Being? There, there

Culture, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind, Things that Actually Happen, War and Politics

Trump is experiencing anxiety.
Lake Worth Lagoon to wine-dark heaving sea.
Two deaths escaped, and thus fearful of three
or four or ten. This violent century
flailed fast into absurdity:
gun-barrel glints behind each bush and tree—
yet their large target? Fate’s full escapee.
The grave? Evaded. Crimes? Committed. Free.
God grants good luck to those least sure to be
deserving, and laughs above alone, and we
flit quick as seasons to the elderly,
are born, live, love, vote, flee
beyond life’s being-boundary.
Unless if cursed to immortality.

TINA

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Effective Altruism is flawed, but what’s
the alternative? Think of a trillion lives
unborn, moon-dwelling boys and AI wives
alike snuffed out because you’d rather futz
with annual gifts, remainder unitrusts,
bequests in probate—ifs and ands and buts
of FASB recognition rules. What drives
man past extinction unless nerdkind strives
to stack its bills and bust its nerdy nuts
early and often; grow rich and populate
the stars and worlds and iron asteroid belts
lest we die out: our species’ prophylaxis
contra death itself; there’s no debate:
for now, the world can burn, a pole can melt;
we do not want to pay our share of taxes.

Terrible as an Army with Banners

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My wife is fond of flying flags. I
am not. Ani l’dodi v’dodi li,
except insofar as it’s implicated me
in her shit. Interlocutors will cry
foul, but Justice—I am one—won’t shy
from fighting’s fighting words: Yes, dear; I see.
It’s as the saying goes, that women be
inverting flags; Senators, please try
to grasp that staying married’s long required
through long gray years to learn just how and when
to pay the bill and wait out in the car
while the missus tries to get the waiter fired—
we rib-robbed Adams, what are we, but men?—
admitted to, and drinking at, the bar.

Newton’s Worst Law

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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.

Literalism Against Itself

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Okay, maybe there is U.S. fascism.
It’s now affected me, therefore it is.
A parlor-game’s gray host transforms when his
parlor is the pitch, and many a church-door schism
turns out to be mere book-to-sell tourism
when cops turn up and—holy shit!—mean bus-
iness! Doktorprofessor’s Niemöllerian quiz
sucks snake tail—O, Ouroboran tropism
of contrarian come-down, what hast thou wrought, O Lord,
cracked skulls foundation babel’s ivory height—
the tower sways; the scales of judgment creak;
he didn’t really care, he was just bored,
better by far to be bruited than right,
until the boxcars open, and you freak.

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.

Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus

Conspiracy and the Occult, Culture, Education, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind, Things that Actually Happen, War and Politics

US names campaign to target Houthis
in Yemen “Operation Poseidon Archer”—
failed opening-weekend Aquaman mise
en abyme—abyssal god’s too-late departure
from depth and form to dumbass Artemis
who hurls more heedless missiles, baking sand
to glass for a domestic audience
that can’t tell Bab al-Mandab from dry land.
They asked: tell Philly Ahab, cut it out;
stop bombing hospitals, and we’ll permit
your ships to pass; in Florida, a gout-
y two-star reads the note and files it
do not reply, and cracks a beer, desires
good consulting gigs when he retires.

Endymion

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“DeSantis drops out of Presidential race
and endorses Trump.” No less surprise has ever
flowed from failed ambition; it was never
gonna happen, yet God’s good grace
brought us, witnesses, to this time and place
to see this runted, rutting, not-so-clever
Archimedes: world to move, no lever
though—and spot to stand? Yes: third place.
A scorned son will make an idol of the dad
who lured him to the sport he couldn’t play
and coached the team to make him ride the pine:
loving to hate himself and going mad
to please the man who calls him short, and gay,
and weak: loss is a howl, but defeat? A whine.

Key? Mo’ Therapy.

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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?

Kind of Blew

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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.