Not six-wingèd, nor a fiery wheel,
not four-bodied, though a living being,
human but for other human’s seeing
only what they a priori feel
to be true. Did he say fuck? Did he steal?
Was he sometimes prone to disagreeing?
Black? A teen? All but guaranteeing
some journalistic posthumous appeal
to see the nuance, meaning the bad sides.
No life is a story, and no story has
two sides: it is a universe, expanding,
not some taxonomic Alcatraz.
Here is the truth your subtlety elides:
there is no peace surpassing understanding.
Poetry
If Obedience Is a Condition of Existence, Then We Must Resist by Disappearing
Culture, Economy, Justice, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Things that Actually Happen, War and PoliticsA cop writes that he has the right to shoot
a man for walking too aggressively,
shoot if he delays or if he flees,
shoot if he fails to kowtow or salute,
shoot if he gets too smart or thinks he’s cute.
The predicate of law is immunity
for lawmen; ours is a cop timocracy,
the badge the only property, the boot
the only vote. The price of life is death,
therefore, if you don’t wish to buy it, you
must make an effort never to be born.
Not far away from here, borne on the breath
of a heat-bleeding highway, a hawk or two
rise in spirals over the mice-filled corn.
A Love Poem Awkwardly Inspired By a Stupid Video Feature at Slate.Com
Art, Books and Literature, Culture, Media, Poetry, Things that Actually HappenDo the rights and freedoms we currently enjoy mean that now is the best time in history to be gay?
When was the best time ever to be gay?
It was when we met. Before that we
were accidents of sex taxonomy;
now we’re texts and winks throughout the day.
Were we to travel back through history,
find ourselves in Death in Venice’s day,
or lounging like ancient Greeks carved in clay
as charms against queer specificity,
I’d still measure the good from when I first
swiveled a barstool so our knees would touch
and laughed too loud and hard and talked too much
and covered my nerves with beer and was the worst.
You still came home with me, and stayed, and here
we are regardless of the marked and measured year.
The Responsibility to Protect
Culture, Poetry, War and PoliticsI am a poem, he says; he sets out to
destroy a country merely made of prose,
the words all justified in even rows,
inelegant and literally true,
doing merely what they’re meant to do,
dictionarily-defined. He blows
them up. Later, a guest on the cable shows,
he’ll note the syntaxless fragments scattered through
the once-ordered pages that he edited;
Incomprehensible, he’ll say, They are
incompatible with order and
responsible for their too-common dead
metaphors; but a redline here and there
is all they need: a pinch; a guiding hand.
De Rerum Natura
Culture, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, War and PoliticsReihan Salam and John McCain have scored
a six-pack and a fix of krokodil;
the war is over; both men need to feel
the war is never over. They are bored.
The decadent world they hate is drifting toward
. . . well, something. Sense-starved, they’ll steal
right up to death, which is all that’s really real:
irrevocable promise of its own reward.
Outside the window of the Georgetown study
where they melt in leather chairs among the shelves
of Boots and Kagans leans a homeless vet;
war muddied his boots; now his mind is muddy
with several sectarian civil-warring selves.
Someone calls the cops, reports this threat.
A Newspaper Columnist Takes Drugs and Inhabits the Consciousness of an Animal
Culture, Media, Poetry, ReligionSomewhere over Silver Plume, a hawk
stoops toward a rodent in the underbrush;
the mountains are green, the small streams rush
with new snowmelt; it’s hard not to be mawk-
ish—nature needs and hates our idle talk
about its beauty. Here in the hotel hush,
the window facing sunset’s westward blush,
I ward the door against housekeeping’s knock
and kneel into this newly legal prayer
to these foreign numina; they are displeased
and I, untethered, terrified, become
the mouse beneath the raptor-crowded air;
unlike a god, a bird can’t be appeased;
I squeak; it wheels; I freeze: immobile; dumb.
Thud. Ark. Enlightenment.
Culture, Economy, Poetry, ReligionIt was reported that the companies
that built, then ruined, GoogleMaps and made
iTunes a hash and ruined blogs have stayed
mostly white and mostly dude—but please
it’s not for lack of trying! What this shows
is that our self-styled meritocracies
are skeins of self-indulged affinities,
where merit is a mirror reflecting bros.
Last weekend on the Carolina shore
we swam in the ocean; one of us worried about
spiders (spiders?); what I didn’t say
was the pale crabs we watched darting out
along the water line were also spiders
in a way; we are all judged, at the end of the day
by distant gods to whom we’re all outsiders.
The Crimean Snore
Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, The Life of the Mind, War and Politics“I’m not sure how many schools prepare students for this kind of love.”
Again this morning news out of Ukraine,
revanchist Russia shoots down helicopters
and NATO loads its fearsome teleprompters
—we’ve been here before—we’ll be here again.
The world is fucked, but in its rubble and pain
ordinary people find the time
for family, sex and music, petty crime
—for love and death and staying entertained.
There are great loves, and there are great books;
let’s not deny the world its poetry,
but let’s not pretend the world is aging past
some youth—passion moderated, looks
declining, romance gone, because some twee
old journalist got his divorce at last.
Mundus et Infans
Economy, Poetry, Uncategorized“They were there for a discreet, invitation-only summit hosted by the Obama administration to find common ground between the public sector and the so-called next-generation philanthropists, many of whom stand to inherit billions in private wealth.”
If Piketty is to be believed
the rate of wealth accumulation, labeled
r, will in fact inevitably exceed
the rate of growth; thus are the rich enabled
to pass their filthy riches on to their
unencumbered offspring, whose vocation
is to be an unearned billionaire,
buying and spending unearned veneration.
Charity is fine. Philanthropy
is surplus value’s subtle marketing,
minor heat loss in the form of piety.
Yo, muse; shit’s fucked and bullshit; this I sing:
what is the point of having an election
when The New York Times has got a Styles section?
The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit
Art, Culture, PoetryTheir peripatetic parents probably
assumed it was an ordinary life:
charming girlhood, and then someone’s wife,
pinafores for evening gowns, lives free
of want, although not literally free;
husbands living on the interest of
what their own fathers socked away, and love
a sickly symptom of maturity.
Adults, poor things, rarely can admit
even to themselves how clearly they remember
that kids don’t learn from parents; children carry
a whole soul as a completed secret,
its wholeness brief as daylight in November.
The daughters in the portrait do not marry.
Jacob Bacharach 