My friends won’t take the subway, and the strong,
young maintenance man in my building finds
himself among those whom the law, well, it binds
but does not protect—he wakes and worries on the wrong
side of the wall the watchman waits upon,
eyeing the watcher through the parted blinds,
imagining richer men and greater minds
are planning more than this panopticon,
its tower crumbling as the land subsides
into the empty aquifers that cooled
the language engines that concatenated
dull prose that duller dimwits used as guides
out of perplexity, and bought and ruled
a country full of people that they hated.

The only people who think I’m “contrarian”
are leftists on Twitter. Everyone else agrees
with me. The holidays from which my family flees
the festive table; not my fault; the Aryan
opinions of my new authoritarian
friends are normal. I am normal. Please
clap. Or don’t. On you. I am at ease
with me as my insistent lapidarian-
lite inscriptions on these lintels of
our online times attest. I’m ordinary.
Many people like me. It is only
Marxists who suggest I cannot love,
myself and that I am a cautionary
tale. I’m fine. I’m fun. I am not lonely.

Luigi Mangione, Sam Bankman-Fried and Diddy
are all in the same Brooklyn jail, per People
Magazine. The glitzed, obsessed, and giddy
press all kneel like pilgrims at the whitewashed steeple
of a new New England church, greatly awakened
to new wondrous sins with which they’ve not
self-sinned before, cold gruel now epic-baconed
to Inferno: pedophile, thief, and THOT.
What angry God had hands enough to sow
such seeds into this dark-soiled furrow?
What mind-surpassing mind could see and know
the crop he’d bear into the singular borough
within whose barb-wired bosom they would come
on the dumbest day, until the following one?

…in the fractious area still call the lake
by different names, neither of which is Trump;
dead Tito’s dream that the mad remaining rump
statelets will reconcile will not take—
utopian dreams are those from which we wake
fastest; Marine One’s dull whump-whump
sounds on the South Lawn; some other schlump
waves once and flies away; the news was fake
but we, like Stendhal stepping out in Florence
stared every day in awe, and felt our hearts
exceed themselves; we sweated bullets and
felt faint, mistook enrapture for abhorrence
and vice versa; and woke to grasp in fits and starts
that every empire is an ampersand.

bonds backed by revenues from chicken wings,
music catalogues and oil wells,
barometric changes and unusual smells,
shriven souls, earthworms and cello strings,
the beers that daddy drinks, the songs mom sings,
unpeopled forest where no woodman fells
a single tree, but one tree, falling, sells
its unheard sound in sections and at auction brings
a pretty penny—the word for world is bourse
and we are made of trading in it, an
exchange of figures representing cash
the way that glue is representing horse;
Hegel said it: in all affairs of man:
first time as farce and second time as crash.

The nature of the vehicle was a Cybertruck
and the heat was just too intense. It burned
as if the sun itself fell down and turned
from star to car, a local god who struck
down and cursed the prayerless: bad luck
and broiling—what they briefly bought, they earned;
what they only thought they knew, they learned
right quick. Each IQ dandy is a schmuck
parading in his fancy test until
his full self-driving jumps a curb and makes
a pyre that’s a punchline; then a cop
watches helpless as a cat on a windowsill
while a little bird alights outside and takes
a gritty bath, sings, sings, and will not stop.

Can Wall Street billionaires deliver on
Trump’s blue-collar promise? Can Kublai Kahn
wear blue jeans? Can peasants dine on ortolan?
Can you fucking kids get off my lawn?
Are those your rosy fingers, or is dawn
lifting my skirt? What new phenomenon
will psalm itself a novel antiphon
where freedom follows from panopticon
and the princess, plucked and cooked, remains a swan?
When Alexander died in Babylon
Companions wept but swiftly set upon
each other, encircling sea to Parthenon
they rent an empire from its noumenon.
Can the wolf befriend a just-foaled fawn?

Can Democrats win back podcasting? We asked
6 popular show hosts to weigh in.
How would this cultural revolution begin?
Which former-going first would leap to last,
which last to first on iTunes? Which working-classed
once-college boy unbales the straw to spin
to gold? Will modern drivetime’s saccharine
sort sound a little less symposiast,
a little more willing to muse upon the kind
of animating questions that the top
ranks of the medium obsess about:
Do rhino ginseng pills unlock the mind?
Are owls real? If not, a deep-state op?
Macaw v. Man? Who’d win it in a rout?

Nothing is real until Trump announces it.
The sky is not the blue you think you see.
The autumn wind? The frost? The barren tree
rattling against the eaves? You must admit
they are not there; their being’s counterfeit,
formless as the void before reality
breasted the darkness with one Let-There-Be.
Well, LMFAO. It don’t mean shit.
Who, if I cried out, would hear me now
among the anonymous orders of his court
already telling tales and casting blame,
each self-serving Morningstar-to-middlebrow
media interlocutor: in short:
nothing changes; everything’s the same.

Will there be a needle? A quick thread.
Every angel asked; here’s what I said:
Though multitudes may dance upon its head
tech colleagues are on strike, as you have read:
the needle’s left as liminal: not dead
but not alive; dry creekbed into watershed;
outcomes stood predictions in their stately stead;
from clay the dying gods with breath have bred
new beings—angel-formed but monkey-brained,
uneasily ruled but easily entertained,
fired-up, although those gods had chained
their firebringer—from that bloodstained
liver-leaking rock the needle rose and trained
its trembling tip: foresaw, descried, ordained.