregants which they’ll embrace:
salvation by good twerks or Nancy Grace?
Their googling eyes flick through wikis; fail-
ing to find a clear consensus, they derail
the sermon: what does father think about race-
derived intelligence, or the reptilian face
beneath the POTUS’ hack-job human veil?
Oh gods, make us less chaste, make us less poor,
and do it now; the undeserving have
converted their unworthiness to cash
unbacked except by unearned faith, no more
than gold—though not gold standard—golden calves;
we’ll skip the sackcloth but accept the ash.

A Red Line

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

“Obviously I think that’s a red line for everybody here: no boots on the ground,” Mr. Kerry said.

War’s past and bootworn decades wore them out.
The Romans, though, wore socks and sandals and
conquered most of Europe, snow to sand
and sea to alp. Roads and footwear rout
inferior engineering. When a trout
flashes in a stream, you pick a lure and stand
braced against the cold water, right hand
to cast, left at your hip-waders; you sprout
like a sapling when the rain has swelled the creek.
“Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in
return.” History is a fish going to spawn
against the current, then it dies, weak
with reproduction, but new fish begin
where the last died for the bears. And on and on.