We’ve got to get checks of fourteen hundred bucks
on top of the six hundred that we’ve already sent;
thirty times twenty that the proles have already spent;
seventy Jacksons for all the lazy fucks.
Sure we said two grand. [Rolls eyes, and ducks.]
Savvy citizens knew what it meant:
one down payment and then one month of rent.
Have we mentioned how much the Republican Party sucks?
Even your saintly Sanders now agrees,
and would you gainsay your wintry mittened-man
by means-testing current truths against the past
positions changed for new realities
gestated in your short attention span?
Enjoy the money. It will be your last.
War and Politics
The Worst Amendment
Books and Literature, Culture, Economy, Poetry, The Life of the Mind, War and PoliticsThis could not be more Orwellian.
Simon & Schuster is cancelling my book.
Where a business-flyer otherwise would look
for such civics, now shelves the Machiavellian
secrets of the boardroom, or Hudson’s selling him
mere Mentos. The woke mob won’t brook
my bold dissent. Why? Because I took
my voters’ insurrectionary whim
seriously? My job is to ventriloquize
exactly what the lumpen want to hear,
smuggling their sordid gripes into the fort-
ress of power with my Yale mouth and dead eyes,
alchemizing gripes into career.
This aggression will not stand. See you in court.
22 Schnooks
Art, Books and Literature, Education, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, The Life of the Mind, War and PoliticsWhat books should Biden read? We went and asked
some of our best of midlist middlebrow
semi-celebs, and some replied. But how
can one find time to read when one is tasked
with convincing a doomer culture to put on masks,
building past glory back, and better, now,
projecting the saintly calm of a teenage cow.
It’s enough to make one wish for a starving asp
to clasp against one’s own bared breast,
the servants, in their startled Greek, aghast,
while at the harbor, underpaid stevedores
who don’t know Ptolemy from Rameses
are loading wheat as they’ve done for the last
two thousand years; a bored scribe snores;
a librarian pilfers some scrolls and coins and flees.
Chary Tree
Books and Literature, Culture, Education, Justice, Media, Poetry, The Life of the Mind, War and Politics
I declare and verify under plenty
of perjury: I cannot tell one lie;
they must be numbered as stars in the southern sky;
gorgeous as guys on Grindr claiming they’re twenty-
something long into their salted, empty
middle thirties; arthritic, old, and spry;
a shout as loud as a lover’s sleeping sigh.
Bullshit for the art of lying’s cognoscenti:
the facts contained in the foregoing complaint
are each correct and true, except when not;
valid to a point, believable when viewed
at the proper angle, under properly faint
and fading light: how Faust’s blood bought
not youth, not beauty, but the right to not be sued.
The Dude A-Biden
Art, Books and Literature, Culture, Economy, Poetry, The Life of the Mind, Uncategorized, War and Politics
In the battle for the soul of America, democracy
prevailed. It hauled its agèd ass across the line
winking and grinning the entire goddamn time
like a dying parent, who, despite your plea,
has spent his retirement on the lottery,
commemorative coins, fake vintage wine;
still mean as hell and obsessed with rising crime;
mad at taxes he doesn’t pay and free
goodies he thinks that someone else has got;
terrified of change and terrified
that nothing’s gonna change except for worse:
here’s what his democratic soul is not:
in love, nor young at heart, nor quite alive.
Each waning angry moment is a curse.
Memento Satori
Conspiracy and the Occult, Culture, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind, Uncategorized, War and Politics“Donald Trump is alive and well,” I tweet:
his consciousness ensouled, his self intact;
his electric embodied being able to act
through his body’s marvelous machine: to eat,
to see, to breath, to speak. His heart? To beat.
His appetites are those a dead man lacks:
McDonald’s lunch, a lower income tax:
Hereby commend to you, O Lord, through the fleet
swing of the autumn sun across the sky,
quadrennial November’s bare-branched swoon,
this declaration: we have claimed a state
of still existing, having not had to die,
nor disappear, nor leave, nor settle soon
for this early ending coming yet too late.
Exiled Thucydides
Art, Books and Literature, Culture, Education, Media, Poetry, The Life of the Mind, Uncategorized, War and Politics
As an empirical matter, democracy,
hallowed by usage and consecrated by time,
has never turned up, hastily dusted with lime
in a hole, shot in the back as it tried to flee
its own cackling imago, autocracy:
yes, some serene republics have declined,
but there their franchise was mere pantomime;
no well-begged question but can burst to be
its own best answer; the universe ordains
that if a country goes to shit, it must
be bad, its laws a sham, its votes a lie,
enraptured by its petty Charlemagnes,
pre-captured by its lack of civic trust:
it doesn’t happen; thus in this essay, I
Chasing the Clouds Away
Books and Literature, Culture, Education, Media, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind, War and Politics
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.
Cognitively There
Culture, Justice, Media, Poetry, The Life of the Mind, Uncategorized, War and PoliticsLike, you’ll go: “Person, woman, man
camera, TV.” So they say,
“Could you repeat that?” Someday
the words won’t come; your lips will fan
the toaster-oven air; you’ll say, “Woman?
TV? Radio? Opera? Fannie Mae?
Elephant? Alligator? Matinee?
Mother? Birthday boy? Afghanistan?”
If you get it in order you get extra points,
although they say no one gets it in order, but for me
it’s easy. Nevertheless I sometimes fear
that each word unremembered thus unjoints
its ordered re-remembering. Words flee
the fit mind. The mouth speaks. I’m here.
An Open Letter
Culture, Education, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Religion, Science, The Life of the Mind, War and PoliticsOur 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?
Jacob Bacharach 