chomsky in chains

Hitting the Hegel on the Nagel

2012-01-08T21:19:00.002-05:00

I vaguely recall reading somewhere in Hegel "There is no freedom from law, only freedom through law."

I can't find any sources for this, but it sounds very Hegeley. (I know Hegelian would be more orthodox, but I'm aiming for a little more intimacy.)

An interesting sentiment whatever the origin.

Rhyme as Metaphor

2011-12-25T07:28:00.001-05:00

Galton marks.
Print dust.
Chalk dust of 10 million algebra classes.
White cliffs of Dover.
The late cretaceous.
Crispy critters.
Critical theory.
Critical mass.
Mass defect.
Lie detector.
She was watching the detectives.
All along the watchtower.
Jimi Dylan.
Dill pickles.
Don Rickles.
Hammers and Sickles.
Armand Hammer.
I’d rather be a hammer than a nail.
Anvil breaking a hammer.
Her water broke.
Broker than the 10 commandments.
Stock broker.
Hammer lock.
Lock box.
Boxers of briefs?
Amicus brief.
Brevity is the soul of witlessness.
Witless protection program.
Protection racket.
Racketeering prosecution.
Elocution lessons.
Execution by electrocution.
The body electric.
Eclectic.
Elenctic.
Enclitic.
Analytic.
Anadiplosis.
Anna Karenina.
Caryatid.
Cary Nation.
Cary Buck.
Buck v. Bell.
The Bell Curve.
“You can ring my bell.”
The chimes of freedom flashin’.
Flash mob.
Flash in the pan.
Pangloss.
Glossal stop.
Full stop.
Fullback.
Full frontal.
Weather front.
Weather underground.
Worm food.
Crude oil.
Crudite.
Animal, vegetable, or mineral?
Twenty questions.
Questionable call.
Call of the wild.
Idlewild.
American Idlewild.
Ugly American Gladiator’s aviators.
Quadrumanous gladhanding Gladstone.
Casting the first hand that Rockefellers the cradle.
Diego Rivera hangin’ round Orson’s inkwell.
All’s well that ends wealthier than Orwellian.
There is no wealth but a life sentenced to death taxes to please love and be wise-ass.
Mandatory health insurance agent 007.
I double-owe my soul to the company’s double-blind double crossing double-indemnity enmity.
Now-and-thenmity
The committee to re-elect the president really creeps me out.
While my guitar gently weeps its willowy brook trout.
Moldy bathroom tile grout and shower-curtain grommet rust.
Chrono-synclastic trust-fundibulum.
Somnambulant funambulist’s ambulance’s mirrorshrift.
Queer theory getting queerer and queerer theory and practice on a blind date.
Date rape.
1492.
Scene of the crime.
The myth of fingerprints.
Galton marks.

An Uncountable Infinity of Orgasms

2011-12-12T09:30:00.003-05:00

My chapbook "An Uncountable Infinity of Orgasms" was published a few days ago by NightBallet press.

Many thanks for the diligent efforts of my publisher, Dianne Borsenik.

NightBallet is one of the few places you can get a copy, they are located here

Following post

2011-08-19T21:35:00.002-04:00

The following post is just a bunch of links to Google image pages for different kinds of flowers referenced in a poem by Philip Levine, "Keats in California". You might want to read this in one tab, and then go to the flower links in another.

Levine flowers

2011-08-19T21:15:00.002-04:00

Flowers
Wisteria, plum trees, almond blossoms, iris, rose, tulip, poppy hillside, lupine, gorse, wild mustard

Annual Vietnam

2011-08-05T08:24:00.001-04:00

At its peak it was an annual Vietnam in America: 50,000 dead. In a year.

And on an exponential growth curve. I think the hardest thing to recover now is that sense of the exponential growth. One had reason to be frightened over where this thing was heading.

There are people in their twenties now who have no idea.

And everyone who got it died, and died quickly, and nothing seemed to help. Nothing. There was one poison (and yes I'm talking about AIDs) AZT, that seemed to slow the descent ever so little, rather like holding an umbrella when you've fallen off a cliff. And that was it.

And then somewhere in the mid-90s, protease inhibitors came along. In a two year period, the number of deaths was cut in half. The epidemic ceased. The disease stopped being an instant death sentence.

This came about six months too late for Robert.

My partner's brother, the nearest person to me to ever have or die from the disease.

Two things seem worth holding onto at this remove: how suddenly the fatalism of the situation vanished, and how suddenly the euphoria over its vanishing vanished as well. And a third thing: how the happy ending is less than perfectly happy.

Even though it had really only entered mass consciousness in the early 1980s, AIDs had taken on the aspect of permanence we associate with cancer, or Alzheimer's. How swiftly learned helplessness is learned! Which is what impelled me to write this: to capture how suddenly the unchangeable, can change, and how quickly people accept something as unchangeable.

The most relevant analogy in my own life at the moment is my father's confrontation with Alzheimer's. I am like a lot of people I think in gradually resigning myself to the irreversible course of his disease.

But there is nothing to prevent the next protease inhibitor (or the next Salk vaccine, or the next penicillin) from arriving, miraculously, tomorrow.

It is very easy to mistake the unprecedented for the impossible.

My point is David Hume incarnate.

But we would be far more proficient in anticipating the remarkable were we to linger on the history of the remarkable. The sheer joy of the Salk vaccine, how seldom we recall it: the joy of parents, the purposeful columns of exuberant school children awaiting salvation in a sugar cube.

Nearly everyone old enough to remember Nixon has had abundant opportunity for the concrete of their cynicism over the war on cancer to solidify. Appropriate to the metaphor of war, vastly inappropriate and expensive weaponry has achieved only the most illusory of progress, while an aristocracy of vampires has entrenched the existing order. We resign ourselves to what 'must' be. But we cannot know that things cannot be otherwise.

Which brings us to the reality of happy endings: for more than a decade after the discovery of the remarkable healing powers of penicillin, it was hugely expensive and so, hard to come by. After decades of widespread use, it has lost much of its effectiveness.

With protease inhibitors it has been much the same, as vast numbers of people with AIDs in lesser- developed countries are unable to afford them.

We do well to remember both that the impossible is often possible, and that it is always short of Utopia.

Thank a LIBERAL philosopher

2011-03-06T07:40:00.001-05:00

"Christians" like those of the Westboro Baptist Church should recognize they are allowed to spew their hateful anti-gay rhetoric only because some 18th century liberal philosophers of the enlightenment first recognized that freedom of speech was a freedom worth having.

LIBERAL philosophers.

Permanent Magic

2011-03-04T08:10:00.000-05:00

Almost
gone the days of your childhood,
almost gone,
the wonder-eyed youth,
when each minute reveals permanent
magic, and nothing but fails
to improve.

The stardust that blesses your slumber,
and guards against waxing concern,
runs low as the days start to number,
filled with lessons you'd sooner unlearn.

Rushmore, Reagan, and Mary Shelley

2011-02-11T14:37:00.000-05:00

They want to put Ronald Reagan on Mount
Rushmore. Ronald
Reagan
on Mount Rushmore.
Ronald Reagan on Mount Rushmore?
I mean, isn't that like
just exactly the opposite of what
Mount Rushmore is there for? I mean,
isn't Mount Rushmore supposed to be reserved
for the Greatest (think here of Muhammad
Ali) the Greatest of presidents?

People like George Washington, the father of our
country, and Abraham
Lincoln, the freer of the slaves, and Thomas
Jefferson the father of our Independence
declaration, and Theodore Roosevelt, the father of the,
the father of the,
OK well,
so I'm not so sure what he's even doing up there, but Ronald

Reagan? Ronald Reagan?
Why do you want to honor the guy who sent Donald Rumsfeld to make
nice nice with Saddam Hussein? Why do you
want to honor the guy who created Al
Qaeda by getting the CIA to train
Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in
Pesha-war to go fight a terrorist war in
Afghanistan? Twenty years later
and we're still cleaning up the big old messes he left us,
the two Great Frankenstein's
monsters he created in
Saddam and Osama.

Which is not to mention the people hacked
to bits in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua,
the thousands and thousands of people raped,
beaten, tortured, dismembered and mutilated
all with the training, assistance, and "material support"
of the Boland-Amendment-violating CIA. Or the way he
dismantled the constitution so he could sell
missiles to the terrorists in Iran, or the way he
helped Nicaraguan terrorists to smuggle
cocaine into the US --- like starting a crack
epidemic was some kind of urban
enterprise zone for South Central LA. He was
so horrible, so-o horrible, why would anyone want to
honor him? Why would anyone want to put him right
there
up beside Washington,
and Jefferson,
and Lincoln and Roosevelt?
And that's when it hit me.

Didn't Washington send out what he
himself called "scalping parties" during the French
and Indian War back when he was still fighting
for the King of England? Didn't he
deploy them with explicit
orders to kill
civilians? Wasn't the father of our
country really the founding father
of American terrorism?
Didn't he steal colossal
tracts of land from native Americans,
and foster a climate of genocide against them?
Didn't he own a lot of slaves and so,
wasn't Abraham Lincoln really
at war against him?

And didn't Jefferson, wasn't he not only
the owner of slaves but a slave
raper?
Didn't he rape Sally Hemings?
I mean, seeing as he owned her,
seeing as she was a piece of his property,
she didn't really have any right to say no,
and so isn't it rape where the
thing you are
fucking does not give
her consent because she has no consent
to give?

And as for Lincoln, didn't he
start the bloodiest war in American history,
didn't he shut down the press and, sans
habeas corpus jail his
own people for voicing dissent? And didn't he
support slavery if it preserved the union?
Didn't he continue
slavery, in the very text of the Emancipation Proclamation,
didn't he continue slavery in the four so-called
border states, the slave states that never joined
the Confederacy? Which then leaves

TR. The
star of San Juan Hill, back in a war we
started,
for empire. The man who continued
the slaughter in the Philippines: 200,000 dead in a war of
imperial conquest. 200,000 dead in a racist war for white
supremacy.

And so looking at Mount Rushmore with its
quartet of murdering, raping, conniving, torturing,
genocidal terrorists and thinking about the real
Ronald Reagan, I came to realize
he belongs there just fine. It's just
we need to change the way we
see the place, from a place of heroes,
to a place of demons; maybe by changing
the name from Mount Rushmore
to Mount Frankenstein. Mount Rushmore to Mount
Axis of Evil.

Consolations for a Cleveland Winter

2011-01-22T08:07:00.001-05:00

What would I do with all that
prodigal sunshine,
day after changeless day, and the way it
bleaches unliving colors
to pastel? Far better to
dwell here,
in wired concrete igloos,
parked in the arctic precincts of a
supposedly temperate
climate, where the dense gray
perpetuity of cloud
supersedes shade and curtain, where
no luminous nuisance trespasses in the sky,
opacifying the lenses of your eye with the
glare of film noir third degrees.
Where you can sleep for weeks without missing a single
shadow. How reassuring,
not to have to worry about the cat
exploding in the unvented four-door.

And then, there are the economic benefits;
the costly, sloppy stickiness of the
sunscreen you won't be needing,
the money unspent on the darklensed
fashionstatements you won't sit on
entering the car, the superfluity of
bikini waxes beneath layer upon layer of
goose down, wool, velcro, Gortex and Thinsulate.
None of the wastefulness of frozen-drink
parasols: instead, the allegory of marshmallows
melting in hot cocoa, the music of
whistled steam gossiping about the impending
arrival of scalded pots of tea.

Who would knowingly trade the
palping rapture of cashmere
coiled in gentle neck-snug, for the
goo gunk of tropical crotchfunk, and
swampheated
pitstench? And then there’s the boon
to marital fidelity, the erotic temptations
of fishnet nymphettes
preempted: the very thought of provocative textiles
foreclosed by the horripilant chill-threat of
bristle-hair gooseflesh. No apocalyptic water bugs
skittering eerily from
unknown places, just a preternatural
feeling of brotherhood
for the lonely burdens of prehistoric
glaciers, and sympathy for the fate of naked
graveyard statuary.

Far better to start each morning with the discourse of
shovel's-edge rasping flagstone or blacktop, even
the cranky percussion of twostroke engines chuting
geysers of crystal into driveway-lining
ridges of freeze-dried sky-squeeze.
Listening to the sizzle-hiss of woodfire, its
narrative about the liberation of stored
sunshine, how preferable this to the trademarked
thrash-ratchet of idling middle-aged stockbrokers.

Needless to say,
mountainside fiberglass waterslides
rank a very distant second to
the doorstep thrill-ride of each morning,
as, improvising your way along the
newly arrived canyons of spontaneous
car-devouring roadcrumble, you
fishtail through slushstreeted
rush-hours. And there can simply be
no moral comparison between the
generosity of the snowplow rock-salt
that leaves the entire northeast
corner of the state saltier
than a frozen-margarita rim,
and the isolating managedcare selfishness
of tinted-power-windows and factory-air.

There is nothing in the radiant scorch
of hot sun on tanned skin
to make you desire anything
but escape; nothing that
remotely begins to compare with the way that,
numbing your extremities, a Cleveland winter
lectures about how you have stopped
feeling, and long
to feel
again.

Tomahawks

2011-01-14T09:46:00.002-05:00

(Generally speaking, cliches are to be avoided like the ... H1N1.
But especially when you mean something as a song, they're actually better than originality. I hear the following as a song, and to hear my own dubious attempts to capture this, you can check out Chomsky in Chains, the podcast.)

Been a war every day of my forty-four years.
Been a war every day of my life.
Been a war to show everyone killing is wrong.
Been a war to prove killing is right.
Been a war to keep dangerous secrets.
Been a war to make some secrets known.
Been a war of defensive invasions,
in the name of protecting our homes.
In the name of protecting our homes.

Been a war to make everyone sober.
Been a war to get everyone high.
But the truth is that war is a banker,
selling peace for a lucrative lie,
trading peace with a lucrative lie,
while the Tomahawks litter the sky

And I been wondering why-hy,
murder's wrong but murderers rule,
spend one day honoring Martin,
three-hundred-SIXty-four like he was a fool,
and I been wondering why, why, why,
peace is always being denied,
peace is a classified secret,
but we treat war like it’s our national pride.

Been a war while the guns have been firing.
Been a war while the guns have grown cold.
Been a war for the wealthy and greedy,
to take the whole world for their own.
Been a war for the lies that they're screaming.
Been a war to cut out the truth's tongue.
Been a war to profit the rich and the old,
fought by the poor and the young,
lose their lives for a lucrative lie,
while the Tomahawks litter the sky

And I been wondering why-hy,
murder's wrong but murderers rule,
spend one day honoring Martin,
three-hundred-SIXty-four like he was a fool,
and I been wondering why, why, why,
peace is always being denied,
peace is a classified secret,
but we treat war like it’s our national pride.
And I been wondering why.

New Year's Day on Mars

2011-01-05T13:55:00.001-05:00

When, in the year 1000,
the year 1000 was celebrated,
it marked only a century or two
of reckoning dates from the birth of Yeshu
(the Aramaic correlate of the Greek 'Jesus'.)
Technically,
it was not the year 1000 of course
since Fibonacci had not yet (until 1202)
introduced the Arabic numerals into Europe
(which he at least, having studied in Tunis had
the good grace
to call
the 'Hindu' numerals.)

It was the year 'M'
that being in Roman numerals
the symbol for 1000,
the Latin for 1000 being 'mille'
from which
the English
'mile', 'million', and 'millenium'.

Although it was a Roman
numeral, and the Aramaic speaking Yeshu a
Palestinian subject of the Romans,
that Roman numeral was not the Roman year, which,
reckoned A.U.C.
(anno urbis conditae, from the founding of the city)
was 752 at Christ's birth
(ignoring an apparent four year error),
and so the year M would have been
1752 according to the
Romans,
whose numerals,
designated it.

On a recent trip to Thailand
(which they,
ungenerous to English sensibilities
insist on calling Muang Thai),
I discovered that the Thais,
having generously adopted a twelve month
solar calendar beginning on our January first,
still date their calendar to the birth of the Buddha
(the number of their year being 543
greater than ours ( and dare I mention
the twenty years
gone missing
from the Indian
tradition?))

The Muslims,
by many accounts the most numerous
religious group in the world,
start their calendar with the flight (hegira)
of their great prophet Muhammed
from their most holy city, Mecca,
in fear of his life (not,
of Jews, Christians, Romans, or Persians but
of fellow Arabs from the same clan),
about our year 622
(with the exception that the Muslim calendar
gains a year
on the Gregorian
once every 22 1/2 years.)

Jews in the East had
for many centuries
used the Seleucid calendar
that began in 312 B.C. when,
in the ninth century,
European Jews began dating
'anno mundi',
to the beginning of the world,
or 3761 B.C. in Gregorian terms.

What was God thinking when,
in his infinite wisdom,
he decided
to make the period
of the earth's revolution
a non-integer multiple
of its rotation?
Perhaps he meant it
as a WPA for astronomers.

It was left to the infallible
Gregory XIII (although this does beg
the question about Gregory's XII and XI)
acting on discrepancies found
800 years earlier by the Venerable Bede,
to set things straight
by declaring
the day after October 4, 1582,
to be October 15, 1582.

Poof.
Ten days,
up in smoke.
Amazing the things
you can make happen,
if you happen to be Pope.

But perhaps this too is a bit
simplistic, since Protestants,
being what they are,
protested
against a Pope's having the gall
to be accurate.
And so whereas
the appropriate days disappeared
in Spain and France,
they took two years to vanish
in Luthered lands.

The British government,
being what it is,
cherished recalcitrance
until, in 1752,
September 2nd was followed by
September 14th,
throwing in the change of New Year's Day
from March 25th back to January 1st.

Recent cosmological data suggest
that the universe is
3 thousand million years newer
than previously thought,
perhaps
only 10 thousand million years old.

2000 approaches though 1000 never happened.
It reminds of the singer Prince ---
'Tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1999'.

Why not?

It is.

2010 Terror for Christmas

2010-12-10T06:21:00.002-05:00

(Since the true spirit of Christmas is rabid consumption, I tend to think of the holiday starting on Black Friday, and extending to the 25th. Also, the "terror alert" level seems to rise around now, for some, strange, reason. That said, this is dedicated to Jdimytai Damour, the man trampled to death in 2008, in a Wal-Mart Black Friday sale stampede.)

Well the terror alert had been raised to high,
so our F-15's were patrolling the sky.
Keeping us safe, keeping us free,
protecting the homeland security.
Every day of the week, every week of the year,
we're armed to the teeth so we got nothing to fear---
except maybe,
fear itself.
Except maybe,
fear itself.

The kids were asleep all snug in their beds,
while visions of Predators shot through their heads.
They were slaughtering badguys like you wouldn't believe,
with their Hellfire missiles there on Christmas Eve.
They were pint-sized heroes in an army of one,
and for Jesus's birthday all they wanted was guns;
guns for Jesus,
and fear itself.
Guns for Jesus,
and fear itself.

Well the terrorists are always around,
so you better never lower your guard.
So while we celebrate the baby Jesus,
you know they're trying extra hard.

It was just after midnight and NORAD radar
showed that something big was coming in fast.
There was no time to think, and no time to argue,
act now or it might just be your last.
And they mighta thought twice,
and they mighta thought better,
but the terror was already so high,
well that was the night that the US Air Force
blew Santa Claus outta the sky.
We blew Santa Claus outta the sky.

And it was raining bits of blown up reindeer
for hours and hours on end,
and none of our jets,
and none of our missiles
could put Santa back together again.
And though fear and hate,
may keep you safe,
from everything the enemy sends,
the problem with answering fear with guns,
is that you're gonna end up killing your friends.
The trouble with answering fear with guns,
is that you always end destroying your friends.
With nothing to fear,
and nothing to love,
except maybe
fear itself.
Except maybe,
fear itself.

Fix the Roof

2010-11-20T11:03:00.001-05:00

The other day my friend DJ observed that in general it was not a good idea to run a deficit, and he felt like the federal government really needed to cut spending. I fumbled through a response which mentioned the words “Paul Krugman”, but I felt hopelessly inarticulate.

I have reflected on this a fair amount since then, and have tried to formulate what it is I think I have garnered from repeated consideration of Krugman’s work, and the most apt summary I’ve been able to come up with is what follows.

My wife is the executor of her recently deceased father’s estate. It is not a large estate, and was fairly low on cash at the time of my father-in-law’s demise. The principle asset is the family home.

Now suppose the roof started leaking. It would make a great deal of sense for the estate to borrow money in order to fix the roof. Not fixing the roof would cause irreparable damage to the house, and the house could not otherwise be sold because it could not pass inspection.

The point here is that the value of a productive asset stands to be destroyed unless money can be borrowed to shore up its value.

In this case it would be idiotic not to borrow the money.

Viewing this as allegory, the house is the American economy. The leaking roof is the Great Recession. Borrowing money to fix the roof is federally funded economic stimulus. The value that stands to be destroyed is the wasted productive lives of unemployed human beings like you and me.

Every allegory simplifies, and every simplification is an oversimplification.

One concern is whether or not the estate can find a lender. In this case, the allegory tells us that lenders are abundant and willing to lend at interest rates so low that they are without historical precedent.

Another concern suggests that the money has already been borrowed and has failed to repair the roof. Here the allegory tells us that not enough money was borrowed to fix the roof, but only to put a stop-gap patch on the roof. The patch is already showing signs of imminent failure.

If we fix the roof, the patch will prove to have been worth it.

If we don’t, the trillion dollar patch will prove a worthless boondoggle. The decision is in the balance, as are the productive lives of unemployed human being who in their humanity, if not in their employment status, are just like you and me.

Now, frankly, I have somewhere very close to zero credentials as a professional economist: I try to make sense of the few economists I trust, and make no effort whatsoever to credit economists in the employ of corporations who are legally obliged to lie when lying is profitable. It seems to me there are all sorts of factors that neither I nor the most recognized economic theorists can justly consider.

Yet, the decision is up to us.

Just remember, this is the family home.

Power Makes Stupid

2010-11-10T21:45:00.001-05:00

_________________________________________
-----------------------------------------

English, Hamburg, Lehman, Schenk,
Darden, Johnson, LaRocco, Rosty.

Rosty?

Yeah, Rosty baby,
Danny Rostenkowski.
You remember him, they indicted his ass
on more counts than Bill Bennett's got virtues for.

Anyway, where was I?
Long, Smith, Glickman, Barlow, Bilbray,
Bass, Klein, Hochbrueckner.

Hochbrueckner?

Yeah, Hochbrueckner baby, New York's first,
the one and only, in New York anyway,
one in the first, ain't that cute.

What in the hell are you talkin' about?

Me? Me?
Surely you know I'm just readin you a list,
and I'm talkin about politics,
congress to be exact, congressional politics.
It's the Republican revolution,
and I am just listing, in order, alphabetized by state
and district number
the complete list of all the incumbent Democrats
who lost their re-election bids in the
great Republican landslide of '94.
I counted 32 of them, but I'm not quite sure
because I had to count them myself for reasons
we'll get into later.

But wait a minute, wait a minute man.
I said WAIT A MINUTE;
I thought this was supposed to be poetry or something;
I thought you were trying to write a poem.
You can't just go reading some random list of names
that no one's ever heard of.

Yeah, yeah, I heard you baby,
and I couldn't agree more;
you can't write a poem like that,
and this isn't poetry.
And that's the great thing
because this isn't politics,
this isn't democracy,
this isn't no two party system ---
I'll give you the two, but what I wanna know is
where's the party baby?
And so the two are kind of made
for each other.
Poetry that isn't poetry,
and politics that isn't politics.

And really, I couuldn't have said it better myself,
no one's ever heard of these guys.
They're simply 32 of the 535
most powerful people in the most powerful country
in the history of the world,
and nobody's ever heard of them.

Well ain't that cute.

And let's try a little channel surfing
and see if we can find some
American Gladiators somewhere.

And nobody's ever heard of them
---- except for Rosty of course,
but that's like Lou Reed said,
"Does anybody really need,
another crooked politician,
caught with his pants down,
and money stickin' in his hole?"

Lancaster, Price, Mann, Strickland,
Fingerhut, Mezvinsky
--- but cutting to the chase a bit,
the way I've got it figured,
and if you get my point I've had to get down
to the bedrock of the names and I've had to figure for myself,
86% of incumbent democrats were re-elected in '94.
86%
Which is to say that even in the midst of
a Republican 'revolution',
nearly nine out of ten democrats were re-elected.

Revolution; Republican; change.
Yeah, the more things change.

Which added to the 100% of Republican incumbents
who were re-elected
amounts to well over 90% of all incumbents
returning to Washington.
(And a lot more if you count lobbyists.)

This, folks, is a revolution;
90% stasis, and 10% change.

And you are quite right, absolutely right,
you can't talk about percentage points in poetry,
I mean it just isn't poetry when you get done,
and that is my point exactly.

It's like what the president said,
the president of the United States, Mr. President
William Jefferson Clinton;
"We're all Eisenhower Republicans and
they're Reagan Republicans."

I'm not making this stuff up,
and if you want to check it out all you have to do is
hop in your car and drive down to Yale
and wait 40 years for them to release the documentary evidence
Bob Woodward deposited there for his book "The Agenda"
under stipulation that it not be released for 40 years.

40 years.
40 years.

Go ahead, have a cup of coffee,
you've got time.

This Woodward character, what a trip.
Yeah, that's right, Redford played him in "All the President's Men".

Redford.

Well if I remember correctly that was a little bon bon
called Watergate,
and there was this guy,
what was his name,
yeah, Nixon, I think --- well and didn't he have
something to do with Eisenhower at some point in time?
All in the family,
all in the family.
Yeah, Julie and David; how's that for closure?
Eisenhower to Clinton to Woodward to Nixon to Eisenhower.
Around the horn.

Well anyway, Redford, I mean Woodward,
is playing intellectual footsy with the librarians down at Yale,
and it's all so god damn cute that I'm just
dying to know
who Deep Throat was
(remind me to ask Justice Thomas if you can get that on video) ---
and I'm not even talking about Linda Lovelace and Harry Reims.
And he is so far into the woodwork at the White House
that sometimes you think he is in Clinton's
god damn boxers (kudos to MTV for that one.)

Anyway,
they call this power.
They call this control.
They call this politics.
Change. Revolution.
And all the time the poor bastard can't find a measly billion
for 'putting people first.'
Sure, it sounds like a lot but it is less than one tenth
of one per cent of a
1.5 trillion dollar federal budget.
One tenth of one per cent.

Okay, okay. If you can't talk about percentages in poetry
you certainly can't talk about tenths of a per cent.
I mean, what is this, some kind of god damned mathematics treatise?

Alright, alright, I apologize, I apologize.

The point is that here is the most powerful man,
in the most powerful country,
in the god damned history of the god damned planet,
elected on a verbal barrage of rhetoric about change,
prostituting every last principle he ever dreamed to hold dear,
working day and night with the energy of a Kerouac benny addict,
a god damn Rhodes scholar
(yeah baby that's the Rhodes who used to harpoon niggers down in South Africa),
with a brain the size of a planet,
----and he can't change one single mother swiving god damned thing.

NOT ONE THING.

Let's stop on a dime here and take a little cross product
into a new dimension.
We can do that you know because our minds are agile,
and we don't have to just think in one direction
like some idiot machine.
A sweetness of directionality that is melodic,
poetic, rhapsodic.
What I want to do is to mention my old friend Nietzsche,
Fred, or Friedrich if you prefer ---
(and that whole Nazi anti-semite rap just doesn't stick.)----
and his dictum "Power makes stupid."

Power makes stupid.
And what really could be the point of power
if not stupidity?
I mean where do you go from here?
Once you've got all the power,
and all the control,
and all the money,
and you own the lawyers,
and you own the courts,
and you own the universities,
and you collect royalties on freedom of thought,
what then?
Whatta ya gonna buy then baby?

It's like what Adam Smith said in "Wealth of Nations",
the whole point of all production whatsoever is consumption.
Consumption.
And what is consumption but taking it and wasting it,
squeezing the thing for all it's worth
and throwing it all away.
And that is about as stupid as stupid gets.
And that, then, is the point.
Power makes stupid.
And so,
super-power makes super-stupid,
and we're the world's sole remaining superpower.

It's like what Kissinger told Oriana Fallaci
(and she can give me some Oriana Fallaci any time she wants to
I mean she is seriously hot in those Italian leather miniskirts);
'Intelligence is not all that important in the exercise of power.'
That's first hand experience talkin' huh Mr. K.?

And now you see we are finally at the point
where we can start 'Bringin it All Back Home.' Okay.
And I know that this has been a long time coming,
and that poems aren't supposed to be this long,
and that even this apology is making the whole thing longer,
but just try to hang with me a little while longer,
cause we are almost there.
(I feel like a god damned dentist sayin' this shit.)

I've always felt that Kissinger's whole life was ruined
when Peter Sellers beat him out for the lead
in "Dr. Strangelove."
It's just like what the President Sellers
told George C. Patton and the Russian guy,
"Please, gentlemen, we can't have people
fighting in the war room."
So Kissinger did the next best thing
and started having 'secret bombings' and 'secret wars.'

What the Fuck is a 'secret bombing?'
I'll tell you one thing baby,
it ain't no fuckin' secret to the people being bombed.
"Mein Fuhrer."

I don't know exactly why it is,
but Allen Greenspan has always reminded me of Kissinger.
I think it's the wrinkled skin and the coke bottle glasses,
and the fact that they were both there in the Sellers
uh, the Nixon Whitehouse back in the days of
non-denial denials, when bloody Agnew was still taking cash bribes from the Baltimore bagmen at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
And so here is Alan Greenspan,
seat A6,
February 17, 1993
on all four major networks,
seated between the new Eisenhower Republicans
--- Hillary and Tipper.
(Protect our youth from dirty lyrics Tipper.)
And where does the White House beat end Andrea,
and the Federal Reserve beat begin?
And Woodward has gotta be lookin' over his shoulder
at Kissinger and Oriana saying that power
is the ultimate aphrodisiac,
the secrets locked like Deep Throat in the archives at Yale.
It's only money, but while your at it,
who owns the Federal Reserve?
'The buck starts here.'

It's the Grammy award ceremonies
coming at you live via satellite
with all the slickly marketed
superficial importance that modern technology and
creative hair dressing know how to manufacture.
It is 1991, and among other things
they are giving a lifetime achievement award to Dylan.
DYLAN, baby.
That's right, Dylan.
Well you know, infinity is definitely going up on trial.
The Persian Gulf War has just started,
and the Seven Sisters are getting what they paid for,
and everyone is getting just a little tired
of watching death, live.
His is a body of work to fill a lifetime.
Dylan, the anti-war troubador.
And, after all the video clips,
and words of homage,
and tribute and honor,
the man arrives to play his own song
and take a bow.
And he is blasted out of his mind,
knocked out loaded,
stoned, and barely able to walk.
And even people who normally love Dylan
can barely make out a word he is singing,
and all the news reports the next day say
that nobody even knew what song it was.
But if you listened hard and you already knew the lyrics,
you could make it out.
It was 'Masters of War' baby, 'Masters of War.'
And so here it is,
the triumph of a lifetime,
surrounded by a generation of millionaires
who grew up listening to you,
the rich and famous, the glitterati of electronic influence,
beamed out to more millions than you can count,
over the same satellites that have been beaming in
the missile-mounted images of destruction.

Success.

Got the picture?

A generation of revolutionaries.
'The times they are a changin.'
You know, "I'll stand over your grave,
til I'm sure that you're dead."

Who could look at the death-crazed,
frothy-mouthed, Saddam-hating multitudes,
the computerized 'smart' bombs,
the sanitized reporting,
and think that anything had changed
but the degree of war's mastery?
Kill more with less risk, less effort,
and our side wins.
And make millions singing songs about
how horrible it all is.
The pro-test,
is part of the pro-cess.

So now I'm thinkin' about another Dylan.
Thomas.
And the lovers,
'their arms wrapped around the griefs of the ages,'
and I'm saying that's it.
They are all one grief.
All the same grief.
And they are all as close as the person sitting next to me,
or you,
it is one person.

And so now the world is down off the satellite,
and the TV phosphors are that greeny black,
and the mikes and the soundstage are all switched off,
and we are sitting here clothed in the heat of our own metabolism,
and the exigencies of this moment,
right here, right now.
You know that power is out there,
but we've been there,
and frankly, it's more than a little too late to go back.

So what am I sayin'?

No, I'm sorry, I think it's off of me now,
and onto you.
This burden, this sustaining it,
if it connects,
it connects into you,
right here.
And I have got to let go.

It isn't out there, and I'm just about out of energy.

If I could, I would make you as open as a child's mind.

So,
how to end, how to end?
Eternal life is no great shakes, just ask the Sibyl.
I can't help thinking that I want to steal it from Elliot:
Da,
Datta.
What have you given?
Does any of us really know how to give?
To give?
To give?
Wrestle with your soul over that one a few times
without calling it love.
How do I know how to give?
What?
This crushed heart is so weak ---
can it bear even more pain?

Open as a child's mind.

*

2010-11-02T09:05:00.001-04:00

---------------------------------------------

So the king was really a phony,
all those homeruns were only a scam,
and Frankenstein needed a needle
to build the higher man.

The gods of your youth were illusions,
and all the old dreams were a lie,
caught up in steroids and opiates,
was the one thing that money can't buy.

Off stage your heroes' allies,
all commerce in illegal drugs,
while your heroes enhance their performance
abetted by criminal thugs.

Like jet fighters piercing an Afghan sky,
truncating Canada's sons,
while opium poppies bloom in Helmand,
and amphetamines fire their guns.

But what made Barry Bonds do it,
or U.S. pilots over foreign soil?
For the lord of the Afghan drug rings?
Or was it our addiction to oil?

Who is the authentic addict?
Who the certified chumps?
The ones with the go-pills and steroids,
or the ones filling up at the pump?

Nomenklatura

2010-10-22T09:30:00.001-04:00

_________________________________________________
-

Secrecy answered terror with a silent question.
What was it?
Privacy ceasing to belong
to individuals,
now the property of the
patriotic state.
Clearance alone freeing in-
formation.

Fear named all that couldn't be said,
where everything illicit flourished like a bumper
of springtime poppies. With security
excusing the galaxy of pleasure,
however pronounced, if unspoken
and in the national interest, profit became
a pension fund limitless with loss
off the books.

Police, crooks alike
banked on strategic leaks
propagating news. Living seed
of truth sheathed
in a rubber tomb, safe.
From an unmanned drone,
evidence of freedom:
a video feed encrypted
in the no-fly-zone of a
trademarked sky, existing
only to be forgotten and deeply,
classified.

Cutting Edge Research, like Columbus Washing up on the Virgin Shores of Intellectual Property

2010-10-15T16:46:00.002-04:00

Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards "thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades."
--- Howard Zinn quoting Las Casas

If you want to find drugs in a city you've never been
in before, she said, ask for a street
named after Martin Luther King. The legacy
of civil rights parodied by America's
automated response to demands
for economic justice; assassinate,
commemorate, obliterate. She had been running away,
tried every illegal drug
she could find; heroin, cocaine, both
powdered and crack, PCP, amphetamines
she was losing her mind ever
since Robert died of AIDS. I remember him
joking about the pot he was smoking being the only good
that ever came out of the North American Free Trade Agreement,
back in the days before marijuana was medical,
when the disease still possessed the
je ne sais quoi of terror, the fear that it might spread,
might not remain just a disease of
gay men.
There was nothing like it
again until a short few weeks in the shadow
of the anthrax attacks on Congress
when no one knew if there would be enough
Cipro to go around, and its German maker Bayer
insisted on upholding its patents, its so-called intellectual
property rights. There was this palpable fear,
it was openly frightening, not just that this
new man-made plague
was being epidemically spread,
but that the heads of business and politics would
profiteer on disaster. For a brief time,
middle, upper-middle, maybe even some
upper class Americans felt a hint of what
millions of Africans have been exposed to
as the disease that killed Robert devastated
their continent, and the multi-national conspiracies we call
corporations, continued to press for
blockbuster profits from their research
investments. Needing to become addicted
to live, but denied such addiction by patented
science, and its chairman of the board addiction,
to cash. Substance
abuse, but which substance, and whose? Maybe,
maybe, if they promised to become good
slaves, very, very, good slaves,
we could save their lives,
a free trade of intellectual for human
property. As if some new middle passage
returning to African shores
spread the Faustian spores of an
ever stranger fruit. This is what America and
its hereditary plutocrats stand for; extending the scientific
horizons of ownership. Like Columbus washed up
on the shores of the new
virgin territories of intellectual
property (the preferred substance of profitable abuse),
conquistadores deploying tactics that remain unchanged:
assassinate, commemorate, obliterate.
And you wonder why she was running away,
trying to find every street named for
King, in America.

“Arbeit Macht Frei”

2010-10-08T06:01:00.000-04:00

*******************************************

Gedanken experiment.
Die Gedanken sind frei.
Gedanken Donuts.
Karl Dönitz.
Paul Nitze.
Picking nits.
Peking Duck.
Duck Soup.
Groucho Marx.
Grouch potato.
Tate Gallery.
Sir Thomas Malory.
Sir Edmund Hillary.
Tenzing Norgay.
Oslo, Norway.
Norwegian Wood.
Tiger Woods.
Tiger Woods’ irons.
Jeremy Irons.
Jeremy Bentham.
Jonathan Lethem.
Lethem eat cake.
Cakewalk.
Walk on the Wild Side.
Wilderness area.
Area 54.
Car 54 Where Are You?
Car Talk.
Money talks.
Mad money.
Mad dogs and Englishmen.
Chinglish.
Chinchilla.
Sensimilla.
Mia Farrow.
Clarence Darrow.
A red wheel
barrow.
Better dead than red.
Cosmic red shift.
Hubble Constant.
Benjamin Constant.
Benjamin Netanyahu.
Nothing but net.
Netflix.
Flexing your muscles.
High-brow pose-off.
Off-color.
The color of intellectual property.
The language is community property.
Artistic community.
Intellectual community.
Thought crime.
Thought experiment.
Die Gedanken sind frei.

Just Outside Death's Automatic Revolving Door

2010-10-01T09:38:00.000-04:00

Whirls of ice-dust sparkle in air brittle with advanced
January. Eye-skewering rays
ricochet from the thin layer
of snow-scrunch that was yesterday
's clouds and obscured sapphire
dome. Bundled in Gortex and goose down,
we near the hospital's automatic
revolving door, only to re-emerge
within the hour, with Robert
and his compromised immune system.
The institution has no room
for smokers, and the automatic door
shepherds us into
the sub-zero blast
of the last December Robert
will ever
see.

We cannot know this.

He has scouted a corner where
the freeze is less
deadly, to inhale his nicotine
fix. Between drags there is talk of
travel, Florida seeming
(the icy breeze spiraling along my neck)
impossible. Smoking, I muse, considering his
death sentence, is hazardous
to your health.

Landscaping the Gated Community's Factory Farm

2010-09-24T05:41:00.001-04:00

Keep a fire burnin' in your eye,
pay attention to the open sky,
you never know what will be
comin’ round.
---- Jackson Browne

'Fleissig' the Germans christen it.
At first hearing I
thought it the manic, agitated,
continuous, pointless, franticness of a fly.
Fly-sig -- lighting, darting, buzzing,
circling -- literally, industriousness.
As busy implies busy-ness, so both
industry and then industriousness.
The activity in question
a dedication to motion, activity
for the sake of nothing
but activity. The root notion is one
of spreading --- and this allies
etymologically with strewing, straw,
structure, construction, stratagem,
stratocracy, perestroika, bremsstrahlung, prostrate
and street --- the chief architect of contemporary
spread.

Again, with landscape we are nearly
at a dead
end. Find only the root 'lendh'
implying OPEN land, see connected only
island, home-land, hinterland,
lawn and the more obscure
auslander. Perhaps this suffices
to demonstrate the innate
contradiction of 'landscape' and 'industrial',
that the groaning,
commercial weighting of the land with titanic
furnaces, smokestacks, and thousand
acre walls, the boutique gift-wrap
retail shopping mall good
cop to the Love Canal bad
cop and his rusting skull
and crossbones steel drums --- that
the sprawl or razor-
wire and cyclone-
fence handcuffing ownership to the bureaus
of land-title, spread out only to close the
what-in-its-essence only is
when open; the open-ness of land.

I begin again.
Imagine a prison
and, following Hamlet,
a prison within
a prison. What then do you mean
by escape? Did you ever know
captivity before release
and had I chosen
my metaphor (or is it an allegory) differently,
perhaps a cave within
a cave, would this ensnare me
in a plagiarism of Plato, and then
what Shakespeare and his
play within
a play. I have heard it called a founding
myth that the founding fathers
gazed out on panoramas of virgin
land. The Romans were more honest
in tracing their empire
to an entire community
of Sabine rape. The Chumash
farmed Pacific shores with fire
long before the constitutional
liars invented their conspiracy of one-sided
equality. And so the dialog of vegetation
with the human
animal -- everything from the germination
of wildflowers to the age
of forests was a poem
of our-kind's construction for
generations untold --- but an industry with living,
breathing blueprints, with margins of
error and toleration -- breathing room,
negotiated without the distant
dictatorship of imperial
jurisprudence written
in irrevocable ink. How are we
to think of how we might
have thought without the Guttenberg
technology? The press gang of the printing
press has stolen our within without
our knowing. How close the words
library, liberty, and liberation? How,
shy of Oedipal blinding, free
ourselves of reading? (Not just the deed
but the ability?) Can you
see no prison here and who made
the decision? Were you
competent to decide? How
affix a signature to choose
either for or against
literacy? And once the ability
to write and read has stolen from the stolen
land into and about you how
undo, how even begin to un-
do the exponentiating corrosion of epidemic
industry, construction and production?
How regulate the consternating
avalanche of regulation, where
even the sky --- air rights, flight
plans, stationary orbits in outer space ---
are obliged to written
law?

There are heights no wings can fathom. Beyond air
buoyancy ceases and so
even flying resembles freedom
only within
limits. There is always the reciprocal
of intention, by convention we open
the frontier only
to close it. Once
opened to closing
everything --- the planet's constriction,
conscription becomes itself
conception and we prevene
to stage even authenticity. The tide
suffers its reflection
from the breakwall of intended
escape, while the gargantuan lifeless
hulks move on to manufacture
imagination, construct
the information of their own
perpetuation where everything is
owned and bartered even freedom,
conceived as nothing
beyond question.

Pyramid

2010-09-17T05:08:00.001-04:00

When the hospital called,
desperate to find you,
I guessed what it was,
and gave them your cell.
When the phone rang,
two minutes later,
I didn’t have to guess.
A trap door opened
into a place you had,
without knowing it,
been preparing for
all your life.

It just so happened
the nearest exit was
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
As you scrambled to
regain your breath
from the decision
to intubate
your father,
I couldn’t help imagining
the floodlit glass pyramid
where you startled
at your own inability
not
to shiver.

Once again, I was reminded of my regret
that electrons
cannot give hugs.

Now, as you cancel
the land-line that has protected
you your entire life ---
fifty years at the same number,
these words
are my hug.

Breakwall

2010-09-10T07:01:00.001-04:00

When compelled, speak of death in the voice of beginnings ended and never ending, endings both begun and unbegun, but explain only what you know and know totally. Unqualified. Completely.

Leave in it no room to be doubted, no questions as troubling as space, no deceptions or half-deceptions half so puzzling as time. Pitch it in no key requiring tense. Dis-place it from moment, from history. Bereave it, and leave it bereft, from any contingency, from all that might not have been, from all that is or was, of might. Render only the soundings whose knots you've fully fathomed.

Extol such truths as will outlive it; dwell there only in what is not and never can be, degraded. Of the pure word beyond hope and passion, of the pure thought, beyond word or deed, of the pure feeling, beyond thought, without need, speak of these in the glimmervoice of ocean skin, the gossip of waves, the murmur of rote, frenzy of froth in the lull. Stammer in the hoven tremble of gullwings, the urgent surges of well-heaves authorizing heaven.

After this, will you still have need of tears? Will the sand befriend your tears like an army of desert skeletons dressed in jewels, a throng of vultures for choir? And where will you find the jeweler of these bones?

Should your voice devour the sun, or capsize a thundercloud, if your lips provoke an asteroid, and your lungs unseat the moon, make answer from the windburned hemorrhage of sunset, kisses blown to the ivory stars, armor spun from mirrored rain.

Divulge all the zeroes in infinity and the infinity of every zero, divulge it in speech of encrypted simplicity, in the paradox of a truth unexpressably expressed, unmissably missed, unjustifiably justifiable, that both does as it doesn't, exist.

For no moment pretend this will repair the crazed blossoms of grievance, pacify the glower of ill-used daisies, rebut the winter's cremations; no words will ever ransom bread from the oven, or clay from the kiln. It is not given to us to sedate the sob in its hurricane, nor to furlough the sweat on its guillotine, nor to decoy for the fragile eternity of one single light-second the incinerator's glowing greed.

No purpose beyond tingeing the whispering lens-glass with hints of meaningful color. To sheath the hopeless fracture in the cushioning plumage of river-snow.

For the sea affords no coronations, accounts no single drop king. Each moves as well as the next, in every and its own direction, knowing that it is the breakwall that is broken, as the moving instant opens on unbordered horizons, where shine spears the void, refuting nothing, with compassion, in each eternal act, of choice.

Downsize Blues

2010-09-03T09:23:00.001-04:00

You know I worked my whole damn lifetime.
Since I was ten plus two.
Worked like that was all there was,
now what I'm supposed to do?
Cuz I been downsized.
I got them downsize blues.
Although I'm upwardly mobile,
I got them downsize blues.

On the job before sunrise,
home after Letterman's through,
worked every weekend and holiday,
until I got the news,
that I been downsized.
I got them downsize blues.
Now if profits are shooting up,
why I got downsize blues?

CEO says lean and mean,
next thing he's leanin' on you,
means to take your job away,
expects that you'll approve,
or you'll be downsized,
you'll get them downsize blues.
Now its a corporate phenomenon,
you'll get them downsize blues.

Billions in stock options,
golden parachutes,
tellin' me that more is less,
but more is for the few,
that's why I'm downsized,
I got them downsized blues,
now if profits are rocketing,
why I got downsized blues?

There's something I keep wonderin',
it's got me pretty confused,
if all this work has disappeared,
what work is left to do,
after you're downsized,
you got those downsize blues.
You know somebody's gettin' rich,
but you got downsize blues.
You may have upscale ambitions,
but you got them downsize blues.

Props for Propaganda

2010-08-27T06:16:00.003-04:00

With the recent "surge" in public ignorance measures, I was reminded of some poems I wrote in the late '90s, based around language use in the publication "Advertising Age". All in all, the propaganda system seems to be doing just swimmingly.

Advertising Age: March 9, 1998

2010-08-27T06:13:00.001-04:00

"The historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful daily reflection that any society ever made of its entire range of activities."
Marshall McLuhan

Brand building
motivated. Slamming-policy
touted. Licensing deal formed and a CD-ROM
in your cereal playing
virtual baseball. Optimizer edges claimed
while eyeing major shifts
in daytime. Dunking for competing
Donuts, as new facial lines are
readied and national anti-drugs
slated: Sicilian pies aimed for American
launch. Prices are click-
throughed, rental campaigns
pushed, tombstones
flagged. Diversity slow
but coming. Surveyed brochureware dominates
as Pokemon invasion nears. Systems-
integrators compete between agencies placing a
Red Sky premium on creative genius.
Organic blaze of online trails, interactive
boxtops in LA, and Robert Duvall
does not rate well "in key
areas like stylish, recognition, fun,
sexy." Hurricane Monica
outstripped
even the OJ tsunami.
The language is safe
for another week

$AT

2010-08-22T12:51:00.001-04:00

Asked for
validation of the test, they
give you correlation with results
from another test. Validation
of that? Still more correlation.
In the end, standards are founded
on the Almighty. And God isn’t answering

His email. The Inbox
is full. Sure, the Auto-Responder lets you Know
(Nietzsche aside) He’s there. Thank you for
your civic participation. But the Bible had
already answered your questions before
you asked.

Start there.

Trust
US.

Spark, or Even Friction Sheds Light

2010-08-12T22:10:00.000-04:00

Above all they are what scrapes from the underside between street
and rusting car-muffler streaking way past midnight on a
desolate interstate, the conflict of opposing speeds teased into
microscopic flames of irreconcileable disagreement between
destination and being,
the inadvertent hulk of long-delayed repairs, the chug-rumble of
industrial horsepower and diesel fumes mixing with inherited
poverty and the urgent need to be
where we are going.
Even friction sheds light when it gets hot
enough, this is the law of whetstones,
the way fingers can feel grit pregnant
with spark.

How easy it is to forget
that the invisible is always there
even when you can't see it
as clearly as a filling spinnaker or parachute,
even when it isn't slapping your face
blowing through a lover's hair as you watch
the engine of the full moon
rising with the tide from the sands of a tropical island.

But when some sky-diving meteor
sprays the night atmosphere with solid air's
ignition, made light by supersonic
collision, having pierced heaven
from the fathomless cliffs
of nothingness --- who can separate that
fierce and frantic dance from the
romance of luminous vibrating frenzy?
It is an instant you think you will always
remember, as fate rumbles on
with its deafening
muffler.

Happy Fifth Birthday

2010-08-06T21:14:00.002-04:00

Today is Jackson's 5th birthday. What follows (or is it what precedes?) is something I wrote about 6 months before he was born. Before he was born, I referred to him as Noam.

Coordinated magic

2010-08-06T21:12:00.000-04:00

1/30/2005

Dear Noam,

The ultrasound, unhearable, has made you, invisible, tangible. Inescapable. Or, with a bow to Wallace Stevens, your reality has been made more acute, by the unreal.

As I struggle to write this, I'm repeatedly amused at how there is no way to say exactly when "now" is.

As I write? As you read? Or, inbetween? My future, your past, existing as it always must, always has, nowhere, except, in imagination.

Each day you perform miracles. The way ten tiny toes is a miracle. Ten tiny fingers. A heartbeat from a heart the size of a pea. This synchrony of coordinated magic, mundanely predictable, profusely anatomized, and just as unapologetically, unfathomable --- it is so hard to be awake when all the miracles are already named.

At some version of "now", the whole of you is the size of my pinky knuckle, floating in a sac of seawater, sucking food from your mother's blood through a straw of flesh in her womb. While at some other version of "now", ten million unknowable chances farther along, you attempt to parse (why will you care?) the bemused thickness of my diction.

In case you haven't guessed, I can't wait to speak to you. In fact, I'm in such a hurry to speak to you that, keyboard in hands, and ever so one-sidedly, I have already stopped waiting.

You have arrived at a fantastic time, and a fantastic place.

Your mother and I are so glad to have you and to welcome you to this "cruel, crazy, beautiful" planet, and the limitless possibilities of a human race.

Natarajan Sick Home Blues

2010-08-02T06:38:00.001-04:00

Shiva said to Vishnu,
'hey man what've I got to lose,
I got a bad case of them
Nataraj blues?
I feel like dancing but J. Robert
Oppenheimer's got me so confused.
He's playing Jesus
while Mel Gibson's up on TV
reading the news.'

Stop makin' waves,
or we'll send a tsunami.
Stop preaching peace,
or we'll call you a commie.
Stop asking questions
about lies the authorities tell you are true.
You better start stopping now or you're gonna end up
with them Natarajan blues.

You ask for dinner,
but the plates are tectonic.
You ask for justice,
get a plague that's bubonic.
You ask for freedom
and they ask you 'hey will terrorism do?'
We've Gitmoized your rights
as the orchestra plays the Natarajan blues.

Needed a vacation
got sent to Abu Ghraib,
where the dogs of liberation
are so rich they can't beg.
The prisoners all wear leashes,
and the German shepherds do whatever German shepherds do,
while a man outstretched like Jesus
wears electrodes and a hood to dance the Natarajan blues.

Sure must be homesick 'cause my home
makes me sick.
GI-Jesus in the White House
has a miraculous new trick.
Speaks so loud that you can't hear his lies,
but his big stick it wears Edward Teller nuclear designer shoes.
He makes Fallujah disappear while
Mel Gibson reads the Natarajan blues.

Talked to the sheriff,
I said we needed a posse,
but he looked highly suspicous
that I might be highly
Selassie. And on his way to Nuremberg a soldier asked me
'what am I supposed to do?'
I said 'we all gotta Nataraj but
when your orders lead to Nuremberg, hey man,
refuse.'

U-Haul

2010-07-24T06:41:00.002-04:00

________________________________

In Greece, a moving van
is a metaphor. Not
a metaphor for a metaphor, just
a metaphor. In English a metaphor is not
a Greek moving van,
and so a moving van is
an English metaphor
for metaphor.

Poets speak in movingvans.

Bad poets in dead movingvans. Good poets
in movingvans that chirp.
The more we chirp the more our words become
Greek to us, our very beta-alph
reverting to worms and myth.

Invisible feathers tickle distant ears
at seven hundred miles an hour,
transfer their furniture to
myelinated houses
as soft as swans.

Like it or not
we all speak Greek.

Chirp chirp.

Surpassing the Test

2010-07-16T14:03:00.000-04:00

Everybody knows the dice are loaded
everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.
---- Leonard Cohen

If you're over 18 you've probably taken the SAT or ACT at some point in your life; the great gatekeepers for the college dream, the drawbridge of the nation-wide scheme that purports itself to be an educational meritocracy. Now I'm sure that there are some people who'd disagree but remain convinced that most of you who've been exposed to this know that whatever it is these things measure it is not an ability any reasonable human being would be proud of or identify as central to the highest shared aspirations of humanity.

Oddly, despite the fact that we all have first hand experience of the absurdity of these tests, they persist, as if they were inevitable facts of nature, changing about as fast as continents drift; a mental form of torture inevitable as tooth decay and dental drills. Despite our living in what is supposedly a democracy we don't vote this absurdity out of existence; as if perhaps our democracy were spelled 'm-o-c-k'.

Now part of this I am sure stems from the degree to which we have internalized the hidden premises of these tests and think our own less than perfect scores reflect something that is terribly terribly wrong with us that might not be obvious as long as we just keep silent. But what exactly are the premises of these tests? They suggest that what they measure is 'scholastic aptitude', but unlike any other aptitude, say like with a hammer and a nail, this is supposedly one you can't improve by practice, one that does not reflect previous educational opportunity but depicts an innate and unchanging ability.

Doesn't it seem like there are two Grand Canyon sized holes in this theory? First, if some people's innate abilities are lower shouldn't they be exposed to the best universities and education in order to promote justice and equality throughout the society -- to give them an equal chance to compete? (Where is the sense in giving more advantages to those who already have them, especially if they in no sense earned them, remember this 'aptitude' is supposedly innate.) And secondly, and even more importantly, don't we all already know that nothing these tests measure is innate? Why is it that even second and third rate schools have special courses to do nothing other than prepare kids for these tests, that there is a whole industry for doing this? And can anyone really believe that you could give the same test to someone who spoke French, or Swahili, or Chinese and that they would have every chance to do just as well as native English speakers? Clearly a person who couldn't even read the questions could not do well on such tests; but the language someone speaks is just as clearly not innate. Even if you translated the questions directly into French for example you would still confront the fact that something as basic as grammar is a social construction; whereas double-negatives are banned in English they are required in French, ne c'est pas?

But then again, doesn't everybody know the dice are loaded, and roll with their fingers crossed? That if your middle name is Dubya for Bush you have a million times the 'innate intelligence' of someone whose middle name is N for Blackman or G for Asian? And isn't that what people are really saying when they claim they 'just want what's best for their children'? If parents want to love their children don't they want that love to make a positive difference and improve their chances for success? Can anyone really blame a parent for wanting to make a positive difference, for wanting to make all the positive difference that they can in their children's lives. And when you try to make sure that your kids get to go to the best schools aren't you at the same time making sure that someone else's kids are in the worst? Unless you're living in Lake Woebegone Minnesota there is no way that all the kids can be above average; for every school that's above average there has to be one that's below; that's the way averages work

I remember I once asked the poet Major Ragain if the world were constructed in such a way that you could either have the greatest pleasure coupled to the greatest pain, or the least pain coupled to the least pleasure, how would you choose to live your life? And without skipping a beat he said 'right in the middle'.

Maybe that is the key. Maybe we can meet in the middle. Maybe instead of denouncing this as mediocrity we can recognize it for what it is: centeredness, well-roundedness, and understand that its opposite is not 'ex-cellence' but ex-tremity, narrowness, and that this leads to a gated community version of success that only regards itself as free when the universal surveillance cameras are watching behind the razor-wired walls. That the only true education is the one that encompasses and seeks to embody the cosmopolitan diversity of the world's rainbow, and not the blind bland blonde ideal of monochromatic Aryan supremacy? And don't kid yourself, the inventors of those self-evidently ridiculous tests, the SAT's and their predecessors the Stanford-Binet's and Army Alpha's and Beta's, these people were avid hereditarian eugenicists. Buried in the premises of those tests, the one's we use to choose who is anointed in our Marquis of Queensbury struggle for survival, is the rock-ribbed conservative belief that the Nordic races that first murdered their way into the manifest destiny of American rule were innately superior to everyone else --- and they have routinely finagled the numbers to the convenience of whatever drool-lipped spit-head happened to be in charge (what were George W.'s SAT's?) ever since.

When you look at the pedigree of these tests, see how they were used to restrict immigration quotas, ultimately preventing many European Jews from escaping Hitler's concentration camps, and used to justify state policies of forced sterilization against poor and minority women continuing on until 1972 (many if not most of whom were of normal intelligence but who were miscast as imbeciles by these innately flawed tests) --- how can anyone, anyone whose fingers aren't crossed, believe in these flagrant intellectual frauds? How can people who consider themselves educated, much less educators, professors, and educational leaders --- how can they ally themselves to this system of intellectual atrocity perpetrated in the name of the very education it defames? This would defy belief even if they'd been eliminated 70 years ago -- the tests were obsolete before they were invented, and the fact that they are still in use is a blatant warning that the people who are in charge and who have been in charge of education for more than a generation are incompetent and worse, and are not to be trusted with taking out the garbage much less the living treasure of our children's and our society's future.

And the only, I think the only thing that can be said in the defense of the history of these tests is that we must not allow them to be replaced --- by something worse. That if the interests of the persons who have been misrunning this system from time immemorial are allowed to continue to define the policy and direction of the country's schools, then it doesn't matter what the tests are, or what the rules are --- the plague of selfish founding-father hagiographic ignorance that has governed our states from their slave-codifying constitution will continue with the execution of the ideals of justice and human equality which alone can make for a better life for all, a life worth living, and what is truly, a more perfect union. And this can only happen when the ideal of the middle overcomes the illusory ideal of the extreme; when balance outweighs excellence; sharing replaces winning; social commitment surpasses obsessive personal security. When we stop speechifying as if we were in this to win, --- and begin to acknowledge that we are in this to--gether.

Joe-fisted

2010-07-09T15:53:00.001-04:00

Before I even open my crumblegrit eyes,
moneymaker this day as yet
unshaken, the deathgurgle sounds from the kitchen
and in she comes,
Joe-fisted --- ambidextrous with
100% mugged-
Columbian.
Caffo-trafficker,
a steaming stream of liquid
consciousness-raising hanked
to each wrist. I savor the electric drip
simplicity of it.

The potter's wheel of morning
has renewed the sky to fired bisque,
and in this slumberspace,
quilt-stitched and down-cushioned,
I am as rich as four walls and a
nailgunned ceiling
will admit. Robed in white terry, she smiles,
her tumble of brown curls
still wet.

For a few ecliptic degrees
the world can wait like 35 cents
of newsprint on the porch
outside
the door.

Freedom Fighter

2010-07-02T06:27:00.000-04:00

Lady MacBeth had it wrong. They were sure.
With enough elbow grease and ethnic cleanser you can
eliminate just about any stain. It helps
if dissent is properly ordained, and
only secular priests allowed
to survey the crime scene. It helps.
Assassination policies, proxy wars, germ banks…
preached with the right disdain, as for a dumpster baby's
uninsured mother, the lifestyle illness
of some gay arriviste --- erased almost
effortlessly from the arsenal of official history.

They could tell you that history is a drumfire
where the poor and weak-minded, homeless,
warm their vagrant hands on the cinders
of their rights. An oil drum.
That life is a grave and death
a grave robber. Murder, a freedom
fighter, for and against. They could
tell you this, for a price.

But instead they will recite parrot arias
on inadvertant lethality. Censer-headed
exhale their words, a cloud forest
of gorilla mist and cavesmoke.
Lip sync the gospel of personal
responsibility like an ethnic weapon,
a living weapon aiming for controlled
incapacitation. They will issue their fatwas
in the name of piecemaking: heard wrongly if not
interpreted under a spell.

Why this sacrament of ruby throats
at the hummingbird feeder, wings
too fast to be seen
at a single place in time, the fact
severally located and ghostly
transparent? Why this big budget
blockbuster offering in the darkness of a movie
theater, strobing like the rotor of
a crashing medevac chopper
into the dream-ending ocean
of peer review?

History will not be told
by the needles of Australian lip sew-ers. They are run
over by search engines that take them for
sewers, enlightenment
refugees frightened by illumination
rounds fired over satellite phones
to the midnight Potala Palace
of cable news network chain-
store commercials.
Nor will it be told by those chased beneath
ghetto birds, windbeaten like pallborne leaves,
living donors basting in the land of the free.
History is a pasteurized op-ed piece
filed by the dean's list
of a warlord academy, a cold
fusion of sub-munition bomblets, lilac
scented machetes, magic carpet bombings
for Baghdad thieves, ghostwritten national interest
waivers, and ion beam
sterilizations, totally lacking adult
supervision.

Not to remember, but celebrate,
the luminaria are lit. Surviving no longer
than a smile, refusing
to submit.

Sure Thing

2010-06-25T06:30:00.002-04:00

I remember when dollars-to-donuts used to mean
a sure thing. Now,
it’s just a mosquito’s eyelash
from even money, and
you don’t need the Palomar observatory to see
where this is heading. Of course

I have always preferred
the donut, its spongy luxury and
silky goo, the
stubbled sweet intensity of sprinkles,
the raucous variety of frosted and jellied
stickiness; the donut is a universe of
transcendant pleasure and you can
have that empire of ice cream.

All those years when I never heard anyone
make the inversion: donuts
to dollars. The unstable dilemma of its
proposition: long shot
or someone just being
clever, or just a subtle way of
anticipating the inevitable
reversal of the unexpected and the dead
certain. Getting great odds,
on a sure thing.

As if words were designed
to unsay themselves. Unmean
themselves. Un-
donut themselves.

Dollars-
to-donutholes.

Dear Osama,

2010-06-15T09:47:00.001-04:00

I strongly oppose answering violence with violence, and so do not personally approve of your vile sponsorship of the attacks of September 11, 2001, despite the fact that you and the entire Arab world do have justifiable grievances against the US Empire.

But as long as you are determined to be, all the terrorist you can be, I think you should consider an entirely different approach to the terrorist ... biz.

Have you heard of "Epstein's doctrine of regulatory takings?" I know it sounds sort of dry, but hear me out. Richard Epstein is a professor or law at the University of Chicago and Osama, forgive me for being so bold, when it comes to terrorism you don't hold a candle to the leading lights of American jurisprudence. I'm sure you did your best to learn from the CIA agents we sent to train you and your forces during the good terrorist war in Afghanistan, but they were strictly --- minor league.

Well, to cut a long story short, Epstein got the idea that a lot of big US corporations could make a fortune if, instead of being forced to obey or even minimally cooperate with US environmental regulations, they could just sue the government for having the gall to try and limit them. The practical upshot of this is that if, say, a US mining company dumps poison into the water supply of some community which then passes a law to make them stop, the mining company can sue the government for the lost profits that have been "taken" by this "regulation". Do you see where I'm going with this?

If you want to kill huge numbers of Americans with poisons, or bioweapons, or chemicals that would melt a cockroach, all you've got to do is --- become a corporation. As long as your cash flow is in the tens of millions, you won't have any problems.

Look at the beauty of it; you get to kill tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of Americans, and nobody will dare to touch you. The courts will be on your side: the police, the FBI, the chamber of commerce, most of the endowed chairs of the top universities in the country, they'll all be outraged at any hint of someone trying to restrict your free trade rights (they might even call this your free speech rights) to poison however many people you want in the patriotic pursuit of being, if not filthy rich, then, filthier richier. You get rich terrorizing the country you hate, and its poor pay extra taxes to reward you for killing them.

My motive for giving you such good advice as it were, gratis? Honestly, and this is the God's honest, I figure that if you start a corporation that gets government subsidies to kill people, well, (and Osama I hate to be the one to break this to you but you are really not very popular here; your image consultant has got to go) people might finally... connect the dots, and realize that corporations using NAFTA's Chapter 11 are just as guilty of terrorism as you are, and we should be putting them in jail just like we should be putting you in jail.

And that wouldn't really be such a bad bargain even from your perspective. OK, sure, you go to prison for the rest of your life. But without these corporations and the governments they've had in their pockets for the last 200 years or so, your country could learn how to govern itself in accordance with its own culture, without the interference of a greedy superpower.

And free from the Pravda-style corporate-controlled news, my country might start to regret its role in violently dominating others. You'd have to go to jail, but you'd get to be a martyr, and somehow, that seems like something you've been aiming for.

As that famous American philosopher Hunter S. Thompson once said "when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." And when the going gets terrifying, the terrifying… incorporate.

The only thing I ask is that you let me use you: as an example.

Pullin' outta here to win

2010-06-11T07:05:00.001-04:00

As my mom tells the story, she was doing light chores at her mom’s house shortly before I was born.

When her sister Gayle, a registered nurse, asked how far apart her contractions were she said, “five minutes.”

Gayle, whose temperament was mercurial in the laziest of times, went apeshit. “GET, TO THE HOSPITAL, NOW ”

This was a second pregnancy, and my mom who had had a long delivery with her first didn’t realize that second pregnancies are a whole different animal. Express delivery.

But there was no car. My dad was out buying a surprise (washing machine, two in diapers.) So the only thing to do was to get a lift from the neighbor, Mr. Toohey.

By trade he was an undertaker. His car, a hearse.

I was ferried into this world in a shiny new hearse.

It was my birthday. Friday the thirteenth.

I was reminded of this juxtaposition when, on my fiftieth birthday, I heard the news that Tim Russert had died at 58. Another Friday the thirteenth.

To tell the truth, I was never much of a Russert fan: too centrist for my taste, too obsequious to power. If you want to see the world from a viewpoint of about six inches distance from a politician’s ass, he’s your political genius. But if that’s an aroma and an ambience that fail to entice you, Russert holds little charm.

Nonetheless, I think his demise pinched a nerve in the body politic, a sense of the ubiquitous proximity and unpredictability of death. How you can go out even when you’re at the top of your game.

In the final analysis, I could easily have forgotten the whole incident had I not chanced across the follow-up report on his funeral on the evening news, where John McCain and Barack Obama were forced to sit side by side, shoulder to shoulder, at his funeral. Two men vying for what soon will seem an inevitability, the title of the most powerful man on the globe, forced to submit largely in silence, by the power of the grave.

As they rolled the credits on the NBC Nightly News, they played a clip from the funeral: it was Bruce Springsteen by satellite hook-up performing “Thunder Road.” The payoff for a lifetime of political butt-aroma: Springsteen performing at your funeral, and the most powerful men in the world pretending to be friends, or at least behaving civilly.

It’s been a long time since I’ve listened to Springsteen, and I got the idea of checking out “Born to Run” from the local library. But they didn’t have it when I went, and so I made due with what they did have: “The Ghost of Tom Joad.”

From the first incredibly poignant wail on the harmonica, steel wool tumbleweed with spangles of silver, he had me. And the echoes of Steinbeck’s original...

“Now Tom said Mom, wherever there's a cop beatin' a guy
Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries...
Wherever somebody's strugglin' to be free
Look in their eyes Mom you'll see me.

... I was just enthralled. And I started wondering, why hadn’t I thought about Tom Joad in such a long time? “The Grapes of Wrath” was such a wonderful book, why has it been almost completely forgotten?

And I was reminded that despite a couple of decades of Steinbeck’s being surveilled by the FBI for possible communist sympathies, he ended his life as a prominent supporter of Lyndon Baines Johnson, and the Vietnam War. He actually wrote dispatches for the Long Island newspaper Newsday from Vietnam, and provided intellectual cover for Johnson at a time when intellectual cover for the war was sorely lacking. The creator of Tom Joad as cheerleader for the napalming of millions of Vietnamese Okies.

The switchbacks of history are truly myriad.

Which brings me back to the National Cathedral with John McCain, and Barack Obama, how McCain the war hero and POW would not be who he is but for America’s invasion of Vietnam, how he was, at least to some small degree, the product of Steinbeck’s political cover.

How Obama had the foresight to try and head off another Vietnam, George Bush’s Vietnam, by opposing the invasion of Iraq.

And I ask myself, when I look in their eyes, do I see Tom Joad?

Nothing of the sort.

These ideas have been rambling around in my head for months now, but just a little short of complete, as if the jigsaw was missing just one piece. And then this past week, it hit.

After 80 years, the specter of the Great Depression has risen from the rubble-pile of history lessons and paraded onto the theater marquee of front page headlines, and evening newscasts. As the sons of Vietnam’s Steinbeck vie for the presidency in Tim Russert’s lee, Tom Joad, the son of Oklahoma’s Steinbeck, stirs from his stock-market-crash grave.

Who will foreclose on the Joad family farm? Who will bail out the billionaire bank-sters?

Of course, in the end, it wasn’t “The Ghost of Tom Joad” that Springsteen was singing, but “Thunder Road,” a different Springsteen altogether : “it’s a town full of losers, I’m pullin’ outta here to win.”

Seen at the War Protest, April 20, 2002

2010-06-04T11:42:00.001-04:00

I believe there is no place for two people in our country… Palestinians are like lice. You have to take them out like lice.
---Rehavam Ze'evi, Israeli Minister of Tourism, assassinated by Palestinian extremists in October, 2001.

Someone has removed the Star of David
from the center of a
light blue-on-white Israeli
flag, and replaced it with a Nazi
swastika. Accustomed as I am to
the gruesome inversion
of Palestinian cobble-slings
and the underdog King
of the Jews --- Goliath now
a battalion of Israeli tanks ---
this new semeiotic
violence succeeds
in shocking even
me.

Certainly,
certainly, I tell myself,
there must be a difference of degree
and kind
between the exterminations of
the Master Race
and the depradations, universally
denounced, of Sharon's
invasion of the West Bank.
Not just
the numbers,
smaller a thousand times,
not just
the culpability of terrorism's
provocation,
not just
the lack of any attempt to kill in-
discriminately.
But attaching to this Hitler and Auschwitz
the atrocity
of the Shoah.

But the facts of the matter,
the revanchist facts
on the ground, testify
with cartographic eloquence,
from Ma'ale Yisrael, Ma'ale Adumim,
Givat Ze'ev, Kiryat Safer, Gush Etzion,
and Har Homa where 90%
of Umm Tuba/Sur Bahar has been
disappeared, settlements
spliced to mesh net into noose.
With holocaust
survivors rising in the Knesset to denounce
the use of identity tag tattoos on
Palestinians being mass arrested,
while the XXX pornography
whip-pans from satellite to TV screen,
jump-cutting the whirlwind
scene to obscene
from the Passover massacre in Netanyu
to the rubblecadaver that once was
Jenin, I keep asking,
why? Why, why, why, why does it take so much
slaughter, to continue to lie,
to yourself?

Cut down in high feast
as the shards of their self-
detonating assassin
penetrated them at their Seder,
what in the hell were they
celebrating? The deliverance
of Moses? The Divine
infanticide of the first born
of Egypt?

What type
of Promised Land
is this? AB-? O+?
Or Texas light sweet?
I am tired of having my collar tailored
with the blade of Abraham.
I am tired of having Jerry Falwell and John Ashcroft
play George Orwell's Big Brother.
I am sick to death of having Never Again
being used to excuse
it Never Ends.

Isn't it time,
hasn't that midnight tolled,
aren't we too old for that pumpkin
to still be a carriage?
Isn't it time
for the horses of this apocalypse to turn
back into mice?
Isn't it time
to admit that the One True God
with the Three True Multiple
Muslim-Christian-Jewish Personality disorders
needs to be worshipped freely
in any way
that isn't
literal,
or lethal?

There is no more room
for faith based initiatives
launching passenger jet missiles
into the occupied territories
of downtown Manhattan.
There is no more room
for faith based initiatives
bombing gay night clubs
and family planning centers.
There is no more room
for faith based initiatives
engaging in pre-emptive retaliations
to colonize the land of God.
And there is absolutely no more room
for faith based initiatives
launching bunker busting nukes
from Dimona, Lop Nor, Islamabad
or the nearest B-52 to service
the insatiable 4x4 god of
Iraqi-Kuwaiti-Iranian-Sa-udi-Arabian
Caspian basin crude.

Somebody has replaced the Star of David
with a Nazi swastika,
my God my literalist fundamentalist God
I say from the protest in Washington,
I wonder who.

Naming

2010-05-28T20:14:00.001-04:00

------ for Chris Burden, Maya Lin, and Arthur C. Danto

When I stare at the stars of a winter's night,
and think how they too are far wiser than we,
unthinking obey their own stare decisis,
relentless explode but do not disagree,
I am
reminded.

When I walk by the black wall of long dead invaders,
when I walk by the black wedge that numbers the dead,
and I think of how they were betrayed by their leaders,
in the white marble dome where the Congress convenes,
I am
reminded.

When I look at the black and white photo of children,
as they scream and they race from the chemical fire,
and Pan Thi Kim Phuc the eleven-year-old naked,
the terror on her face as the naked skin sears,
I am
reminded,

that the wall of their dead would continue for miles,
that the wall of their dead rises high in the air,
that the unnumbered millions graffitti the silence
to the space and the silence the nameless adhere.

Tectonics

2010-05-21T06:10:00.002-04:00

Icebergs of granite float on an ocean
of fire, a luminescing sea of
liquid rock. We know this.
We know
this, though we talk about it
little, agree for the purposes
of discussion to heed
the pock marks of lava only
intermittently, when active
or threatened.
'Like a rock
I was wet as I could be
Like a rock
I lit up reality.
Oo-hoo, like a rock.'
As if solid ground meant more
than an eggshell on molten
albumin, shaved ice
in a boiling martini, as if
the bubbles did not
wash up the erections
we call the Himalaya, as if
the collide-ascope of continents did
not shift with the churning
currents below. The certainties
we call foundations, the bedrocks
of knowledge vanish
with a swirling dream we are merely
too quick to see.
Just so, just so.
The hard becomes
soft, the permanent
fleeting the dead
alive with candent

heat. Our metaphors
fail
us. Erroneous as sight,
shaky as a cliff,
solid as the wind,
superficial as the sea,
our metaphors fail
us, and we
them. We rehearse
the chains
of thought, the script of progress pre-
ordained. Know that
we ignore and in ignoring
know,
beneath the script of marble
tongues the very planet
lives aglow.

Cosset

2010-05-14T08:46:00.001-04:00

Oh to be cosseted with russet
potatoes, gussets on our crockets,
our pockets full of Rimbaud
and ducats. Banquets of suppose,
rainbows of ribbon,
troves of Flaubert
and busloads of Gibbon.
Oh to be nestled in soft down and kittens,
nuzzled and cocoa-ed with steaming hot milk,
songs that are Orphic and tunes out of
Rilke. Oh to be jolly in gullies of
golly, to spool like a fool unaware
of Fate's tally. To rally around
like a kid in no hurry,
amused as a goose
in a Newfoundland flurry.

Division of Labor

2010-05-07T05:39:00.000-04:00

At least you had a mother. All four of mine
denied responsibility. All four denied
maternity. The sensibly-shoed girlnextdoor
firstwife of my selfmade
millionaire sperm-parent: my
contracting-mother. The chesty blonde neo-Aryan
Ivyleague Phi Beta Kappa who skipped Con-law
to mine her uterus for its haploid yolk-sacs; my
egg mother. The highschoodropout daytime
soapaholic who
triple-trimester-timeshared her belly
with my wormfishchildlike zygote: my
gestation-mother. And last,
the onetime stripper trophywife with the
silicon-valley for
cleavage: my
custodial-mother.
What, with a post-restante
prenatality, an au pair roulette-wheel
upbringing with a
UN's-worth of nationalities, and
the synthetic mother's-milk, it's
as if nothing in my life isn't
artificial, isn't queer as having a
hypodermic needle for a sex-partner.

I spent my formative years with
laboratory mice wearing human ears on their backs:
among french fries classified
technically by FDA as a natural
insecticide: where cornfields grew human
antibodies and Monsanto implanted patented
Terminator sterility into next-generation
seed.

Is there something wrong
with me that I wanted
a mother's love and not just
a fertility protocol and a sequence
of genes? That I resent being conceived by
the division of labor? That I
need something more than
things to eat that have been -- "linked to"
items that were once
food? That I suspect these biotech
improvements have less to do with
feeding the hungry than
digesting their souls into intellectual
property.

Only Hallmark loves me
on mother's day.
No one's ever even bothered
to hate me. It's like I'm a jigsaw puzzle of a
Jackson Pollock and it doesn't matter
how, or when, or even if
the pieces ever fit
together, the box makes it clear:
some assembly required.

Why should you, why should anyone
care about me, this handful of nucleotides
grown on a culture medium of
fee-for-service medicine and
recombinant genetic pride? When three-fifths
patented, the motherless mammal leaves
a five-fifths hole, in the for-profit
subsidiary, replacing
a once human
soul?

Got Milk?

2010-04-30T05:25:00.000-04:00

There's a sequence in the film "Life and Debt", explaining how American dairy exports are so heavily subsidized by the government, that American farmers would still turn a profit even if they gave their milk away free. You see hundred-count pallets of fifty pound sacks of powdered U.S. milk forklifted off cargo ships in Jamaica; dried udder-spurt immune to the tropical heat.

Black waiters in flawless white blazers, white as antebellum cotton, bear glass pitchers of this primordial mammalian babydrink to the linened tables of international tourist hotels only too happy to serve globalized cornflakes for breakfast. These are luxury multinational conglomerate hotels with gun-turrets, where armed guards survey whitewashed stone fences crowned by double helices of razorwire.

But in rural areas where bare feet trod dirt roads to bring five gallon buckets of fresh squeeze to a local distributor, where, unsubsidized, they can't afford to sell their backbreak for less than free, thousands of gallons of calfsuck constipate the shiny holding tanks, stainless steel breasts of local industry: the market so tied up the owners sluice the spigot to flood the concrete floor and unpaved streets with latex sheets of bovine goodness. Streams of milk gorge what passes for gutters, which with the scant exceptions of catlap and doglick, speed to curdlestench rot.

I imagine this scene magnified; land drenched by thunderheads of milkstorm. Billionshot enfilades of tropical milkdrop tit-pelt downpour. Churnsplash of Nestle-less Quick; bubblefoam arroyo-surge, frilled into cancan petticoat ruff where jetskinned tumblesurfers choke-drown-ride a Klan-colored cataract, dragooned into a transcontinental milkshake by a double-edged and lobby-bribed freetrade agreement.

For-profit-export-dumped, the milk is more lethal than free; the process resembling the torture of men force-fed water with their penises tied off; at once glutted and stopped, unbearably pained from the inside by an urgency they can by no means relieve.

From atop a Bretton-Woods fiat-money Matterhorn, the newly christened Level-Playing-Field, the torturers broadcast whirlwinds of bombast about the dint of hard work and personal responsibility, about getting ahead on your merits.

Systematically, and with epic condescension, any suggestion that merit should not be inherited is blown out by a privately owned and nuclear powered windtunnel whose name has been copyrighted and trademarked. It is called, The Free Press.

In this Panglossian Free Press, only the best get ahead, and all is for the best. Worry is superfluous, criticism insane. It will not be heard, it will be blown out. If need be, with your brain.

The History of Futurism

2010-04-22T22:24:00.001-04:00

This is a standardized test
in the history of futurism
the vortex of vorticism
the Rubik's cube of cubism
the Boccionian continuity of unique forms in space
traces of a nude descending a staircase,
some Duchamps disingenue disarmed
by the porcelain art found
in a urinal. This is the story of the glacial pace
of educational reform, a summer snowstorm
above the clearcut
treeline, making an a-bee-cee-dee-line
in the number 2 graphite of the promised land.

How did P.T. Barnum do it?
How did he turn the schools into
the domain of trained seals
and dancing elephants, a chartreuse
box kite of groupthink
plutogoguery? How did he induce
this permanent state of slovenly
dishabille, simultaneously banal,
and surreal, free to think or feel
nothing beyond a curriculum
a light-second wide
and deep as a carpenter ant.
Where some Turkey born on Mt. Ararat
effervesces fulsomely about the infanta
flooding the world with Velasquez
and the rest of the conquerors, so there's no time
left for Juan de Pareja, or Sojourner
Truth, so there's no room
to consider inconvenient genocides.

Sometime. Sometime.
Sometime before you die there will be
a chance for you to boycott,
this gunshot, shotgun shackled demockracy,
boycott the snoring scar of feather-tar
platitude, boycott the Avagadro's number
of lies you were made
to memorize, before being apportioned
some small opportunity
to criticize.

Even surprise, after all may await
the first sign of winter
plumage, even surprise may not cease
from breastfeeding until it's well
into its teens, and the rote necessity demeans
creativity, the rote necessity teems with the deplorable
snoring passivity of Boer wars, and more wars,
and star wars, what's-in-the-store-wars
crocheting espionage with cactus needles
skirting the de-facto evil
of doing what you gotta do
saying what you gotta say
being what you gotta be
to get through.

By contrast
money is a McNeil River grizzly bear
with a mouthful of fishtailing,
not-much-longer-to-be-living salmon,
money has the Woodrow Wilson luxury
of playing Jesus Christ in some World War I
hall of mirrors Versailles.
Money has the option of buying the biggest
gun, reaping what it Clemenceau's.
Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes
you're the grizzly, but most of the time
you're the wiggle-tailed fish
no matter, no matter, no matter how much
you wish things were
otherwise, the all-too-well funded facts
abet your indecision and downward mobility
abet your studied imbecility
abet your drill pressed well oiled school ruled
facility of keeping the bunions of defeat
up against your own jugular.

You would have to quiz Einstein about the possibility
of living without Schwarzwalder kirschtorte, without
bittersweet chocolate, cherries, and whipped-cream schlagg,
about living without the fourth dimension
and what Picasso enclosed in those guitars and rose
colored gypsies, how he enclosed Gypsy
Rose Gaza Strippers, why he drank
espresso from fourth dimensional kiosks.
Ask not, ask not, ask not
what your Picasso can do for you, ask
not the smell of Venetian canals in summer.
We are just piazza pigeons cooled
by the fountain-mist of genius, we are
the fiddle-headed smoke curls
of recently snuffed votive candles. Suffocated
anacondas issued life jackets
of barbed wire. Oh Picasso,
I need Dramamine. Oh Einstein,
I need you to mention the Geneva conventions in
Guantanamo Bay. Need you to mention this
in the land where dissent is heard
only if it is ordained and brought to you
after a word from our Sponsor,
who art on Wall Street. Hallowed be thy
chain store curriculum, thy chain gang
brainwashing curriculum come
in the name of educational reform.
Give us this day our daily Oedipus
and his tragic flaw. Oedipus and his
tragic flaw, the man
who lives above the law,
the man who lives above the law
the man who lives above the law
is a motherfucking murderer.

The Quotation Marks of War

2010-04-16T06:38:00.001-04:00

My dirge is for mothers
unchilded,
to re-member the toddlers
not there,
the smiles that once flashed
from young faces,
replaced by blood dried
in fine hair.
No quote will undo their
slaughter,
nor the lucre of conquest
rescind,
no words will rekindle their
spirits,
such words are for quoting
the wind.

The dust and the ashes
will sizzle,
on the miles in the library
stacks,
the guns and the fetuses
nuzzle,
the moon and the concrete will
wax,
and jewelry once fashioned from
miracles,
offshore by the islands
within,
will laugh as it weeps
at the silence,
made of teardrops for quoting
the wind.

Corporations on Welfare

2010-04-08T21:07:00.002-04:00

(audio)

They may be talkin' free trade,
but the corporate raiders,
been shakin' down the welfare state.
Promisin' jobs just to feather their nests,
panhandlin' for a tax rebate,
and the pinstripe desperadoes,
want the workin' man to stick 'em up high,
despite their eight figure incomes and
their million dollar bonus,
say that profits should be subsidized.

Corporations on welfare,
tellin' me we gotta compete.
Corporations on welfare,
advertisin' corporate deceit.
Well if you want a free burger you're a lazy bum,
but a tax deferred billion's just cute,
only thing that matters down at Gucci gulch
is how to get yourself a share of the loot.

You can try to complain
bout their corporate reign,
but they keep tellin' you to let em eat cake.
Things'll be fine long as profits keep climbin',
no need to reevaluate,
and the limousine bronco busters,
want their diamonds on the workin' man's dime,
pay their big name attorney's just to buy the name Justice
as a trademark for corporate crime.

Corporations on welfare,
tellin’ me we gotta compete.
Corporations on welfare,
but my taxes subsidize their deceit.
When it comes time for dyin'
it's everybody's country,
other times it's just what you own.
Sometimes I wonder when the land I was born in
was sold out for a corporate loan.
Sometimes I wonder when the land I was born in
was sold out for a corporate loan.

Wake the ... Heck up Cleveland, You're Living in Denial

2010-04-02T05:54:00.001-04:00

(audio)

Disembodied severed heads,
everywhere I go I see,
disembodied severed heads,
while I buy my groceries,
disembodied severed heads,
even walking down the street,
disembodied severed heads,
when I'm watching my TV,
disembodied severed heads,
when I'm driving in my car,
disembodied severed heads,
lying on blankets in the park.
Disembodied severed heads,
T-shirts worn on fat man's chest,
disembodied severed heads,
babies suck'n on mama's breast,
disembodied severed heads,
on-the-hats of selfmade millionaires,
disembodied severed heads,
on-the-bus they ride with poor man's fare.
Disembodied severed heads,
they smile at me with big white teeth,
disembodied severed heads,
they smile at me with bulging eyes,
disembodied severed heads,
they smile at me like men set free,
disembodied severed heads,
when killed by broken treaty lies.
Disembodied severed heads,
we paint their skin fire-injun red,
disembodied severed heads,
makes no difference now their dead.
Disembodied severed heads,
Sambo Wahoo that's OK,
disembodied severed heads,
if he can turn the double play.
Disembodied severed heads,
we broadcast red faced golliwogs,
disembodied severed heads,
killed like they were rabid dogs.
Disembodied severed heads,
in broad daylight try to hide,
disembodied severed heads,
the facts that cannot be denied,
disembodied severed heads,
the founding fathers' genocide,
disembodied severed heads,
we treat like it's our city's pride.
Disembodied severed heads,
while Wahoo plays our city's shame,
disembodied severed heads,
is amplified with every game.
Disembodied severed heads,
disembodied severed heads,
disembodied severed heads.

Cycladic Architecture Refuting the Premises of Abstract Expressionism and the Greenbergian Critique of Illusionism

2010-03-26T21:02:00.004-04:00

(A little more than a decade ago, I traveled in Greece. Among other things, I got to go to Asclepius' temple in Epidaurus. I had a wonderful time ferrying among the Cyclades, impossible to capture literally. My itinerary was, to some extent, influenced by Henry Miller's inspired "The Colossus of Maroussi")

I have become a
blue shutter on a Cycladic
window that has melted into the spiraling streets
of an endless
white
city.

The city has disappeared
into a mountain
of shaving foam cloud
suspended in the sky
of my heart, land-legged
in a yawing sea.
Chalk white mosquito the size of a
hockey rink, humped
by a blue elephant. I am a Matisse
beneath whitewash, invisible symphony
dancing to a Charybdis of lava,
imprisoned by walls of nothingness
unimaginably thick. A whirlwind paper-clipped
to a turn-the-world. Place has
collapsed to a rectangular center,
a cubeless Picasso of Miles-horn and
Bernaise sauce, wildflower fireworks in a green sky,
a Memphis of marble tessera,
ironic gravity,
levitating geraniums
envased in shamrock,
an Acropolis wall-papered with postcards,
battalions of hemlock-Pepsi,
hemlock-Coke,
maieutic suntan,
heuristic dialectic.
Egyptian L'Ascaux.
A cock for Aesclepius,
a rock for Prometheus,
an orphanage for Rousseau,
a spider of Damocles
for a gigolo Odysseus.
X-rays with planetary half-value-layers
compress a rib in Tribeca
on a Roman fresco:
a song in St. Louis
on a skin of Drambuie.
Satellite to an eardrum,
laser to guitar strum,
megastar to drunken bum,
asphault of innuendo
tarnish on a monster of Loch Ness.
The shutter incandesces like the water on the sun
and I am all the Kodachrome in all the world,
tears that wed, bury, baptize,
birth. For-profit sex acts, numberless
once-in-a-lifetimes ubiquitous,
a flutter of milliseconds in
automated darkness,
eternity throttled with endless
loneliness -- borrowed memory.

Everywhere, the gods are at play;
in the afternoon,
in a shuttered room,
we sleep in love as if we
pray, shadows of a ferry's fumes
that dance while fast they blow
away.

Optimism

2010-03-19T05:54:00.002-04:00

(audio)

What we don't understand can't hurt us,
except that what we do understand can't hurt us either, and we don't understand this,
and so we don't understand
that we don't understand what we don't understand, and it hurts even to think about it
--- understand?

Not so much the understanding as the hurting;
how can you hurt what can't be worse? How can you
hurt what must of its own accord
die, which amounts to nothing
more than the sod it
in sleep so much
resembles. If,
as Socrates said, death is a positive
boon, if so there be no harm to it; a murderer
sheds our blood with favor, and we ought
savor the throes from whence it's bred.
Such palaver as spills kips of blood
on pricks of pins but empties butts
of senseless sin. Immune
to harm as a storm to invective,
alike to gain, we
disdain nothing more than the
encroachment of that,
inevitable as gravity,
which in our hour of direst
need, befriends us.
No oath knows the like certainty.
No vow the like trust.
Despite the fustian casuistry of
centuries of syllogizing sophists, the victimless
dockets of doubly-blinded justices
stuffed with guilty innocents
--- the outlandish yarns fool none
but the wise,
and these too have born their foolishness gladly.

Madly.

We return to that we cannot escape,
escape to that cannot return:
the diurnal frenzy of a cipher calculus,
a dispaltried paltriness,
of urgencies soon crucially
forgotten.
What harm then this in mis-
or under-
standing when so near attending
our truest friend,
spurned yet peaceful waits our certain
ending.

As a Cat to Lap

2010-03-05T05:57:00.002-05:00

(This is the first poem I ever read at an open reading.)

Audio

There's no use crying over spilled milk.
There's no use crying over spilled milk.
There's no use crying over spilled milk.
There's no use crying over spilled milk.
What's done is done.
No use crying over spilled milk.
Time is time for moving on.
No use crying over spilled milk.
Here today tomorrow gone.
No use crying over spilled milk.
A present lost, a future won.

There's no use crying.
Tears are bootless, facts are blind.
There's no use crying.
Sadness cannot change fate's mind.
There's no use crying.
Sorrow loses, cheer will find.
There's no use crying.
Be practical, leave tears behind.

There is no use.
This fret and strut achieves the grave.
There is no use.
All is lost, nothing's saved.
There is no use.
The free man's just a shallow slave.
There is no use.
These shadows never leave the cave.

There is.
Not here.
There is.
Not near.
There is,
But cannot be.
There is.
But is not me.

There.
Here, but that which not.
There.
Other in which what.
There.
Now again before ahead.
There.
Another, than from fled.

There's no use crying over spilled milk.
But what if milk should turn to blood?
There's no use crying over spilled milk.
And war's tears rain in dead flesh flood.
There's no use crying over spilled milk.
This mother's milk in corpse coughed mud.
There's no use crying over spilled milk.
This saline spite of shrapnel's God.

Milk of kindness, milk of death.
Spilled milk spitting Gatling breath.
Milk of useless, milk of use.
Milk of every profit's truth.

Those are ghosts that were his eyes,
and at his mother's milk-spilled cries,
war's rich banker trembles.
A use without a usurer's prize,
which tyrant heads of state despise,
from which too common truth
dissembles.

Snow Refracting on Cedars

2010-02-26T07:24:00.001-05:00

When you made love in the shower the morning
before he died in the boating accident,
you wore nothing but your wedding ring, and the
sight of the two of you,
through the pebbled glass of the stall door,
the sight of the two of you,
had there been anyone to see,
had the daubed thickness of a Van Gogh,
the swirled livingness of a Renoir,
the beige desolation of a desert O'Keefe.
Only the lustrous annular permanence of that
precious metallic band seemed
out of place as,
with him behind, your fingers clawed
at the door, everything
else a rushing, steaming, wet, soft, fastness
racing to a conclusion passing then,
past. Again, had there been anyone
looking at the keepsake pictures of your deceased parents,
they could have observed the sheriff climbing
the steps of the porch,
then knocking just outside the screen door
--- his uneasy regret-to-inform speech ---
they would have seen it all reflected in the
framed glass that protected
those photographs, as in the
tranquil precision of Vermeer.
Had there been anyone to brave
the snowstorm outside the courthouse, the air
solidified into a three-dimensional rush-hour of
unique flakes, distances diasappeared
behind the strange shapes of gusts
--- tumbleweeds, funnelclouds,
horizontal tracer-streaks,
layered laced curtains pasting themselves to
the rooted wings of weary cedars --- as if nothing
far away were real, and
only what is close to you
exists --- and had they peered to see
the black mesh of your mourning veil
on the witness stand, draped in gloomy shadows,
the courtroom wick-lit by oil lanterns
with the power out --- justice
extremely dark but never blind,
it would have been the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio,
with a pointillist haze from Seurat
that met their eyes through
the blown glass panes.

In the darkness of that room
was the sound of snowfall. Caught in the glass
of your tears, a single aquifer whose wells
are legion, clung the scent of pines,
as if hung in a museum to distant lovers
(the ones who do not exist),
beyond the scrub of reason,
or the clutch of years.

Typecasting Porn Stars

2010-02-19T06:42:00.001-05:00

(audio at chomsky in chains podcast)

Another case-law floor exercise:
some four-door snuff-film needs a
skywalking deadbeat with a
divining-rod and execution-stay to
rule on a decision. Days like this make me long
for my birthmother, or at least
her business card. From the faith-healing on the
day bed, the restraining-order in the
breadline, before there was even time to
typecast a porn star, bar-code a
cloud chamber, rent-control
the exit-wound of a coffin nail,
you could still lip-read contradictions between
cash flow and crop rotation, landing-
gear, duty-frees, dry-ice-smoke and
overloaded lifeboats.

If you could attach greaseless eye-shadow with
lugnuts, or fickle proximity-fuses with
magnetic-tape, you could eliminate the grab-bars and
love-handles, burglar-alarms, Miranda rights,
and the universal-precautions
surgical-gloves.

Criminal Justice.

Eventually you will discard the bracket-creeping lynch-mob,
and the bounty-hunting day-trading for the
forced-march from assisted-living to
estate-planning; combination-lock on the cutoff
man. That you could find a countable-infinity
under house-arrest, a sex-industry in
riot-gear, a pleasure-calculus with
release-forms--- what jackbooted think-tank would have
thought? Some chain-smoking creation-scientist,
some home-schooled creation-scientist goose-steps
through the airdoor with a bench-warrant for a
condom-swallowing drug-mule and demands that he
childproof his dime bags.

We arrive at the graveyard
shift. Intensive-care booster-cables jump-
starting the occupational-disease of
hedge fund coronaries, the electro-convulsive contact
HIGH. All the double-dutch clockspeed in the world can't quench that
Los Alamos controlled burn: gut-bucket in the daycare,
hack-saw at the eye bank, stiff-arm at the NICU.

Life will be served au-jus.
It may make you homesick.

She Really Gives Good Abstinence

2010-02-12T07:05:00.003-05:00

She Really Gives Good Abstinence

(audio at the chomsky in chains podcast )

She's such a good good girl
she's been born again it’s true,
doesn't fool around
but she knows just what to do.
Where her parents’ lead her
she's always gonna follow,
no matter what they feed her
she always gonna swallow,

because

she really gives good abstinence,
I found religion with her down on her knees,
she really gives good abstinence,
she’s still a virgin but she knows how to please me,
she really gives good abstinence,
doesn’t need a course in sex ed,
she’s just using her head.

Feel like such a lucky stiff
when I see she’s goin’ down,
sure ain’t a movie but
you know it’s sensurround,
saving it for marriage,
that-don’t-make-her straight-laced,
she’s such a connosieur
she’s got such a lotta taste,

because

she really gives good abstinence,
I found religion with her down on her knees,
she really gives good abstinence,
she’s still a virgin but she knows how to please me,
she really gives good abstinence,
doesn’t need a course in sex ed,
she’s just using her head.
she’s really using her head
getting ahead on her head
she’s really using her head

Chaser

2010-02-05T12:15:00.001-05:00

Tonight is
a verb.
To “night” is
a verb.
To spend, to thrive, insert
yourself in the unknown,
rebel, revolt, re
-verse the premises of day,
the light of reason with the amendments
of debauch, the codacils of defiance,
the bill of rights for deviants,
the shifting alliances of the hearse
and the brothel, the nurse
and the harlot, the praise of sin with
the virgin corpse. Gin
and tonic. The cognac dusk.
The grenadine of transition.
The Kahlua of sweet
desolation. Flesh a single malt
butter-scotch.

How will we night?
How were we will?
How night we were distilled
and transentient, sententious
and prevenient, contentious,
expedient, unrepentant and yet,
nonetheless, defiled.

The stylus of time makes
present.

Impossible tonearms dance,
fulfilling the mumblements of prophecy,
while the thrill of cash
chases tequila plans.

Night and be-
night, quite and re-
quite. Morrow and tomorrow
in what petty pace
becrawl. Deny
what being cannot be,
the whole of nothing,
the night of all.

Post-Sokal

2010-01-29T06:06:00.005-05:00

(Audio at http://zinnzen.podbean.com/2010/01/29/post-sokal/ )

I don't know if it was Marshall Field, or Totie Fields, or Sally Fields, or "Field of Dreams", but in the field of words sometimes Luther sounds like Lucifer, and you're sure someone must be king, but not of what. And as a child I can remember the King family singing, with Alvino Ray playing Hawaiian guitar, and while you might say that guitar was gently weeping, it certainly wasn't Pablo Picasso. Pablo who himself had never been called an asshole, must have been very close to Castro if they let him call it cubism, although I'm not sure that Larry, Curly, or Moe, or any of the lesser stooges would have approved. But only a prude needs approval in a world where every value has been valorized, or colorized, it's hard tell sometimes, to separate the twonesses from the Dubois. I don't think Dubois ever went to Idaho, maybe never even met Ho Ho Chi Minh, never set eyes on Ed Wynn or Ray Bolger or his scarecrow, but Jim Crow I am sure he met. Jacqueline Bisset or Jacqueline Onassis? I can't even get their Jack Kennedys straight; not that they were queer in theory or in fact or in Biafra or eating Jello with Martha Stewart at her Vineyard and talking behind the backs of Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler, and the Counts of Marquis de Sade and Monte Cristo. It's just a thought, but if Dee Dee Myers married Denis Diderot she would have been Dee Dee Diderot. Can you see them all at lunch --- Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Marcel Marceau, Dario Fo, and Denis and Dee Dee Diderot all eating truffles with Francois Truffaut at some chichi eatery in lower Manhattan just north of Soho. I'm not blaming him but the fact is my life's been all Foucault'd up since Alan Sokal. I was sitting drinking at my local, wearing a spare pair of the new designer genes when I caught Andrea Mitchell wearing Allen Greenspan's jeans and just like mine the designer label said Richard Dawkins Selfish. I might as well have been a kangaroo because I was hopping mad. Her hip hype hypocrisy fed my reserve with resentment. It all resembled some postmodern postmortem which there at my local just meant Alan Sokal which made me post-Sokal, postmodern, postmortem, gone postal. Or perhaps post-postal, because when I went to grab my Kalashnikov, I felt like a person in Goncharov, a man who lost his will; it all was so Oblomovistically mystical. But the world was oblivious to my Oblomovism, lascivious with my solipsism, and mischievous with my solecism. The sole of my solecism was the Costa del Sol where I tanned by moonlight and dined on fillet, where to at least sometimes not split my infinitives I ex-Humed my Berkeley. George, not the University, and not the Barkley butted mound of well rounded rebound, nor even Busby. Guarding against barbarous Berbers in bearskin busbies --- I am on to their hat-tricks --- no more hoofing it from Panmunjom, or Sun Myung Moon, or Warren Harding with a hard-on on the White House lawn. You could be cavorting with assorted watchmakers, all of them blind, or abortive Kevorkians with you losing your mind. The faster you travel the behinder you get until the Tet offensive destroys your Corvette, or your Fiat, the money's the same, the five sided caissons are rolling along, from the JFK funeral, horse drawn, to the vast field of carnage not far from Saigon.
If a helicopter can land on stage it must be possible to Miss my point. Call it a conscience clause for a conscientious resister, but Descartes was a French battleship colonizing Indochina and carrying Jean Paul Sartre's father. Put another way, Descartes was a Sartre-carrying chartership, a Sartre-house of charter, a premeditated Meditation on the continuation of state policy by other means, or if that means a police state with a Maddox in the Tonkin Gulf, so be it, Soviet, so, Vietnam. So why not let bygones be bygones and Saigons by Saigons, forget about annoying Hanoi's, unrepentant Phnoms, piss-pot Pol Pot's and Christmas day bombs? Judas Kiss Kissinger's, My Lai malaise, napalmed Kim Phuc's, assassinated Premiers, erase them from memory like the blood-rouged Khmers. King Kong or Viet Cong … they were both guerillas weren't they?
Vanilla guerillas. Sigourney Weaver living dangerously with Mel Gibson, but Joe Frazier and Muhammed Ali were already gone; just a movie this thrillah in Manila, though supposedly not the Philipines but Indonesia; but it was too dangerous in Indonesia where Suharto had no amnesia about Sukarno ; things were just too hot in Java, it would have meant skating on thin Vanilla Ice. Gorillas, gorillas, everywhere nor any mist to drink; Sumatra to Manila, Java to Rwanda, Bolivia to Guantanamo, Bolivar to Geronimo, Kabila, Aguinaldo, Che Guevara, Uncle Ho.
My sixth sense told me that if the Seven Samurai met the Chicago Eight singing Revolution #9 for the Hollywood Ten at the eleventh hour. that LA and Tokyo would be just like love and happiness: the eternal seven-ten split.

Watchmaker

2010-01-22T06:19:00.001-05:00

(audio at http://zinnzen.podbean.com/ )

There's nothing you can do about it.
It's not the light-switch. It isn't
the ignition. It started without you
and you can pretty much pretend
as you will.

Habit does make thought
easier, if
emptier. You think you
know and continue to rehearse
as if facility assured
veracity, steadfastness, meaning
or perhaps
beauty; familiarity or alacrity
warrant- if not guarantee-ing
purpose. It is enough for now,
and now is too much for the most part. The vast
acceleration of happening,
the exhilaration of becoming, the
concupiscence of each single act
of seeing --- it is enough
to moat the possibility of being, re-
enforce the palissades of endurance
with ricks of rigor-mortis: the
transmorphation of the forest into dressed
cordwood in close order drill. Remote
as the inference of life from the ticking
of a watch, or the constitution of a state from
the smithing of a manacle,
we speak these words to be
self-evident. A nation is just
a place of birth, a native
just a person born there, and laws
are just bayonets until you attach people
to them --- sharp but
harmless. There are constituencies
for almost everything:
call something sodomy,
no matter what,
and there are those who will
condemn it. In a world where life
is pain, death
is release. The frenzied yearning is
my kin and when
I can I absolve even
belief. But I stopped
knowing who to complain to
when I learned
they were what I had
to complain about.
If there is no such thing as a blind
racist, where is the advantage
in seeing? If it were
the lightswitch, if it were
the ignition, I
would know what
to do
--- but it's not.

Tomahawks

2010-01-15T09:12:00.003-05:00

Consolations for a Cleveland Winter

2010-01-08T06:52:00.001-05:00

What would I do with all that
prodigal sunshine,
day after changeless day, and the way it
bleaches unliving colors
to pastel? Far better to
dwell here,
in wired concrete igloos,
parked in the arctic precincts of a
supposedly temperate
climate, where the dense gray
perpetuity of cloud
supersedes shade and curtain, where
no luminous nuisance trespasses in the sky,
opacifying the lenses of your eye with the
glare of film noir third degrees.
Where you can sleep for weeks without missing a single
shadow. How reassuring,
not to have to worry about the cat
exploding in the unvented four-door.

And then, there are the economic benefits;
the costly, sloppy stickiness of the
sunscreen you won't be needing,
the money unspent on the darklensed
fashionstatements you won't sit on
entering the car, the superfluity of
bikini waxes beneath layer upon layer of
goose down, wool, velcro, Gortex and Thinsulate.
None of the wastefulness of frozen-drink
parasols, instead the allegory of marshmallows
melting in hot cocoa, the music of
whistled steam gossiping about the impending
arrival of scalded pots of tea.

Who would knowingly trade the
palping rapture of cashmere
coiled in gentle neck-snug, for the
goo gunk of tropical crotchfunk, and
swampheated
pitstench? And then there’s the boon
to marital fidelity, the erotic temptations
of fishnet nymphettes
preempted: the very thought of provocative textiles
foreclosed by the horripilant chill-threat of
bristle-hair gooseflesh. No apocalyptic water bugs
skittering eerily from
unknown places, just a preternatural
feeling of brotherhood
for the lonely burdens of prehistoric
glaciers, and sympathy for the fate of naked
graveyard statuary.

Far better to start each morning with the discourse of
shovel's-edge rasping flagstone or blacktop, even
the cranky percussion of twostroke engines chuting
geysers of crystal into driveway-lining
ridges of freeze-dried sky-squeeze.
Listening to the sizzle-hiss of woodfire, its
narrative about the liberation of stored
sunshine, how preferable this to the trademarked
thrash-ratchet of idling middle-aged stockbrokers.

Needless to say,
mountainside fiberglass waterslides
rank a very distant second to
the doorstep thrill-ride of each morning,
as, improvising your way along the
newly arrived canyons of spontaneous
car-devouring roadcrumble, you
fishtail through slushstreeted
rush-hours. And there can simply be
no moral comparison between the
generosity of the snowplow rock-salt
that leaves the entire northeast
corner of the state saltier
than a frozen-margarita rim,
and the isolating managedcare selfishness
of tinted-power-windows and factory-air.

There is nothing in the radiant scorch
of hot sun on tanned skin
to make you desire anything
but escape; nothing that
remotely begins to compare with the way that,
numbing your extremities, a Cleveland winter
lectures about how you have stopped
feeling, and long
to feel
again.

Amygdala

2010-01-03T07:23:00.001-05:00

We defame the blind,
by invoking them as a trope
for ignorance. With the deaf
it is much the same;
I have tutored the deaf,
and lectured the blind
and I find them
far better students
than those whose ignorance
is self-inflicted.
People with ear-buds in don’t want
to listen; it is a choice
against openness, albeit
a choice to connect,
at one and the same time
to sever yourself from your
locality, and attach yourself
to the pod, the download,
the matrix of what you have
pre-decided
you want. It’s like
what Sontag said: blindness
shouldn’t be a metaphor
except that metaphor itself
is a kind of illness.

In the library,
a young male employee is
dusting the shelves, and
listening to his i-Pod.
The body language
is ecstasy: the job rents his physique,
but his mind
is exquisitely, Jeff-Goldblum
his. I need directions, but
who am I
to ask, to inter-
rupt the feast of his consciousness
with my foreign
if all-too-human
needs?

There are profits
in the arbitrage
of attention, and prodigious
slotting fees in the free market of ideas.

Friends, co-imperialists, countrymen,
rent me your earbuds.
We are free to hear
what we want to
or not, but I note
there are reasons
for the neural pathways
from you ears
to the fear centers
in your amygdala.

How do you know
the alarm
hasn’t
already sounded?

New Year's Day on Mars

2009-12-25T21:48:00.001-05:00

Freedom

2009-12-19T05:59:00.002-05:00

There is no freedom from law, there is only freedom through law.
--- Hegel

Freedom.
How will you get there?
In the club car of an overnight train perhaps,
a cup of hot coffee in a cardboard tray,
seeing little but reflections
in the windows made mirrors
by the transient seam of severe light
stitching through the vast drapery of darkness
that is nothing
but earth's shadow.

In the wicker basket of a hot air balloon?
Its garish colors bulging above
rolling hills of shaggy meadows and the occasional elm,
a skein of judgmental geese eyeing
you as they pass, otherwise
the flame-punctuated silence
where you float in the invisible
alone, one giant step
away from solid ground and
fatality. Or perhaps in the industrial
precision of an economy
four-door with a full tank, recent oil
change, tires at manufacturer's recommended
inflation, the continent's roads like root hairs
captured in the folded pages of the atlas,
the broken rear window
defroster sometimes clouding the towns behind,
while rhythmic lost loves and ever-recent
disasters emanate from the radio's electromagnetic
ether, the vibrations of the interstate traveling
up the steering column to your ever-vigilant hands.

And, given how, one wonders, when?
Before or after work, or, might one dream,
during? Will the time be measured in the ink
stamps of alphabetized punch-cards,
the programmed surveillance of keystrokes at computer terminals,
the wrinkles of skin pressing into foreheads,
pit sweat melting into work shirts,
or be transmuted by engineered genetic alchemy
into a softer currency of diapered babies on their backs,
tiny toes kicking air into whispers
of dance? Will it be
returning to a near or distant past ---
buffalo hunts and armor-mounted jousts,
initiation rites in torch-lit caves,
gladiators battling in imperial
stadiums, texts being transcribed
in the solemn tranquility of monasteries ----
or advancing toward a limitless
future, weightless in earth
orbit, never a cloudy day or
a hint of rain where,
standing on our heads or climbing the walls
effortlessly, sorrow is
as forgotten as the blue of the sky
we are outside and above
or the reason anyone ever listened
to Billie Holiday.

And last, the question of where?
Hyperlinked to 10,000 symphonies and
a million sonatas, a mouse-click
away from the entire history
of radio and tv. Or,
escaping the middle
decks of the middle passage, the rank
putridities of slobbered mucous
and the ptomained slime of decaying corpses,
with decks too tight to turn over in sleep,
released onto shores of the first great
democracy, dedicated to the self-
evident ideal of human equality. Perhaps
in some multi-acre casino
where bustiered women with bunny tails
serve around-the-clock intoxicants to patrons
wagering ocean waves of cash in games
where chance is guaranteed
to be against them.
Or, almost too easily,
with no vehicle but the mind,
no time but the present,
no place but what you hold in your hands,
astonished when suddenly,
like a poem, you find it,
coming from inside.

You Can Always try Bribing the Urine Tester

2009-12-12T06:46:00.000-05:00

Surveillance respects
no limits. Just because
you have strong privacy rights
in your penis doesn’t mean the government,
lab coated and litmus papered, won’t
swim upstream,
making you pee in a pot to find out if there’s
pot in your pee.

Even if you haven’t hit 700 home runs,
or won with a sudden, swollen
Dizzy-cheek of muscles, an Olympic medal,
the avuncular chemists of the
piss Gestapo insist
they are not invading,
despite that electron microscope
in your bladder,
your privacy.

Only the well-trained murderers,
fangs out in their
aluminum clouds and brown shoes,
titrated to a go-pill tee,
only they are free
from urination chaperones,
and the mandatory optical catheters
snaking their threads
up your dick.

Who are you
to resent the cameras in your penis?
Or the state supervision of your bodily fluids?
Who are you to resent the invisible tattoo
of retinal scans and DNA dragnets?
As if so much as the ownership of your body,
check for missing foreskin,
would be left to you.

Lightnin Rod On

2009-12-05T20:47:00.000-05:00

If it's old enough
then we can call it new
just have to torque the talk
don't have to mean it's true
oh baby
I got my lightnin rod on.
If you need me
I'll be at the Pentagon.

I been printin out twenties
in the back a my car
got a tank full a fossils
and a counterfeit card
oh baby
I'm wearin armor that rhymes
I'm trackin you down
for a bit part as a partner in crime.

Well there's squatters in the alley
like some squalor spree
but the man in the limo
thinks the mother's milk's free
oh baby
I'm like the fourth of July
I'm like a thistledown neon of rejection
in a newly fledged sky.

I'm a needle in a haystack
tryin to talk some sense
to the soap bubble tourists
with the luau defense
oh baby
I'm like a telephone poll
I keep askin people questions
when the world is spinnin outta control.

The guru's in the data
he's divining the sales
of the lapidary notions
by electonic mail
Oh baby
I'm like a poisonous seed
to protect you from the parasites
who'll rob you of the things that you need.

Well the buttocks by the donuts
in electroglide blue
have been fattening for decades
like an elephant stew
oh baby
I'm like a Rosetta Stone
reading your Mirandas
in a language that you thought was unknown.

The entire constellation
has been dropping its pants
the vacuum hose is nothing
but a temple a dance
oh baby
you make my molecules sing
I've been searchin for enigmas
and I know at last I've found the real thing.

What up is

2009-11-29T21:54:00.001-05:00

(By way of House of Cats, thanks Wendy)

NASA got so
pissed off about the Russians selling slots
on the international space station to
millionaires like Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth, that they
promulgated new rules, new
criteria, for just who can, and who can’t be
what people are now calling
space tourists.

Conduct,
dishonest, criminal, infamous or notoriously disgraceful
conduct, (apparently discrete disgrace is just fine), suffices
for rejection. My mind thinks “they’re worried
about OJ.” Can’t you see it,
the tabloids would have an
outer space field day. Low speed
chases in orbit, OJ in a space suit.
They’re trying to nip this publicity stunt
in the bud because everyone knows —
astronauts prefer
tang.

But seriously, the other
factors that can disqualify you
from space-flight include
fraud, excessive drinking, and
drug abuse. And I’m trying to picture this,
thinking of some 800 pound gorilla. Some
coke-jonesing,
gin-chugging,
smoke-stacking reefer
madman playing three card monty
with John Glenn. You know they say
weightlessness can cause spacesickness even without
someone’s chasing screwdrivers with
tequila shots while he watches the
moon rise. Imagine it, way up
there above the continent-sized
lacey galaxies of cloud, luminous
spiral white fluff poised against
the blue-glowing ocean, a
giant opalescent, marbled jewel
sprawled against humanity’s
intensely arbitrary conception of
what
up
is. Imagine that scene
wasted on someone in orbit
before he even
arrived at the launchpad,
some moron too high on
himself to notice the glorious
beauty that surrounds him
everywhere.

He’s getting
queasier and queasier by the minute,
until the swollen weather balloon of his
zero gravity stomach starts to collapse, eject, and
catapult-spew the vile, putrid Mulligatawny
stew of his chemically-ridden,
industrially irradiated, and
genetically modified diet of
ever-so patriotically American
“food”.

No. Now I’m seeing him in a space station
that’s become a gargantuan
vomitorium
of his own making,
because if he is weightless then his vomit
is weightless too. And it is sloshing and
bouncing and rebounding all around
the cabin. It’s got nothing
to stick to, what with all the
precision-machined metal and plastic
surfaces designed to repel it. And just then,
imagining this intersection of progress
and malnourished disgust, what do I see
but the balding domed septuagenarian pate
of John Glenn, and he’s flushed with all the
senatorial outrage he can muster —
and dodging puke, and I think to myself:
wait . . . WAIT.
This is perfect. This, is,
perfect. I think
“what better place can there be for all the
nauseous politicians in the world?” Every
president, prince, king, pasha and potentate, every
emperor, czar, dictator, and shah,
every grand mufti, premier, and papal nuncio
each vice chancellor, senator, and MP,
even the representatives of the Icelandic
Althing — load them all onto some
orbiting
international space station.

After all they like to think of themselves as
above the fray, ten feet tall.
Loftier minds, concerned
with the big picture.

Upper class. High
brow. If they want to
look down on us why not
let them? Why not make them do it
from a place high enough so they can
piss all over everybody in the world,
— but where their piss,
won’t fall? Where they’ve got to live with their own
predigested messes which won’t
trickle down. Where people drunk
on power have to dodge their own
projectile vomit. And like the poverty and war
they make for the rest of us,
there’s no escape.

I wonder how long it would take before they stopped
concentrating on their own emissions, bodily
secretions and ex-
cretions for long enough to notice
that there are no borders and no skin colors
painted on the land and sea
down below. Wonder if the mid-day sky,
black as Texas crude
might not wake them up to that thing so near,
and impossibly far, the news
they hold in the palm
of their hand, like us,
the rest of their victims,
the reality that we’re all equal,
the miracle of the life
we are.

Terror for Christmas

2009-11-20T05:46:00.003-05:00

(This will be the last post before Thanksgiving, and so it's time to resurrect this classic from the vaults. I dedicate it to Jdimytai Damour, the man trampled to death in 2008, in a Wal-Mart Black Friday sale stampede.)

Well the terror alert had been raised to high,
so our F-15's were patrolling the sky.
Keeping us safe, keeping us free,
protecting the homeland security.
Every day of the week, every week of the year,
we're armed to the teeth so we got nothing to fear---
except maybe,
fear itself.
Except maybe,
fear itself.

The kids were asleep all snug in their beds,
while visions of Predators shot through their heads.
They were slaughtering badguys like you wouldn't believe,
with their Hellfire missiles there on Christmas Eve.
They were pint-sized heroes in an army of one,
and for Jesus's birthday all they wanted was guns;
guns for Jesus,
and fear itself.
Guns for Jesus,
and fear itself.

Well the terrorists are always around,
so you better never lower your guard.
So while we celebrate the baby Jesus,
you know they're trying extra hard.

It was just after midnight and NORAD radar
showed that something big was coming in fast.
There was no time to think, and no time to argue,
act now or it might just be your last.
And they mighta thought twice,
and they mighta thought better,
but the terror was already so high,
well that was the night that the US Air Force
blew Santa Claus outta the sky.
We blew Santa Claus outta the sky.

And it was raining bits of blown up reindeer
for hours and hours on end,
and none of our jets,
and none of our missiles
could put Santa back together again.
And though fear and hate,
may keep you safe,
from everything the enemy sends,
the problem with answering fear with guns,
is that you're gonna end up killing your friends.
The trouble with answering fear with guns,
is that you always end destroying your friends.
With nothing to fear,
and nothing to love,
except maybe
fear itself.
Except maybe,
fear itself.

Uncountable Orgasms

2009-11-14T06:34:00.001-05:00

(This poem is indebted to Rachel Maines' "The Technology of Orgasm".)

'When did God make men? When she realized vibrators couldn't dance.'
---Roz Warren?

Leave it to mathematicians to invent something called a
countable infinity; a contradiction
in oxymorons to the lay ear. What they mean
to convey is that whereas infinity is something you know
you can't count to, nonetheless, if you have an infinity
of integers at least you know which one is next.
If you reach 3,458,753 you proceed to 3,458,754.
6,400,079,010 leads immediately to 6,400,079,011.
But then again if you start trying to count what they call real
numbers --- it could be something quite small, 15 perhaps,
you don't know what the next number is. In theory
if you just step to 15.000000001, there are still
uncountable millions of fractions in between. In the
case of 'real' numbers you don't know what the 'next one'
means. In both there is an infinity of numbers
but in the latter case an infinity between each step towards
infinity. It's like the difference
between not having a prayer of getting
where you're going but at least knowing the next step,
and not having a prayer of getting where you're going
and being clueless
about what the next step is.
Almost like two different types of people.
A countably infinite person looks down on
an uncountably infinite person for lacking direction.
The uncountably infinite contend that the countable are,
regrettably, not very deep.
I was reminded of these two different types of infinity when I was trying to imagine the total number of times in history
women have faked orgasms. I figured it was such a large number
(probably one or two for each grain of sand on an ocean beach)
that you might as well call it infinite
in that same poetic imprecision one lets slide with sand.
You see I've been reading about the evolution of vibrators
and medical douches and I've been,
let's see, it's hard to find a word for it….
flabbergasted? (Really, more like gabberflasted? ma-zazed?
fumdounded? sta-monished? pur-srised?
stump-jarted? ) to realize not just how often women fail
to achieve orgasm from plain old vaginal
penetration, but also how long this has been going on and why.
How often, throughout history, they were told this was because of something wrong
with them and they were frigid. That if they tried to satisfy themselves they'd only be made
more frigid, perhaps infertile. And so women would become
physically ill from unsatisfied sexual desire, diagnosed as
hysterical. Up until 1952 hysteria was one of the most commonly
diagnosed illnesses in hystory. What an amazing thing that the social
construction of sexuality can get so close to a person, so far
inside her head, that it could stand between a woman and her own
clitoris.

The prevailing treatment for women
diagnosed with hysteria? Go ahead, guess.
Would you believe me if I said
genital massage? Yes, 'genital massage'. As far back as the second
century A.D. the leading physician of the time, Galen,
provided a detailed description of how to bring a woman to what he called, 'hysterical paroxysm'; his description complete with
vaginal contractions and release of vaginal fluids leading to
'relief of symptoms'? As Rachel Maines (the author of
'The Technology of Orgasm') observes
doctors have had their hands full throughout history
satisfying the sexual needs of
women otherwise unmet by their husband's penises.
She calls the term 'hysteria' social-
camouflage for 'sexually unsatisfied'.
'Hysterical paroxysm' camouflage for 'orgasm'.
Historically then, doctors have functioned
as (albeit socially prestigious) sex slaves, or,
given the differentials in pay, lucratively
rewarded prostitutes.

I imagine there are those who think such pursuit
the stuff that dreams are made of, but medicine
even then being a volume business, and paroxysms often
requiring up to an hour of devoted physicians' attention,
doctors were quite eager for any technique or device
that could save them labor, increase turnover
so to speak. This explains what might otherwise
strain belief, at the end of the nineteenth
and beginning of the twentieth century, the wide
dissemination in doctor's offices
of that new invention, the electromechanical
vibrator. Responding as it did to a need both
urgent and widespread it nonetheless proves a little shocking
to twenty-first century sensibilities
that the medical vibrator was patented
fully a decade before that
other great labor saving device, the vacuum cleaner.
Achieving regularly in five minutes what men's penises often failed
of for years, and which even a skilled surgeon's fingers might
only succeed at in ten-fold the time, the technological imperative
of such a machine is clear. But
as so often happens in materialist culture what begins
as curiosity soon evolves through convenience to household
necessity, and an earnest and thrifty market learns
to bypass the middleman. So it came to be that
medicinal electromechanical vibrators were widely advertised
in the sorts of ladies journals read by knitting circles
and elderly spinsters, and even the Sears-
Roebuck catalogue.

What then? Shall we call it revealing
or call it odd, that nature (or was it God)
should design a woman's genitalia
in such an inappropriate fashion
(or at least unflattering to the male anatomy?)
That the act of procreation should so often fail
to satisfy feminine lust or (truth be told) masculine
ego? And once this fact concealed
how quickly the healing profession, dominated
by men, should substitute its agency
for prostitution, which because invested with social
prestige, could never be perceived
for what it was? But more again how a
foreign hand should improve on a lover's
virile member, and how a hard, dead, anonymous
vibrator should, at least functionally, improve
on either?

We sound these nether regions imperfectly
with the mind --- finding our egos
always there arrived
ahead
of us. But such creatures as have conjured
incubus and succubus alike
to explain what they, neither male nor female, can
comprehend, should only pretend certainty --
with caution. Beneath the skin such turbulent
purposes contend with reason
we both must, and cannot begin
to fathom. Resigned sheerly to function,
our technology has surely rendered us already
superfluous; once the markets
demand it, vibrators will undoubtedly
dance. But these shall sooner coax stars out of the sky
than entrance, whoever the fool and however foolishly,
or achieve the starry devotion of a lover
in the uncountable infinity
of a beloved's sparkling eye.

Copyleft

2009-11-07T17:12:00.002-05:00

Copyleft, copyright,
copy in the stars tonight.
Copy jungles, tiger bright,
burning twinkles, mind delight.
Money profit, forest laws,
copy right the conscience clause.
Own ideas, patent genes,
money nose what money means,
and when the lamb in molten wool,
lambent shines its starry spool,
the lawyers in their tiger suits,
announce the rules that time refutes,
and bankless loves in left bank flesh,
apply the fingersong touch caress,
for better terms on love's tontine,
disdaining tender's legal green.
Like fools with hearts they reeve their gauche,
while kingly brains make fools reproach,
and tight as drunken souls bereft
leave copyright their copy left.

You Must Play

2009-10-30T09:14:00.002-04:00

Woody Allen tells the story of a French resistance fighter who at the crucial moment fails to kill a Nazi collaberator. It is entirely within his power but he simply has not the will, he can't force himself to do it, there is something deep inside of him that refuses to be a murderer. Walking away from the scene of his 'failure' he is overcome by a horrible case of existential nausea, a sickness that can only be cured by an existential alka-selzer, a pill the size of a hubcap.

We all have our existential moments. Those times when we confront our demons head on, and stare straight into those truths we spend most of our lives denying, times when the three laws of thermodynamics refuse to be silent; you can't win, you can't break even, you must play.

For some people those facts are relentless as daylight, overwhelming as a newborn child; the sense of futility never leaves them and any attempt to evade or ignore the sheer pointlessness of human life is for them worthy of mockery and derision.

But other people go through their lives with the unmitigated enthusiasm of a family pet; you know the one, that Labrador retriever when you come back from the grocery store, its tail wagging a mile a picosecond, butt wiggling faster than a debutante's fan, front paws prancing in half-audition for bipedality, that little eh, eh, eh, eh, eh squeal that says it is pure joy, to be alive.

Now the question for me is, is it possible that these two attitudes represent two fundamentally different types of intelligence; one that is anxiety ridden and constantly depressed, and the other with a bouncing bliss at the mysterious fact of being itself, refusing to see the half of certainty that is more certain than taxes.
The issue is, suppose these two different types of intelligence are themselves amenable to evolutionary natural selection, that each group has a different fitness, a different ecological utility. Which one do you think is more likely to survive?

Or, putting it a different way, suppose you lived in a dictatorship where the state police routinely came around and pointed a gun at your head and asked if you lived in a country where everyone was equal and free. Everyone who says no is executed immediately. Everyone who says yes is left alone to do what they want for another week, as long as they don't challenge the privileges of the dictator, whose Christian name is Democracy.

Imagine now the situation after several generations of this. Everyone who has managed to survive this long has gotten the habit of saying the system is fair and that all are free --- but perhaps some due to some fluke of genetic mutation do this almost reflexively. They support the dictatorship without thought or effort --- they tell their lies, as it were, genetically.(inadvertent) But others (it is difficult to say how many) may lack this genetic adaptation and find that they have to lie if they want to keep on living. They are tortured by the absurdity of this, and depressed both by the required repetition of hypocrisy and the enthusiastic compliance of their genetically 'adapted' brethren.

Finally, suppose that among these depressed, anxious, and existentially obsessed people there arises an exquisite irony that depicts the situation much the same way as I've just described, and that this irony provides them with a joyful humor that comprehends both the happiness predicated on the genetic lie, and the angsty depression of those who are too intelligent and too honest to celebrate hypocrisy.
What will such a person say when asked if the system is fair and free?

Now if you would just put down that gun, I'll tell you.

Coals for the Samovar of History

2009-10-24T06:36:00.001-04:00

Aboutness
ramifies,
while loneliness quivers
with being. The sun plies
the ripple with conjecture,
the wind with quarrel,
the shimmer with
quarantine, while plumes of question ask,
if frosting can be revoked once they've eaten
all the cake, if telescopes
can resolve childhood, if microphones
can amplify memory. Coals glimmer with messages
of warmth and
death, samovars of tears, parades
of fossil music,
letter bombs
of acid reign.

There are pills for almost everything,
and we caulk much while waiting
for eloquent mushrooms, and bulldozers
with human skin.

When the invasion comes,
books will be thumbed
like sex acts --- only truth
recanted.

Guaranteed emptiness,
the commute will be free
to last forever, where
trespass is history,
and war remains
unknown.

Catastrophic Success

2009-10-16T05:51:00.001-04:00

If you can sell your lies when all about you,
are getting caught,
and blaming it on you,
if you can trust in even those who are paid
to tout you,
while reneging on their fees for touting too,
if you can raid, and not get tired of raiding,
or stealing prizes not give back the prize,
or feeding hatred, escape from others’ hating,
and flaunt your looking good while making wise,

if you can scheme – and make those schemes
others’ masters,
if you can scam, while making scams your aim,
if catastrophic success is the label of your disasters,
and though you are an imposter
not be called so by name,
if you savor hearing all the lies you’ve spoken,
proclaimed by scum to bait a trap for fools,
and watch the frauds you earned your wealth from, broken,
and still be asked to pen revisions’ rules,

If you can talk to crowds and repeal their virtue,
and walk with kings, while serving as their crutch,
if even the idea of having friends can hurt you,
if nothing counts with you, or nothing much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
with sixty seconds worth of bullshit slung,
yours is the World Wide Web, and all that’s in it,
and, which is more, you’ll be the toast
of Washington.

(Props to Rudyard Kipling)

All Grammatically Correct Sentences Mean

2009-10-02T16:23:00.002-04:00

'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.'
The word 'green' when spoken is quite
colorless, and so colorless green is just
the idea of the word
'green'. But rational
minds sleep to the idea
of a colorless green. Unaware of
this sleeping ambiguity reason seeks
furiously to control by a means it does not...

Furiously pursuing domination,
rational ambitions
sleep to the idea
the word
'green' is quite colorless.

Episcopalians

2009-09-26T07:11:00.001-04:00

With the possible exception of
a dog stretching his
limber neck through a speeding
car window, jabbing his snout into the
aroma-feast of the world’s passing
velocity breeze, wet nose
perusing the Sears catalog of its living
scents, nothing in nature
(and, yes, isn’t this nature too)
appears more orgiastically
self satisfied than a
McNeill River grizzlybear.

Think of the river
as a Southern California freeway
for fish: but this isn’t a Hollywood movie, and
the bear isn’t Jackie Gleason,
and none of the salmon even remotely resembles
Burt Reynolds.

As fast food goes,
McDonald’s has nothing
on this: wriggling silver-scaled missiles
of saliva-stoking flesh just a
clawsplash
away.

It is a church
of sorts, their house
of worship, and they populate its banks
at standoffishly respectful distances,
like a small congregation of furry
Episcopalians in a remarkably
mammoth cathedral of unstained glass.

Admittedly, there is no Bear-
naise sauce, no cole slaw,
no french fries, not even
tartar sauce or mayo,
and the wine cellar,
sans sommelier, is distinctly
sub-par. But the bears are nonetheless,
inordinately full of
themselves, and strangely aware of the
luxury of not having to carry
hardhats, or lunchboxes,
or even to stuff brown paper bags into
leather attache cases, or to worry about
shattering the silvered linings
of Thermos bottles. The exceptionally
white noise from the rolling field
of the water’s ornately scalloping surface,
the glimmering spears of shine
flashing from its liquid
mirror, the grizzlies appear to have such a
refined awareness of this
you could be forgiven for imagining them
devotees of Rousseau.

For them a mouthful of fresh fish
is something radically foreign to us,
the jawlocked death throe of twenty pounds of
squirming, ichthyous, blood-squirting thrash-flap;
and though they can make do
without the chirping hi-tech beep
of barcode scanners in the checkout line,
and perhaps do not miss the convenience of having
someone else to clean and bone their fillets,
there is a kind of clumsiness in the
bulk of their supersized morsels, as if
a bear’s reach was destined always to exceed
its mouth’s grasp, a fact that
conveys a faint longing
for better tools, some silverware or at least
a butcher’s cleaver
to reduce this nourishment
to more digestible
proportions. Like the words of a language,
rendering the stuff of fantastic appetites
into manageable, fork-sized
bites.

Intubate

2009-09-20T07:16:00.000-04:00

The LTV blastfurnace
Bessemeres the night
with the tattoo of death's galloping
quarterhorse. The
bills for borrowed time come due in
typeface without serifs, mandays
brimming with camouflage,
and the craniometric vainglory of
dead Dakotan presidents.

No Ariadnean thread
escapes this callousing labyrinth,
where the canonized smokestacks
scathe the boreal winds,
cold as flamethrowers. Miles of
flanged steam rivet breath in
portable green oxygen bottles of
managedcare.

Without a living-
will, bureaucracy demands
they intubate.
Without a living-will bureaucracy
translates the soul into narrow-gauge plastic
catheters, and bedpans.
Without a living-will bureaucracy
expands to fill the last scrag of leathery hide,
and bodily fluid.

Squirting from behind the
bulletproof plexiglass and
the bootless burglarbars on the nursery,
patched from the moonshine
of belt-fed, air-cooled, semi-automatic
placebos, perfused by the
aquatint of in-habited scrip
the crash of the rote we touch,
imbibe the foam of the rift.

Who would Jesus torture?

2009-09-11T06:37:00.000-04:00

Who would Jesus torture?
Who would Jesus rape?
Why would Jesus murder?
Who would Jesus hate?

Who would Jesus carpetbomb?
Why would Jesus shoot?
Who would Jesus waterboard?
Who electrocute?

Who would Jesus slander?
When would Jesus rob?
Who would Jesus subjugate,
in the name of a merciful God?

Building More Butterflies

2009-09-04T09:55:00.000-04:00

If the butterfly's flapping wings in northern China,
if the butterfly in the ozone
of a billion exhausts,
if the butterfly, craving love as it
transmits its desperate
beauty
could,
anterior to thought,
demolish Hoboken,
isn’t it at least
conceivable
that the executive director of the free world,
armed with ten thousand million tons
of dynamite, armed with two and a half million jail cells,
armed with 300 million
television sets, could,
consciously,
menace a teenage mother
with hunger and loneliness,
prostitution and broken teeth,
drug addiction and the livid,
tattooed insignias of a
domestically violent
?lover?

Can I even say
that the butterfly is
the leader of the free world,
that I
am the butterfly.
That I have no wings,
that my lips and tongue have become
butterfly wings,
and that there is no
free world?

Motionless, reserved, reticent,
basted in the fly ash of fossilly-fueled
smokestacks, perfumed by
the imported bayonets of most-favored-nations,
the butterfly's unflapping wing,
the butterfly's lifeless wing,
the butterfly's recklessly indecisive wing,
devastates Boise,
pulverizes Assissi,
and breaks into
smile like a summer breeze
on the skin of a dozen lovers
in Central Park.

And I without wings am the butterfly's inability
to decide. I am the cascading catastrophes
of the unsaid. The hidden clauses of amorous
fraud, the needless
loneliness of love whose words have not stolen
courage.

The supply of disaster forever exceeds
the demand.

The hurricane will build
more butterflies.

As many wings as tongues.

And I read the night sky like a newspaper,
but one with no advertising,
trumpeting
silently
the spectacular arrival
of the past, forever
beginning forever
undone.

This Television has been Revolutionized

2009-08-29T06:26:00.000-04:00

This television
has been
revolutionized.
This television
has been
revolutionized.
On this TV the war is on every channel,
the war is on every channel
because the war is nowhere to be found
on any channel.
This war is not one war because it is two wars,
this war is not one war, because it is all wars.
This war has been
revolutionized
because when they show war
there is no war
and the real war
is between channels
The real war
is channel surfing
give me your restless, your tired
and your Taliban heros
your Taliban heroins
injected into the veins
of your heroic soldiers.
This war has been brought to you
by a word from our sponsors.
This war has been taught to you by a word from
our sponsors
who art in board rooms,
hallowed be thy trademark.
This war has been brought to you
by the War President,
this war has been brought to you
by the Peace President
This is the perpetual war for perpetual peace,
it goes on in the bright lights of nightvision,
in the manufactured darkness of televised day.
This television has been revolutionized because
this revolution has been revolutionized.
The revolution will not be tweeted.
The revolution will not be Facebooked.
The revolution will not be electronically
chainmailed.
But the revolutionized revolution
will.
The revolutionized revolution texts in darkness,
the revolutionized revolution exists
in isolation.
The revolutionized revolution thinks that nobody knows
your IP address.
The revolutionized revolution is the
white noise on every channel
of an analog TV set without a digital converter
blasting its one message loud and clear:
from now on you will have to pay for your own
brainwashing.

What, you think this shit is cheap?

Half Wrong

2009-08-21T08:21:00.001-04:00

"To generalize is to be an idiot.”
--- William Blake

The glass is half full or you die.

Optimist shmoptimist. Pessimist shmessimist.

Anyone who isn’t brain dead recognizes that the glass is both half empty, and half full, and that you could even say it is half empty because it is half full, or verse vica.

But what about when the glass is 90% full: is it just as valid to say that it is almost empty as to say that it is almost full?

At some point imprecision slips in: 92.67%? 86.9817%?

At some point, you generalize.

I once read that less than 10% of Americans owned slaves before the civil war.

A slightly higher percentage of blacks were free.

If this were true, it would be as accurate to say that blacks were free as to say that whites owned slaves.

My point here is twofold: if we are “forced” to generalize, we should prefer the generalization that is 90% true and 10% false to the one that is 90% false and 10% true. Both are true (in part). Both, false. But one of the two (optimistic or not) better approximates our sense of truthfulness and honesty.

You can speak conventionally, and you can speak truthfully, but you can’t speak bothfully (I note that my spell-checker does not like this last word).

Take another example. Mathematicians define a “manifold” as something that is locally flat, but globally curved. This is the way living on earth feels. When a carpenter tries to determine whether something is flat or not, he compares it with the flat ground. It does not concern him that the planet itself is curved. People on both the political left and right call their adversaries “flat earthers”, trying to imply that they will not admit the “truth”. But the truth is that the earth is flat. And the earth is round. Bothfulness again.

In an odd obverse of this, consider the human habit of referring to “sunrise”, and “sunset”. More than 400 years after Galileo, you might expect that people would no longer believe, or at least utter sentences that sound like they believe, that the sun revolves around the earth. Are people who use the words “sunrise” and “sunset” “flat earthers”? Think here also of “moon rise” and “moon set”, and recall that the moon really does revolve around the earth.

Revolution, rotation. It’s all so confusing.

The problem is that the problem is always at least two problems. Consider the (non)equations:

2 + 2 = 79
2 + 2 = 4.000001

We want to say that one of these is more right than the other. But asked whether each one is “right” or “wrong”, we feel compelled (for the most part) to answer that each one is wrong. They are both “100% wrong” even though the first one is wrong only by some small fraction of a percent.

We want the fact that the glass is 99.999% full to count for something.

I would be remiss were I not to mention that whatever the case may look like, the glass really is much more than 99% empty since atoms themselves are mostly empty space; atoms themselves are fantastically empty. Should you doubt this ask yourself this simple question; why do x-rays work?

Even the glass part of the glass is more than half empty (more than 99%: light does, after all, pass through it.) The emptiness (or is it the extreme concentration) of matter caused the discoverer of the nucleus, Ernest Rutherford, to wax poetic. Of his early experiments with gold foils he observed it was "as if you fired a 15-inch naval shell at a piece of tissue paper and the shell came right back and hit you."

Another way of describing the situation is as the universal synecdoche (rhymes with Schenectady) of words, as the American Heritage Dictionary defines it: “A figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole (as hand for sailor), the whole for a part (as the law for police officer), the specific for the general (as cutthroat for assassin), the general for the specific (as thief for pickpocket), or the material for the thing made from it (as steel for sword).” Note that to restrict the definition of synecdoche to any one of its parts would itself be, in part, synecdoche.

We may want William Blake to be right when he observes that “to generalize is to be an idiot”, but we note that Blake himself is generalizing.

Nor is this fact restricted, as might be concluded from my examples, to scientific situations.

When the United States in an act of naked aggression invaded Iraq thereby committing the supreme crime under international law, many Americans, myself included, were horrified. Many sought ways to make this crime palpable to their fellow citizens, in order to counteract the massive propaganda campaign conducted by the military-industrial media. One group called “Iraq Body Count” sought to collate press accounts of Iraqis killed by American force. Their methodology was such as to err entirely on the side of undercounting Iraqi dead. This was understandable since they wanted to have thorough credibility. But, this had unintended consequences.

When, in 2004, the American researcher Les Roberts published a study of Iraqi mortality based on cluster samples he and his colleagues had conducted in Iraq, he found a number about ten times the size of the number published by Iraq Body Count.

The glass was 90% empty.

Iraq Body Count’s numbers were used to dispute Roberts’ results although the two were measuring entirely different things by entirely different methods with entirely different types of errors (note in passing that an ungelded horse is called an entire.)

With the glass, the sunrise, the flat earth, the x-ray, the nature of error in arithmetic, free blacks, white slave-owners, 15-inch naval shells, Iraqi body counts, we, in order to speak, are compelled, like William Blake, to generalize. To synecdochize.

Maj Ragain writes that we are all f**ked tomatoes.

He may be half wrong.

Love in the Key of Skin

2009-08-16T12:15:00.003-04:00

Skin, bright-eyed, sight reads.
Fingersong calligraphy.
You, my holy, braille.

Buy the Numbers

2009-08-07T10:21:00.004-04:00

Thou shalt not sit
With statisticians nor commit
A social science
----- W.H. Auden

Statistics show,
ours is by far the wealthiest age in history, but
we have less land per person, less green space, and dirtier
air and water.

Statistics show
that our phones are ineffably sleek and sexy, that we have more of them, make more calls, with cleaner connections, and do it for less money, but
we say less, forget it faster, confuse more, and abandon commitments sooner.

Statistics show, life expectancies increased by twenty years in the past seventy, and so you'll only age 45 minutes in the next hour; that if you're not already dead you could live to be 300 --- but only if you were born yesterday.

Statistics show, July is warmer than January
and that January is warmer than July --- if you happen to live in Australia.

Statistics show, that every square inch of dry land on the surface of the globe will soon be submerged in wriggling sinuous human flesh, and
that all of these wrigglers will own bigger starter-mansions, and flat-panel TV sets, louder Dolby with less harmonic distortion, posier shock-absorbing mountain bikes, and that they all will have more, healthier, and better-engineered food.

Statistics show, that the average SUV will soon be bigger than the state of Minnesota, and need the total oil reserves of Saudi Arabia just to drive the mean distance between Walmarts (about 50 feet), that computers will soon be so fast you'll be able to calculate tomorrow yesterday, and store the Encyclopedia Britannica, the entire archives of the New York Times, the complete works of the Marquis de Sade, and the film library of MGM in something smaller than a drop of mosquito spit, but
you still won't be able to find your car keys or wrist watch when you're in a hurry.

Statistics show that if present trends continue, children will only be born
to unmarried parents, but only married parents will have kids who are educated,
housed,
clothed,
and fed.

Statistics show,
that statistics lie.

Statistics show
we all know this.

Statistics show, that nothing is growing faster than the use of statistics compiled by governments to increase the profits of transnational businesses.

Statistics show, people choose their statistics to fit their prejudices, they show you should never think with your heart, never act imprudently, never ignore your own benefit, and never ever ever do anything statistics warn you against.

What statistics won't show is how or why to love another human being, cherish the beauty that hasn't been spray painted, strip-mined, industrialized, or urban-sprawled out of existence
yet,
demand that the poor and weak receive the same respect and dignity as the rich and the powerful, or deride the mathematical fraudulence of assuming all humans behave as identical, independently distributed random variables when they are in fact
transcendantly,
irreducibly, and
polydimensionally
unique.

(I've been meaning to put this poem on the blog for a couple of months, but have run into problems with line breaks. What exists here is just the best I could do for line breaks using the blogger editor at the moment. I thought this would be fun because of a recent NY Times article about statistics, and note, to follow the link you will need to be a registered user of the Times, which doesn't cost money, but does cost a certain amount in releasing marketing info, which is probably not worth it if you are not already a Times reader.)

Lipstick

2009-07-31T09:49:00.002-04:00

Why is it some people get away with murder,
hell, some people get away with mass murder,
and others go to jail for just
opening their mouths?
That is what they’re doing in Pakistan,
and Afghanistan, mass murder. Guy in an office
10,000 miles away in Langley pulls the trigger
and a dozen people die in a Hellfire missile attack;
DA, judge, jury, and executioner.
And then there was the guy who was the head of
the central bank in New York. He got caught not
paying his taxes for five years. Know what they did?
They promoted him. Now he runs the money department
for the whole country. And his loan shark pals are busy
knee-capping people into the streets for being late
on their mortgages. And then there was the woman
who was arrested for just wearing a T-shirt;
the shirt just had the number of US soldiers who died
in Iraq written on it. And they arrested her because they
didn’t want people thinking about that.

There was a children’s book one time called Animal Farm,
where they said “all animals are created equal”.
The pigs stayed up all night rearranging that to say
“but some are more equal than others.”

“Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation”

2009-07-25T11:23:00.001-04:00

Side by side, on the shelf,
a children’s book of Hindu deities,
and a book about Browns’ tailgating.
What randomness assorts itself
in our lives,
and how. ‘Deity’ reminds
me of telling Mary,
just yesterday, that ‘Jupiter’ is a slurring
of Zeus Pater (as in deus
ex machina.). Two tremendous
-ly foreign words melding
into another we both know,
and don’t: obvious
and obscure. How the planets
have given their names to our days,
and the gods their names to the planets:
Saturn’s-day, Wotan’s-day, Thor’s-day.
How just this morning I’ve been teaching
the planets to Jackson.
“Life’s nonsense pierces us with
strange relation.” How, at the tailgate
of a hearse, I was reminded of
Browns’ Sundays. It was the funeral
of the book’s author’s mother.

(The title is a line from Wallace Stevens’ poem, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”.)

New Zealand Ice Cream at Bondi

2009-07-17T12:57:00.000-04:00

Austral ice cream sweats
with melt and lick. Fingertips
cradling fresh waffle cones
in the January scorch,
as the flesh of tongues
experiments, probing
the gelid slick. Everywhere
the hands. Hands
and arching necks
lapping attention: she is there, she is there, she is
there as afternoon becoming morning, jumpcuts
farandnear, abovebelow, upfrontbehind,
latticed shadows, knuckles crumpling
the silky universe between index and thumb,
taste and lip. White as the rush hour of
promiscuous gulls in their swirling commutes,
the esplanade laden with the identical song
from ten thousand different radios,
they are all her hands. The pendance
of her breasts as she bends to invade
the five gallon tubs
with her benevolent scoops,
the belt high eyes craving
sugar-dairy goodness
through the refrigerated glass,
this bucket brigade of redemptive affection
where heroism comes in chocolate.

I see from within the heads of ten thousand
total strangers, her hands are my eyes
and my eyes are her breasts, and we are
all of us, licking
at the same sweetness.
I wear the far side of the Pacific on my skin,
as close to far away as I can ever get,
where north and east and south and west,
where even down points closer to home.
Her hands are fresh aloe
for the sunburn.

“The fewer the hits, the truer the statement.” (July 7, 2009)

2009-07-11T14:15:00.001-04:00

“Property is theft”. 50,900.
“Intellectual property is theft.” 3,650.
“Property is murder.” 170.
“Intellectual property is murder.”
0.
“Theft is the intellectual property of the Wall Street Banksters.”
0.
“Government is a conspiracy to commit theft.”
0.
“Government is conspiracy to commit property.”
0.
“The fewer the hits, the truer the statement.”
0.
“The truer the statement, the fewer the hits.”
0.

Tailgating

2009-07-03T20:59:00.003-04:00

“We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

--- T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

I.

Eat enough poison, build up to it
slowly enough, and you too
can become poisonous. At least
if you’re a snake-eating newt.
Call it a business lunch, concerning the
hostile takeover of the snake’s
toxic assets. If it can be inherited,
self defense may itself be
an incitement to meal-icide, each end,
by nature,
a new beginning.

Each gate,
as Janus and the newt make clear, a place
for both arrival
and departure.

II.

With the tailgate open I couldn’t help but notice
the roller-wheels (they reminded me of the
supermarket merchandise conveyor tracks
of my childhood) in the bed of the hearse,
the way they eased the slide of her casket
into the bar-grabbing hands of her pall’s
bearers. “Someone has done this before,”
I thought to myself. “Many times.”
And with the news of GM’s impending
bankruptcy dominating the headlines,
I mused whether or not we’d be able to die any more,
without Cadillac. Talk about
brand loyalty.

And I thought of the sky burials
of Parsis in India: the way they leave their dead on towers
for the vultures to eat, the way they are
re-in-carn-ated (consider here the term ‘carnivore’),
how quickly, as vulture-meat, they are borne
to the sky. How, like Cadillac,
the vultures have been going extinct.
How it’s been traced to the remnants of
pain killers in the carcasses of beasts
of burden (they work longer in the fields
when they’re given pain relief.)

An even bet whether the vultures,
or Cadillac, will dance
on the other’s grave.

III.

Ever since I took that Aeroflot flight to
Bombay I’ve been captivated by how
interhemispheric telephone calls can’t take place
at the same time. Come to think of it,
time can’t even take place
at the same time. It is all hours
of the day and night, always.
And they say when someone asked Yogi Berra
what time it was he asked,
“you mean now?”

Sometimes pain killers are just killers.
And sometimes poison keeps you safe, and sometimes
poison gets you swallowed, and sometimes,
at the tailgate of a bankrupt hearse,
it is all of those times
at once.

Shadow

2009-06-26T13:10:00.000-04:00

The sky is not as blue,
the swifts are not as fleet,
the straight line not as true,
the cherries are less sweet.
The grapefruit is more bitter,
the lemons much more sour.
The sparrows less atwitter,
the minute lasts an hour.
In your shadow more
is so much less,
and less is so much
meaner,
and failure reaps such great success,
the keening’s so much keener.

Cremona

2009-06-19T10:48:00.001-04:00

Flittering in the permanent ice fog
my father's memory has become,
the brittle anorexic husk of a once
Cremonan instrument, so much of my life is now
nothing more than
frog song and fly buzz:
the white noise of
wet chemistry.

Gone,
how gone,
the resisted temptations of jailbait
lip-gloss, the sight rhyme of white caps caught
in a beam-reach jib-belly basked in
Adirondack sun, everything
that once promised this prison inmate
his heart transplant, everything
that gave these Fourth of July
sparkle sculptures their
rocket lift.

And I, a busker of words
tag the air with this
phonetic grafitti,
sheerly to wax the apple
that's already been eaten.

Santé

2009-06-12T10:01:00.002-04:00

I love you naked.
I love you clothed.
I love your tummy.
I love your toes.
Fat or skinny.
Scrunched-up or tall.
I love you sleeping.
I love it all.
There's nothing in this world I don't love about you,
that's the only thing I know that is totally true.

I love your shimmy.
I love your strut.
I love you shaking,
your bubble butt.
Love you in panties.
Love you in bed.
Love you in jammies.
I love your head.
There's nothing in this world I don't love about you,
that's the only thing I know that is totally true.

I love your butter.
I love your jam.
I love you mustard.
I love your ham.
I love your coffee.
I love your cream.
I love you frothing,
Like cappucin’.
There's nothing in this world I don't love about you,
that's the only thing I know that is totally true.

I love your shower.
I love you wet.
Love to remember,
when you forget.
I love to read you.
I love your book.
Love when you give me,
that santé look.
There's nothing in this world I don't love about you,
that's the only thing I know that is totally true.

Mango Sky

2009-06-06T15:06:00.000-04:00

Walking back from the blood bank,
it's a fine and rapturous day.
I've just given my donation
to the common good,
and the brotherhood of all,
and I've got
nothing to say.
But the sun is kicking the wind up,
speaking in licks of waves
on a gin-clear lake while I've still got
nothing to say.
With the sun and the lake
singing their invisible duet
my only regret is
having eaten that fajita before I found
this bodega with its mound of
tres-por-un-peso
mangos ripe
as a tropical sunset's threatening
watermelon sky. Feel like I

fell off a cliff, drifting off
El Capitan, a mammoth fluted
riff of granite, fell off
El Capitan like Yosemite Sam
on a hang-glider, and I'm riding the thermals
of that duet like a top forty hit. Got more
airplay than I'm equipped for,
more airplay than my
flight training prepared me for.
Got all my true possessions gripped tighter
than my fannypack: gut-sense enough
to stay the hay out
of the coal mine.
No caged canary in bituminous darkness,
no graduated dipstick
in swampgas isolation,
I have just left the blood bank,
and my heart is coursing through
the veins and arteries of my
fellow man, my
fellow woman, I am in
red commerce with the world,
like a hang-glider in the mango sky
carrying all the life insurance there is.

Somewhere over the eye-rope,
the tongue-wire, over the glass-fire
fiber optic, there is a chain-gang
getting rich. There is a chain-smoking,
chain-store, chain-gang
getting rich,
trading stocks on insider tips,
leveraged buyouts, like bodybuilders
in a graveyard. Somewhere beyond my
El Capitan airplay there are fiberoptic bodybuilders
getting rich in a graveyard,
and I don't know which one of us is right,
me, in the spiraling sky blue in green leaf duet ride,
or them buried in their wealthy bituminous fossilized
night. Can't decide which one of us is
waiting on a mail-order miracle,
waiting on love like some
mail-order, freeze-dried miracle
you just add water to.

Like the perfect blow-up doll.

And as you ask what is the point,
the chiselpoint of my gin-clear
Beaujolais duet, I say,
I say, I say, I am not
the bouquet. Not even
the sommelier.
I am just walking downtown today
on my way back from the blood bank
of daylight savings and loan,
where my only true donation flows
through the circulation of men and women
I will never know.

Could a metaphor explain
that I am the flake-feathers of snowbirds?
Not the spun metal fiber of lamé burial clothes.
That when the escape-wheel of fate's timepiece gets
permanently stuck,
you won't find me on a
golden chain gang,
you won't find me revenging myself
on no brain-eating flies,
you won't find me in the world's
biggest shopping mall,
frantically scanning my GPS device
for some kind of way out.
But, like a kinetic sculpture,
you might find me hangin around
a museum: cresting the champagne powder
of a Bitterroot ridge. Goo-goo eyed for some au naturel
water nymph swimming the swells off the cliffs of Negril,
or thrilling in the crepuscular image-arpeggios of poetry,
jazz improvisations for my home,
working my idea jujitsu against the Mafia patent
on dreams. Working
25/8 to vaccinate children
against bureaucrats,
and Eurocrats, and their
android progress. Spray painting
fluorescent tie-dye on their blinders,
a reminder, a reminder, a reminder that
blood bank is redundant,
without heart.
Without art.
Without flight coursing through the
sky-blue veins, and sunset arteries of our sisters and brothers
we would be nothing
but chain-store body builders
in an autumn graveyard.

The Thief

2009-05-28T10:37:00.001-04:00

I've stolen breath from luffing air,
and water from blue seas,
warmth from winter suns,
and cool from summer's breeze.
I've stolen thoughts from purling streams,
and sleep from thieving time,
shade from bosky greens,
it’s sure I've led a life of crime.
I've stolen mist from cataracts,
and views from mountain climbs.
My gold's from autumn leaves,
my diamonds all from rime.
Such wealth though stolen’s never grudged,
though some of virtue be,
who'd never steal an hour from toil,
to steal what's had for free.

Bazookamouth

2009-05-21T13:17:00.000-04:00

It mails lighting bugs
through my vertebrae,
remembering that first time,
and with me now bold-hued in the
encaustic
of you, there's nothing,
nothing, I wouldn't say
or do. I'd

dogpaddle across the foamstorming
whitewaters of Iguacu Falls,
drink all the frog spit
in the Okefenokee, lip-skimming
thick algal mats like the froth off
freshly brewed lager-wort.
I'd bobsled clearcut old-growth redwoods down
Cascade lumber flumes,
through the middle
of an EarthFirst skeetshooting range.
I'd front unedited jeremiads
ghostwritten by Salmon Rushdie
ridiculing missile-toting,
mandatorily bearded,
fundamentalist Shiites.
I'd go angling for cavefish
in Tora Bora after
taunting Norman Schwarzkopf
and Donald Rumsfeld,
and stealing all the warlord baksheesh
in Peshawar. I'd field Barry Bonds
line drives with my teeth. Memorize
the collected works of
Carl Jung, Leo Tolstoy, Iggy Pop and Sting,
Noam Chomsky, T.S. Eliot, Henry Miller and
Yahyah Ling. I'd amble barefoot
across Saharan runway tarmacs.
Pucker for Rottweilers.
Dicker with aircraft carriers.
Flutterkick through lava flows.

I would milk a menstruating grizzly.

I wanna be your veejay,
my liquid crystal display
dancing in opaque patterns to you like
an electric sandwich.

I don't wanna be no roué,
lecherously dissipating my
dwindling years away,
no human shield
protecting the coward
inside of me.
I don't want to live my life
like a grammar teacher in a ghetto high school,
correcting spelling errors
on suicide notes.
I would rather flatline
than be a concierge
in the overeducated concentration camp
of a world without you,
gnarling like a bonsai in a
potted premise.
Without you I’d be so empty
you'd need a scanning tunneling electron microscope
to find the purpose in me.
Besides you there is no solace for
shambling through this boomtown whorehouse,
no matter how much cheap whiskey
you chase it with.
This activated charcoal only gets
one chance, and being without you is like
being swaddled in wasps and eating bees.

Save for the moveable feast of you,
your eyes bluer than all the bluebonnets in Texas,
save for the chance of my fingers
dancing the macramed geography
of our shared embrace,
my biography would be a
diorama of a bread line.

A landlocked navy.

When the picked bones of my
fully procured cadaver lodge
beneath six feet of the ultimate DNR,
I don't want to be remembered
as an eponymous invective
for impacted bowels,
or toothless smell-bitten
scurvy-laughter.
And that is what has made me
the wadded
dayglo-pink-gummed
Bazooka-mouth who is
trying to bolt the here-and-now,
to your vervetrumping

wow.

If Time Were Music

2009-05-12T12:42:00.000-04:00

No sooner does a thing become final than I
recant it. Finding enchantment in the recanting,
enchained by the refrain,
circumscribed by the reprisal,
the lines of the round
decline defining, as if definition were an
end instead of a worm in the beak
of a mother robin whose nurture
proceeds from clutch
to brood. Verve,
to vibe, tremble,
to quake. Minuet to march,
as the end-systole s-s-s
syncopates to the enthralling chanteuse
of gothic romance, a pas-de-deux with the
last or the next diastole, the four-chambered
hypocrite vetoing the proclaimed intentions of truth,
while diction evaporates like fire the strawmen logic erects,
and rues. If water were ink
then oceans would publish,
and if time were music then air
would sing. Final vocabularies
riff and string. Skep and skeptic,
honey,
sting,
lavish and perish
desert,
spring.

Like water making light of fire,
and murdered beggars defining kings,
this worm-like word is death and hope,
love and need, child
and parent,
sacrifice,
greed.
Bait and purpose,
earth and flight,
nest and office,
gloom and sprite.
In a tongue upheaved
by unspoken sins,
all ends are quickly ended,
and the means of words begin
to mean, where words are found
transcended.

Career Day

2009-05-04T14:53:00.000-04:00

Let's review:
high paying manufacturing jobs:
thing of the past. There's still
manufacturing work to be had but
only for the same wage they're paying
the illegals. Healthcare is growing, and not a bad option
as long as you don't mind denying services to the mothers
of poor children, or taking away the houses of frail
elderly grandmothers, filling out
thousands of pages of reimbursement forms
and you aren't too upset by the people who die
while yer preoccupied with all that timbertrashing
topsoil depleting flash flood paperwork.
Working with children's another fastgrowing
career path because after all,
the children are our future. Course the goin rate
on the future's a bit shy of minimum wage, truth-be-told,
and then there's all those licensures and regulations they're imposing now
cos you can't be too safe with our kids.
And ya'd better not be above a fair bit
of pokin and proddin, needle's wortha blood here,
vial a urine there, battery of psychological profile tests,
maybe a few questions round to the neighbors, FBI,
local police, fingerprints, maybe even a polygraph…maybe.
Not that all that sophisticated testing'll keep people from lookin at ya
sideways, like yer the biggest pederast since Father Geoghan.
Careers in TV, now that's the job ta be had if there's a having any.
Pay's like you wouldn't believe, and all the notoriety and celebrity
and there's always plenty of the opposite sex eager for a taste of fame
if you know what I mean. Course there's a thousand unemployed for every
liposucked, botoxed, blowdried, rhinoplastied tribute to good grooming
that gets their face up on the screen but that's no reason for not
following your dreams. Which is the least of your problems
since if you have any talent well that's the
meanest aspect of the whole thing, the way you have to watch
people who sing like gorillas, act like cardboard, and think like fleas
rise to the top cuz their one true genius is for getting the tongue
in deep when it comes time for some serious --- career climbing.
If you don't mind lying and beating the crap out of people for
demanding a fair day's pay for a fair day's labor,
firing rubber bullets that are only
occasionally lethal into people demanding peace, or freedom,
or whatever nefarious cause the case may be, well, there's a
pretty good future if you want to join
the police. But if you can keep your smile
when all about you, are losing their jobs,
and blaming it on those silly little pink slips
yer handing out by the thousands, and the oinking
multi-million dollar stock option stocking stuffers
you use to grease the political campaigns for
regulatory reforms that turn grand theft into
aggressive offshore accounting irregularities
well yours is the high skills high tech
job market of the
free trade agreement future.
Yours is the career path of unlimited
prosperity, the path that assures this great land will always be
number one; the path of rewriting the rules and
controlling the biggest guns.
A titan of industry, an entrepreneur, a CEO,
teaching a lesson they don't teach you in school,
that if you want to make it
in a neo-liberal, fascist state economy:
the thing that matters most is
who they fear,
not what you know.

Bothfulness

2009-04-27T15:18:00.001-04:00

One or the other.
Both.
Solemn oath.
Solitary confinement.
Russ Feingold.
Rheingold.
Barbara Boxer.
Boxer Rebellion.
Taiping Rebellion.
I Ching.
Spring fling.
Shoot your wad.
Johnny Wadd.
Holmes County.
Sherlock Holmes.
Merchant of Venice.
Venice Beach.
Omaha Beach.
Mutual of Omaha.
Mutual of Tokyo.
Tokyo Rose.
Gypsy Rose Lee.
Bruce Lee.
Li-young Lee.
Natura non facit saltum.
Saltation.
Sodium chloride.
Drinking-water fluoride.
Skin flora.
Skin of our teeth..
Skin flick.
Dental floss.
Ipanema Bikini.
Hydrogen bomb-test Bikini.
Edward Teller.
Edward Said.
Raed in the Middle.
Middle Kingdom.
Middle Passage.
Passage to India.
Bollywood.
Bali bombing.
The goddess Kali
Nicola Calipari.
Gay Paris.
Paris is worth a mass.
Mass energy conversion.
Mass media.
Propaganda.
Manufacturing Consent.
Consent without consent.
Commodify Your Dissent.
Descent of Man.
Decent respect for the opinions of mankind.
Sexual selection.
Intelligent selection.
Intelligent design.
Designer drugs.
Drugstore Cowboy.
Cowboy Junkies.
Brokeback Mountain.
Heath Ledger.
Cliff ledge.
Heathcliff.
Jane Eyre.
Emerald Isle.
Emeril Lagasse.
Michael Simon.
Lolita.
Lola.
Cost of living allowance.
Coca leaf.
Bolivia.
Simon Bolivar.
Paul Simon.
Simony.
Donatist.
Campaign donation.
Campaign reform.
Reform school.
School figures.
Figure skating.
Peggy Fleming.
Ian Fleming.
James Bond.
Junk Bond.
Collateralized Debt Obligation.
Junk stock.
Famous in the neighborhood.
Speak meaningfully.
Speak truthfully.
Speak bothfully.

Shouting Over the Band

2009-04-22T13:57:00.001-04:00

Music so loud you can barely hear
above the distortion,
work hard at ignoring it as we
shout to each other competing for love,
but mostly attention.
One television, the big game.
Another, the latest war,
and in the back the pool balls
break. On stage the singer who has
sifted his life for importants, finds nothing
but love mislaid, greed
unlanced, hearts betrayed
by hearts forever unknown,
chances forever past,
lives unplayed,
undanced. The quivering
petals of blue-bells in spring,
the taut skin of youth brushed by feather-soft fingers,
linger only until the refrain
skirts to a minor key
we neither will nor dare attend,
as shouting over the band
we ignore, and become
the singer.

Homeless Kings

2009-04-13T09:24:00.000-04:00

Remember,
all of the fiat
money in the world,
all of the watermarked, counterfeit-
protected, silver-threaded floating currency
fiat money in the world couldn't buy a simple
transistor radio. Not
for all the money in the world.
Before there was
radio.

And you didn't know
what you were missing.
It felt,
it felt,
it felt

much the same as now,
which is to say
you couldn't feel a thing.
Even when, like right
now, a hundred
or a thousand stations
bathe you in music and urgency
you can't hear. Soft.
Electromagnetic vibrations in the ether,
you can't hear.

Even homeless people can afford them now,
even homeless people are richer
than the transistorless kings
of yesterday. Living in used
cars, abandoned
factories, in subway
tunnels, and under urinous highway
overpasses,
the homeless are richer than yesterdays'
kings.

We call this
progress.

Wealth, once inconceivable,
like music,
once unhearable,
everywhere.
By fiat.

And grimy, unclean men,
friendless,
roofless,
loveless,
toothless,
patrol the streets devoid of shelter and saturated
in miracles,
paroled straight from mother's womb into this place
of placental predators.

And I wonder,
once you put down that TV guide,
just how well do you know
your next-door neighbor?

To Have and Have More

2009-04-04T06:41:00.005-04:00

Found this posted at the Crisis Chronicles lately. Here's the text.

Bogart said to Faulkner “hey man,
pass me some of that single malt.”
Then turning to Ernest Hemingway he asked,
“do you think I’ve got a shot with Lauren Bacall?”
Well the story’s set in Cuba
but we can move it all to French Martinique,
It’s got these terrorists from al Qaeda
but in the screenplay they are much more elite,
In the novel it’s a “Not” you know, but
reality is a photo-op war,
for the base the point’s not having,
the point is just to have and have more.

Could be freezing, could be burning,
could be starving for just one bite of food,
you can stow them in a hell hole
with jailers all lascivious and lewd,
from the Bremer-walls of Baghdad
to troops murdering a 10-year-old in Ni’ilin,
making a living is illegal,
making a killing is not even obscene,
the rich are always covered,
but convulsing for an hour on the emergency room floor,
the uninsured discover what it means
for them to have and have more.

What to do about the poor,
“let them eat yellowcake,” she said.
Then Marie Antoinette Paris Novak Hilton,
she handed her her head.
Well Barack was such a rock star
in Berlin when his jelly donut moment came,
even though he wasn’t Gable,
everyone said he also wasn’t John McCain,
and where there’s blood on the tracks, you know
you just might find Al Gore,
‘cos when your country’s lost in the bushes,
all that matters is to have and have more.

Santayana's Blue Period

2009-03-29T16:46:00.001-04:00

--- for Patrick Marblo, born 4 April, 2001

On the day you were born, 24 American spies were captives on Hainan Island in the South China Sea. Their spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet that crashed, and killed its pilot. No one anywhere knew how this would turn out. An embargo, or worse, a war? Imagine how their families worried about them, as your mother would go nuts if it had been you, as the Chinese pilot's mother must have rung in agony, the bell of her heart peeling in her chest, the sound of her keening unheard, mute in the American press. You should ask yourself what those Americans were doing there, 10,000 miles from home, what freedom they were defending there. Consider how the word defense is contorted when it refers to military action on an enemy's doorstep, and what the word 'freedom' means when neither you nor I have any right to know exactly what information those spies were after, and how, or why. Some will say they were protecting our freedom but you should note it is only our freedom to be ignorant of the activities of the rulers of our own country.

On the day you were born the Nasdaq stock market had lost nearly 70% of its value from the preceding year and people were very concerned about an impending economic collapse. Before that the Nasdaq had gone up and up and up, as if it were in earth orbit and no longer had the ability to fall. Companies that had never turned a profit were worth many millions of dollars and the only people you could hear on radio and tv were telling you how the internet would revolutionize everything. Many people disagreed with this but they were not let anywhere near the radio or tv for fear that stock prices might go down. Mass media had become the marketing branch of the electronics and computer industry. From this you should note that the fact that everyone is saying something, especially if they are rich and famous people who have a financial stake in what they are saying, does not make it true. Also note the implication that rich and famous people do not become so merely by telling the truth.

On the day you were born a 10 month old Jewish baby was injured by a Palestinian mortar attack, and 77 Palestinians were wounded by a 'retaliatory' Israeli helicopter rocket attack. Lying there barely sentient, you could make very nearly zero sense of this; I could make little more. For the record I think you should pay very close attention to the use of the word 'terrorist', and how often people speak as if 'arab' is just a contraction for 'arabterrorist'. When one group of people uses rockets, tanks, and helicopters to fire on another group of people who have only slingshots, stones, or are completely unarmed, I propose that you think of the people with the tanks as the true terrorists.

On the day you were born the thousandth victim died in an epidemic of meningitis according to reports from the Burkina Fasan capital of Ouagadougou. Most people I know couldn't begin to tell you where Burkina Faso is, or what Ouagadougou. I have always thought that just the sound of the word Ouagadougou was kind of funny. You should ask yourself if people's lives are worth less because they live in a place that sounds funny to your ear. Before answering this you should consider whether or not Washington might sound funny to a Ouagadougan.

On the day you were born a man named Jason Massey was executed by lethal injection in Huntsville, Texas. Despite the fact that all civilized and educated people condemn the death penalty, executions happen nearly every day in America. Note that you were not born into a country ruled by the civilized and educated.

On the day you were born your mother was reminded that human blood is not always red, but rather is blue when deprived of oxygen (note the blue of the veins in your wrist.) The particular source of this reminder was the color of your face when you were but seconds old; the placenta had wrapped twice around your neck and you were born blue in the face. What I take from this is how very precious human life is, how it seems to be made more so by being always so very close to death. You, are, what you choose to make of this.

I wish I could say it was a day unlike all others or at least the end of an era; no more provocative and pointless spy missions, no more bubbles of irrational exuberance in the business world, no more provocations and massive retaliations, no more disdain for unfamiliar peoples, no more savage state-sponsored revenge. The most notable difference between the present and that fateful day of your birth however, in my estimation at least, is the way that your face is no longer blue.

Nearonym

2009-03-22T17:52:00.002-04:00

Names must be both
different, and the same. Without
difference, we'd meander
through the city streets of a placeless
homonym, a single zip-code
where everyone's phone rings
simultaneously, while over undecipherable
food, we'd puzzle how to share
the multi-million page bill
from Mastercard. Without
similarity, the characters
of the alphabet would need to outnumber
insects, and the excuses of politicians.
Then we'd be absorbed in the tongue-
babble sound-mimicry of
toddlers struggling to master the endless
palette of phonemes in a lifelong preparatory drill
for a skill that had outlived all
utility.

As for this dif-sameness
of naming, it costs
us a pas-de-deux of nuance and
ambiguity. Creates a world
that confuses
foot doctors, the unabridged
legacy of educational method, and the sexual
abuse of children. Where diamond
weights pass for rabbit food, or the purity
of gold. Chintzy or chancy,
whimsy, fancy, mansion or shanty, rhyme
impossible or endlessly
riche.

Even if reach
may exceed metaphor
as might may right,
or capsize,
we, in the same both
hear and name
near and there.

Named, unnameable and naming
neither anto-, hom-, nor synonyms
awkward, we juggle as if
nearonyms, recognizing alike
surprises. Embody in-
consistency, distance in proximity
convey both fact and impossibility
of conveyance.
Like authors
who create sound and meaning
never entirely
the same with difference.

James Gang

2009-03-01T14:29:00.000-05:00

Jesse, Lebron, William, and Etta James.
James Brown, Paul Brown, Jim Brown,
Marlon Brando, Florida Marlins,
Richard Florida, Keith and Renee Richards,
Richard Keith, Rene Descartes,
Cartes Blanche, Blanche Dubois,
W.E.B. Duboise, DW and Andy Griffith.
Andi and Roddy McDowell, Sam
MacDowell, Sam Mayday Malone,
Malone, New York, Mary Doyle,
Doyley Carte, Gilbert and Sullivan.
Higher Ed, New Hire, Nude Painting,
Newt Gingrich, Gingham tablecloth, red tablewine,
Red Foxx, Michael J. Fox,
Fox News, Fox Chase,
Chase Manhattan, Salmon P. Chase,
Salmon Run, Milk Run, Iran Air Flight 655,
USS Vincennes, USS Stark, David Stark,
Pete Stark, Peat Bog, Bog Man,
Isle of Mann, Mann Act,
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice,
Benicio del Toro, Che Guevara,
Gael Garcia Bernal, Martin Bernal,
Black Athena, Hugo Black,
Hugo Boss, SS uniforms, Boss Tweed,
Tweetie Bird, Charlie Bird Parker,
Robert Parker, Maceo Parker,
Burt Lancaster, Cynthia Plaster Caster,
Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes,
Hugh Downs, Downs Syndrome,
Syndrome X, Malcolm X,
Malcolm Ten, Tintin,
Rin Tin Tin, Howard Zinn,
Zen Buddhism, Pali Canon,
Bali bombing, Balm of Gilead,
Gilligan’s Island, Fantasy Island,
Voted off the Island, Vote early
And vote often, often a bridesmaid,
Brideshead Revisited, All out Waugh,
Elinaw hates Waugh, Leo Tolstoy,
Crimea and Punishment, Raskolnikov,
Rasputin, Vladimir Putin,
Put-in Bay, San Francisco Bay,
Sydney Harbor, Sydney Greenstreet,
Easy Street, Easy money,
Chicks for free, I want my MTV,
I wanna hold your hand, the hand that rocks the cradle,
Tim Robbins, Baskin Robbins, the Emperor
Of Ice Cream, the naked emperor,
Hans Christian Anderson, Mr. Christian,
Captain Bly, Captain Queeg, Humphrey Bogart,
Lauren Bacall, Key Largo,
Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner,
The Importance of being Earnest,
Oscar Wilde, I knew Oscar de la Renta when he was just
Oscar Renta, Veal Oscar,
The Academy Awards, Plato’s Academy,
Platonic relationship, Nambla,
Allen Ginsburg, Ruth Bader Ginsburg,
Badr corps, Marine Corps, Semper
Fidel Castro, Reinaldo Arenas,
Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men,
Cormac MacCarthy, McCarthy Hearings,
Bobby Kennedy, Arthur Miller, Rebecca Miller,
Daniel Day Lewis, Cecil Day Lewis,
Cecil Rhodes, Rhodesia,
Rhodes Scholar, Bill Clinton,
Bill Bradley, Bradley assault vehicle,
Omar Bradley, Omar Khayyam, Khayyami Vice,
Jalali calendar, Gregorian calendar,
Gregorian chant, Rule of Saint Benedict,
The good words of St. Benedict’s dictionary,
Benedict Arnold, Arnold Palmer,
Palmer raids, Mario Buda,
Mario Andretti, Barney Oldfield,
The purple dinosaur, the purple pill,
AstraZeneca, Astro the Jetson’s dog,
Hanna-Barbera, Hannah Montana,
Miley Stewart, Miles Davis, Willie Davis,
Davis-Bacon, Kevin Bacon, Matt Damon,
Casey Kasem, Ben Affleck, Jesse James.