Being? There, there

Culture, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind, Things that Actually Happen, War and Politics

Trump is experiencing anxiety.
Lake Worth Lagoon to wine-dark heaving sea.
Two deaths escaped, and thus fearful of three
or four or ten. This violent century
flailed fast into absurdity:
gun-barrel glints behind each bush and tree—
yet their large target? Fate’s full escapee.
The grave? Evaded. Crimes? Committed. Free.
God grants good luck to those least sure to be
deserving, and laughs above alone, and we
flit quick as seasons to the elderly,
are born, live, love, vote, flee
beyond life’s being-boundary.
Unless if cursed to immortality.

TINA

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Effective Altruism is flawed, but what’s
the alternative? Think of a trillion lives
unborn, moon-dwelling boys and AI wives
alike snuffed out because you’d rather futz
with annual gifts, remainder unitrusts,
bequests in probate—ifs and ands and buts
of FASB recognition rules. What drives
man past extinction unless nerdkind strives
to stack its bills and bust its nerdy nuts
early and often; grow rich and populate
the stars and worlds and iron asteroid belts
lest we die out: our species’ prophylaxis
contra death itself; there’s no debate:
for now, the world can burn, a pole can melt;
we do not want to pay our share of taxes.

Terrible as an Army with Banners

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

My wife is fond of flying flags. I
am not. Ani l’dodi v’dodi li,
except insofar as it’s implicated me
in her shit. Interlocutors will cry
foul, but Justice—I am one—won’t shy
from fighting’s fighting words: Yes, dear; I see.
It’s as the saying goes, that women be
inverting flags; Senators, please try
to grasp that staying married’s long required
through long gray years to learn just how and when
to pay the bill and wait out in the car
while the missus tries to get the waiter fired—
we rib-robbed Adams, what are we, but men?—
admitted to, and drinking at, the bar.

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.

Hilarious and Philarion

Art, Books and Literature, Conspiracy and the Occult, Education, Media, Poetry, Religion, Science, The Life of the Mind

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.

Mother, mayday

Culture, Education, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind

All this brings us back to Sydney Sweeney’s
boobs: her honkers, mommy milkers, grands tétons—
our remaindered reputations avalanched upon:
castrating coup de foudre: we’re all weenies,
heart-battered, wracked by liberal meanies
whose elitophile noctes and successful spawn
out-Freud, out-Jung us, even out-Lacan
the shrinks who told our moms, Your Mussolini-
manqué sons have but two paths in life:
in one they kill a schoolyard full of kids;
the other?—disappointed crypto-Waugh;
in either case, they never get a wife;
they’ll masturbate to low-res Twitter vids;
weird hairline, creepy eyes, a Habsburg jaw.

Rectified and Readymade

Art, Books and Literature, Culture, Education, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind

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.

Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus

Conspiracy and the Occult, Culture, Education, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind, Things that Actually Happen, War and Politics

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

Conspiracy and the Occult, Culture, Education, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Religion, Sports, The Life of the Mind, War and Politics

“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.