This Television has been Revolutionized

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

"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

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

Buy the Numbers

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

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”

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

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)

“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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?