Key? Mo’ Therapy.

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

We have to deal with the cancer that is mental
health. Good thoughts are gumming up the works,
and happiness immiserates both saints and jerks
who each require more than incidental
misery: a boo-boo healed, a gentle
word from mother, love, a job with perks—
they rob from noble nature; they’re the Turks
at our Vienna: foreign, oriental,
bearing a better-ordered civilization
with running water, daily baths, and prayer
and poetry: what worth are we if all
that we expect from life in this great nation
is to be clothed and fed without a fair
good chance of dying in a shooting in a mall?

Meine kleine Kampfmusik

Culture, Economy, Education, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Religion, Science, The Life of the Mind

“I would love to see, you know, a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins…Our solar system would be full of life and intelligence and energy.“
–Jeff Bezos

If we had a trillion humans, we would have
at any given time a thousand Mozarts
and a thousand Einsteins—but a thousand Hitlers too:
from each ocean-edging glacier calves
ship-sinking icebergs; mankind is crime and art,
both Model T and Ford who hates the Jew;
our solar system would be full of life,
Europa choked with algae; Mars on fire
like Pittsburgh riverfronts in ’53;
a zillion virgins for each fed-up AI wife
whose godlike energy demands require
the output of the sun itself, and we
last earth-born, dying-earthbound humans forced
to this end by rich men’s pattern baldness, and divorce.

Kind of Blew

Books and Literature, Culture, Education, Media, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind, War and Politics

How sad that perceptions so quickly tri-
umph over truth in our decadent culture. This
most woeful outcome breeds small minds that miss
the hives’ swarmed thought for each buzzed bee, the fly
for the ointment: asks not cui bono, only why?—
but it was good for me, side eye, chef’s kiss,
a modern man’s best bet at benefice,
small favor from great fortunes’ wont to buy
their best bets before the betting line
is set—and then, mere parlay, placed across
polls’ standard deviations, law’s whereas
and wherefores, interest rates, and chance, divine
disfavor, foreign intervention, Jews, Hamas,
life’s rhythms, Adolph’s watercolors, jazz.

Angelus Not Us

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

The blast killing hundreds at a hospital
in Gaza is deeply wrong. I grieve for each
non-actor whose non-action I impeach;
blown up and blasted down, a miracle
of sorts, that it’s occurred without a little
human help at all—no thought nor speech
preceded it; mere happenstance in breach
of all intent or cause: what noncommittal
form of fraught effect could bring into
this universe of action something no
human being has witnessed yet: kaboom!
without a bomb preceding it, and blew
that backwards angel outta here, although
an aide could swear it cried: “Please, read the room!”

Unetanah Tokef

Books and Literature, Culture, Economy, Education, Justice, Media, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind

I screwed up. I should not have written
that tweet. I probably should not write
any tweets, but I was soused and smitten

with a half-formed joke: the awkward mitten
of a child-drawn hand; the wan fluorescent light
flattered it, but I should not have written,

although the word’s the sea, and I its Britain
borne imperially sunward, brave and bright
and soused on gin, humble, never self-smitten,

self-ruled and able to admit hard-bitten
lessons such as: if you think you might
tweet aforeflight, you should not have written,

for you’ll land, and scroll, and, panic-stricken,
walk it back, unmarry it, make light:
guys, dear readers, I was drunk and smitten

with one bon mot that hung there like the kitten
in the poster: Oh Lord! I pray to make it right:
the book of life is not yet sealed, though written:
number me among the living, not the smitten.

Bore, The Whale

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

This meal just cost me $78 at
the Newark Airport. This is why Amer-
icans think the damn economy is terr-
ible: drowned in unused miles, getting fat
on beers and queers and Russian Kompromat—
what wonder that a simple working square
who wants—what?—wife and simple fare:
PB&J, not “beurre jambon,” and that
is why, from hell’s heart and the Centurion Lounge,
I stab; this almost-erev Yom Kippur I break
my social-media fast, forlornly make
the plea: even in New Jersey, one must scrounge
and scrape a scotch while waiting for a status bump
to first-select. This is what got us Trump.

Hella Roma

Art, Books and Literature, Culture, Education, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind

A new social media trend where women ask
their men how often they think of ancient Rome,
its aqueducts and baths and concrete domes,
its wars and slaves and plays and funeral masks,
amphorae and Mary the Jewess’ flasks,
hillside temples and haunted catacombs,
naval battles and horsey hippodromes,
reveals a gender shocked by simple facts:
their mundane husbands rarely dream of sex;
they contemplate instead cement and lye,
the Tarquins, Carthage, Nero, Christ’s own rood,
Lucretia’s rape to Peter’s pontifex,
triremes, floating bridges, Caesar’s die—
in short, dominae meae, they are dudes.

Platyrhynchus

Culture, Education, Poetry, Religion, Science, The Life of the Mind, War and Politics

Congress must join the AI revolution,
feed every thought it has into a box
that talks the way a congresscreature talks:
mirabile binomial distribution,
concatenating prior elocution:
a talking ducklike ape of real ducks’ walks
that you, recumbent turtles, see as flocks
of fowl in flight instead of consecution.
The ducks themselves are flying overhead.
Their unsemantic calls inure to no
rack of sweating servers; parliaments
of mallards lived, flew, swam, and bred
themselves anew—no need to beg and grow
backwards out of dire senescence.

Fishers of Men

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

As for the flight, Mr. Singer and others had already made arrangements to fly to Alaska when I was invited shortly before the event, and I was asked whether I would like to fly there in a seat that, as far as I am aware, would have otherwise been vacant.
–Justice Samuel Alito

And I was asked whether I would like to fly
there in a seat that, as far as I
am aware, would have otherwise been vacant.
O! Pale Alaskan sky! O! noctivagant
permafrosted critics of the fourth estate
who would tear down the stars to punish great,
deserving men: dear honest, worthy friend
I barely know—Temerity! to send
to me, mere umpire, damned and stinking sulphurous
lists of did I this? or did I that?—
What man, born under Christ’s blood-borne domain,
his rod in hand, a Peter, under fulgurous
flashing sky, would let some man-shaped rat
inquire about pecuniary gain?

for us at every moment in time & certainly this one

Books and Literature, Culture, Education, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind, War and Politics

to see the moment in time in which we exist
and are present and to be able to context-
ualize it: the river now becomes the next
river by flow alone; a moment missed
recurs as déjà vu : the lips you’ve kissed,
a child’s first word, some fumbling first-time sex—
the lighthoused shoals we’ve shored against the wrecks
of time’s tumults and tides; the curses hissed
at all our disappointments; the absent gods
and flocking angels; the death, the flesh, the blood
baked in the boot-stomped sand—O Lord!
that formed the hand that held the dowsing rod
and made the time-perceiving mind of mud,
give me thus your cause, and gift: the word.

for Vice President Kamala Harris