Chasing the Clouds Away

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

Shapiro

Are the muppets biased to the left? Of course. That was
the point of Sesame Street, as I discuss:
provocateurs like Snuffleupagus
preach Maoist leveling while Ernie does
his LGBTQI-best to shove
both his and dear Bert’s sinful “love is love”
anti-Judeo-Christian cant at us,
telling mere children, “Mom and Dad are sus.”
Hashem forfend! Miss Piggy may be trans,
sharing Kermit’s bathroom and his bed;
Statler and Waldorf swooned for Hamilton;
Big Bird’s Khmer cabal now favors bans
on “racist” speech; The Count is dead
by firing squad for saying one is one.

An Open Letter

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

Our cultural institutions now must face
a trial unlike any faced before:
@litboner69 called me a bore;
a sophomore undergrad said that my race
informed my sense of self, and worth, and place;
they didn’t put my book in the front of the store;
they added diaspora studies to the core
curriculum; now my promotion case
is held up with the provost just because
I hold a few unorthodox views:
that Blacks are more athletic by design;
true women lack men’s moral flaws;
Arabs just aren’t quite as smart as Jews.
For this you’re telling me I should resign?

Psalm 122

Poetry, Religion, Things that Actually Happen, Uncategorized

on celebrating Passover via videoconference

The Midrash tells us there are two Jeru-
salems, but there are three: one unequal
city still on earth, and then a sequel
made of our mitzvot, beyond the domed blue
tent of heaven; the third has very few
of the tangled modern, ancient, and medieval
attributes of either; it’s only people
separated not by choice, but by a new
sickness—each trying from the dining room
or fire escape, the garden or the narrow bed,
to make the seder with their telephonic friends;
while outside the pear trees bloom
and bless even the dying, and even the dead,
and the hearts God breaks, and breaks, and mends.

Girl, I Want Your Body

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

We’ll call this the room of love. In this room,
you get to know someone and a spark is struck,
e.g., your research assistant’s down to fuck,
and your marriage, each bitter workday’s-end exhumed
for dinner’s silent paces, then re-entombed,
is done—you haven’t told your wife, but luck
may intervene; she’ll find some other schmuck
to love, right? Sex is the bud that blooms
through every season that does not accrue
to years as age; sex is an intimation
of immortality, for him at least;
why harass when you can simply do
a book together? It stinks of limitation,
a rough but two-backed slouching beast.

A Few Colossi

Art, Culture, Education, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind, Things that Actually Happen, Uncategorized, War and Politics

We must never, ever take anything down.
Build on top of the built world, accrete
and do not pare; fill every ordered town
with statues of its residents, and choke the streets
with statues of the statues of the statues till they drown
all empty space beneath a solid sheet
of human matter; burst the borders; frown
at the vast wilderness, incomplete
without commemorating plaques
and towers named after long-dead architects
and roads to nowhere and great retaining walls
retaining other walls; let Atlas’ back
break; he can no longer shrug, his neck
has also snapped. We’ll build a statue to his fall.

The Choad to Damascus

Culture, Media, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind, Uncategorized, War and Politics

What is a binch? What is it to be
corncobbed? Where is the civil past, when men
in ill-fitting 1960s suits could spend
an hour with Cavett arguing if pee
was stored in the balls? Where is the racist glee
of Midge and Norman? Peace with honor’s end?
What will we do with no norms to defend?
(Can you believe this site is really free?)
The road to Damascus has been wiped away
by a war I hate and desperately support;
every side of everything is wrong
but my own belief beggaring my chance to pray
to the hash-tag idol-god who drinks and snorts
Adderall, rants a Solomonic song.

At the Mountains of Badness

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

This space has been traversed for nearly four months by Jared Kushner, whom I first met about 18 months ago, when he introduced himself after a foreign policy lecture I had given.

-Henry Kissinger

About suffering they were never right,
The Old Ones: how little they understood of fear,
An old man at the mountain when a god draws near
Still mostly pines for a restaurant that’s bright
Enough to read the menu, still delights
That the soup is hot, the winter roads kept clear.
Worshipful terror is for the young, the shear
Effort overwhelms. There was one night
Quite recently when I, arising from
My sleeping soil, called the car and went
To a cocktail party where I met the son-in-law
Of our most recent deity; he seemed
All right. I did not find it evident
That he was yet prepared for Saturn’s maw.
He smiled pleasantly and blankly beamed.

Dying in Moab

Culture, Media, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind, Uncategorized, War and Politics

Aujourd’hui, the mother of all bombs is dead.
Or was it yesterday? I can’t recall.
The world was bombless once. She spawned them all.
Her ravening brood ate her, starting with her head,
and then, silk-borne on a breeze, her babies fled
into the vast sky above the wrinkled sprawl
of the Hindu Kush, on which they fell, and fall
still: indiscriminate, a wed-
ding or a funeral, a village or
a narrow road. Her million children live
but once and very briefly; none will ever
bear their own next generation; war
can only eat; it cannot love, nor give
itself any meaning whatsoever.

/pol/ite society

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

This is the future that liberals want: a cool
return to norms after the tan excrescence
is excised. Peace? Well, purity of essence.
Articulate. Harvard Law or a comparable school.
Personally dedicated to the rule
of law. A paragon. A recrudescence
in an empire seemingly sunk in convalescence.
Judicious. Stylish. Not a raving fool.
Across an ocean in a dusty town a boy
who’s barely past a cracking voice is set
to marry a girl he’s only recently met.
He vacillates from morbid fear to joy.
He’s droned and bleeds to death at evening prayer.
The liberal president pretends to care.

The True Fairy

Art, Culture, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Religion, Science, The Life of the Mind, Uncategorized, War and Politics

My means for critical evaluation
all center on the fable of a little wooden toy
whose earnest desire to become an actual boy
mimics my own self-serious adulation
for a truth as narrow as a lawyer’s accusation,
all causes shorn of context, which I then deploy
to accuse Achilles without Helen of Troy,
Ulysses’s fandi fictor reputation
divorced from his desire for his wife.
Truth is never beautiful; it lies
on a vast ocean like a raft of floating turds,
a shifting host for dull, bacterial life,
an effluence of human compromise:
the foul excreta of silly nerds.