There is. Sperm suppressant in processed baked
goods including pizzas and calzones
served in middle schools. Unhealthy bones
have turned us into one enormous faked
orgasm—even our ephebes slowed and slaked
their heightened hormones elsewhere, pheromones
are falling, vaccines turn little girls to crones
too quick: limber to sleep; at dawn, she ached
as if arthritic—every 5G tower,
every pill, each shot, your microwave,
will shrink your balls and tits; we once rewarded
teendom with deflowering in a brookside bower,
arcadian, grass-stained; now? we give the grave
to childhood’s future children. Death recorded.

Tucker Carlson has gone public with the news
that he was physically attacked by a demon. This
is true. It burned like fire and smelled like piss.
It scared the kids and ate the cockapoos.
Seduced my wife to sin and drank the booze.
Singed Satan’s sign and sealed it with a kiss
upon my blackened brow, and from the abyss
I heard that fallen angel laugh, “You’ll lose
your show, your job, and you’ll end up on X,
the everything app, where you will spend your days
aggrieving to a parlor of sex-bot AI,
unjoyed with life, uninterested in sex,
stuck sucking oysters on Parisian quays
with your last believer, this weird Dreher guy.

Dad is pissed, and when dad gets home, you know
what he says? “You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been
a bad little girl.” She says, “Dad, I’m fin-
domming a former Fox News host, so no,
I haven’t got the time right now to go
get stuck in the dryer.” Noah’s daughter-sin
beglooms the turbid dreams of certain men,
Freudful, untalked, uncured, and just as slow
as nightfall in the Arctic in July:
thawed, mosquitoed, muddy, half-divorced
and dreading the dream’s end: you bolt awake
and realize: I am just afraid to die.
Each Richard’s kingdom sinks and ends unhorsed
brittle-boned and burned as well-done steak.

Here’s what my gut says about the election.
But don’t trust anyone’s gut, even mine.
Here’s several predigested sibylline
pronouncements covering every projection,
possibility, cross section,
standard deviation, storyline:
broad as Russia, small as Liechtenstein,
unspoken but precise as stage direction,
accurate as a biathlon, and as weird
and cold—a shot could go wide right or left
or bullseye, backfire, blank or just misfire:
here’s every outcome, dreamed and volunteered,
woven into one fabric, warp and weft
crosshatching prophylaxis for a liar.

When he took showers with the other pros, they came
out of there, they said, “Oh my God,
that’s unbelievable.” Each lantern-jawed
scratch handicapper felt the fucking same:
a rod-spared child rod-spoiling for a game
and gamine tumble through the tiled defilade,
flesh, ceramic, spurting firing squad,
relief released and thus released from shame.
This guy, this guy, this is a guy that was
all man. This guy was strong. This guy was tough.
Half lemonade and half iced tea, he could
push even teetotal duffers to a buzz,
and each plaid-panted putterer to stuff
his irons in their covers, drive with wood.

I want you to picture this — Bernie Sanders
& Dick Cheney together holding a sign
that says brat fall. Lord God, your grand design
makes miracles, although, Boss, it meanders,
mudbound and slippery as a nest of salamanders,
dual-breathing mixture, son of Frankenstein:
stitch, meld, mold, combine and recombine—
proofed against presidents-past slanders
by September’s now-exhausted yard-sign green—
enfeebled avatars of two exhausted dreams
play on as their Titanic submarines,
the fogfall like a curtain: blackout, scene;
museums barred, all art replaced with memes,
and seafilled conchs now whisper yassing queens.

Coates is not a journalist so much
as a composer—one who uses words
the way birdsong is used by singing birds:
to thrill, trill, call, to warn, to touch
men’s rambling forest hearts, their souls as such—
he gathers grazing human flocks and herds
them—normies, magazine subscribers, nerds,
and independent voters. What a crutch,
to merely be persuasive, for to write
engagingly is just a shibboleth:
convincing those who don’t believe to think
anew is neither fair nor right; the white
blank page is not the place to argue death
and life. Just nod and know. Just nudge and wink.

In a photo with the wife and children of a longtime friend,
female-fringed and subdivisioned, familied
by borrowed brood and camera-conjured breed—
fall’s just arrived and hastens to its voted end:
the rains have come, the creeks have surged, the bend
in 40 out of Asheville, flood-freed,
washed away, a candidate teed
off somewhere in Eastern Florida; we’ll send
more soldiers to the Middle East and hope and pray
an aged incumbent won’t forget his teeth
or self—last night I read that just thirteen
percent of the oceans are wild yet; today
I woke in sweat; I’d dreamed I swam beneath
all light, blind and crushed and very clean.

The Jews should stand with Eric Adams. He’s
our inverse Niemöller: he does the taking
and says a fucking lot, each morning waking
beneath a sort of sword of Damocles
composed of assets for the swarming feds to seize,
textual evidence of his own making,
and barstool lies he’s spent his life mistaking
for his life: B’nai Yisrael should see in these
itself, once-bullied bullies coplike in the breach,
self-believed God-chosen singled out,
un-mitzvahing out of necessity—
our waiting haters set their eyes on speech
and free expression, rizz and online clout:
like freedom, we’re not guaranteed, nor free.

You know first stop is always Istanbul,
from Christ-converted Constatine unto
the tattered coat upon a stick and through
one New-York mayor’s fiscal opuscule—
Dardanelle-to-Hudson stepping stool
of first-class fares and frequent billets-doux,
Byzantium-on-Hundson revenue
for what?—some jerseys, some dull travel pool
of junkets? Once we laid awake and dreamed
of Hagia Sophia’s jeweled tiles, tinkling
fountains, palace eunuchs, fabulous
Eastern riches, pashahs, oh, it seemed
unearthly, magic—hadn’t the slightest inkling
it could become so grotty, dull, and sus.