Naming

------ 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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

(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

(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

(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

(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

(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

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

(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

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

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

(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

(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

(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.

Consolations for a Cleveland Winter

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.