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.

Newton’s Worst Law

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

The gun, which had a flashlight on it, fired.
The verb to participle’s past aspired.
The bullet’s now quiescent path required
a wood-framed wall within which it retired
on its own, sui generis, self-sired.
A reporter took a note, rushed home, and wired
copy to his editor then fell, dog-tired
into a dream in which actions attired
themselves with actors: a stone, a plop;
a batty president, a malaprop;
a bunch of bratty kids who want to stop
a brutal war abroad, but mom and pop—
at home, attuned to cable agitprop—
wring hands and choose the unenacting cop.

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.

Or, the Wail

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

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.

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.

d/dx(Q)

Books and Literature, Economy, Education, Media, Poetry, Science, The Life of the Mind

I’ve told this story before, but in 2008
I applied to be a scooper at an ice cream stand
with a BA from a top-25 school in hand,
a CV on paper of excellent gloss and weight,
a skill for conflating absolute change and rate
that the shift manager did not seem to understand—
his media diet and his clearly poor command
of slope curve derivations. . .—well, as fate
would have it I was one of maybe 50
applicants, sweating from the coolers’ hot
exhaust: a normal joe, a working slob,
although I wore a tie, unlike these shifty
untucked teens—it was an interview, not
some joke, my god. I didn’t get the job.

Beauty School Cop-Out

Conspiracy and the Occult, Culture, Education, Media, Poetry, Science, The Life of the Mind

Young men today feel they must be six
feet tall, make six figures and have six inches
downstairs to get with any basic binches
whose blonde ambitions won’t put up with dicks
or dudes too small and weak to make the Knicks:
picky as cats and flighty as flocks of finches,
they will eschew the sexual-nuptial cinches
of poor short men with decent politics,
a loving nature, kindness, murderous rage
that they were once passed over for the prom,
a perfectly normal love of firearms,
a set of calipers with which to gauge
which race should rule the rest, a wonderful mom
who’s reassured it’s no call for alarm.

Platyrhynchus

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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.

Wise Men

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

In some sense, both sides are right, both sides are wrong,
and, in the bifurcated politics
of urban genderqueers and rural hicks,
of fetal stem cell bans and legal bongs,
of floury tiktok wives and boys in thongs,
in this American moment: nothing sticks;
the self-destruct device’s timer ticks
toward zero hour, and the nearing thundering song
of risen oceans lapping Appalachian
foothills murmur in our dreams, and wake, and speak:
human failing or God’s grim judgment day?
Reason, duty, kindness? Fickle fashion.
Fairness compels: in equal measure seek
to talk too much with nothing at all to say.

Bitter Angels

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“Rationality is uncool,”
he laments; “it isn’t seen as dope, phat, chill,
sick or da bomb”; no attribute of will
is more unlikely to be deemed “to rule”;
it’s like an outcast in some middle school.
You cannot even argue that you cannot kill
in pure percentage terms sufficient mill-
ions of men to match the Earth’s once miniscule
murder rate; Cain’s Abel was one full quarter
of the world, for instance; wouldn’t you rather take
the odds in Auschwitz with those awful chances?
It’s fall. Across each campus days grow shorter;
undergrads still kiss and fuck and fake
enthusiasm for science’s romances.