Sunk Home, the True Key Slots to Its Matrix

I won't post here what's ignited my moleskine because I need and want to protect multiple parties' privacy. I can say entirely new galaxies in which to matrix my own complicity have been discovered, none of them good, all of them irresistibly juicy.

Hey! Look what Creamy brought us!

Walked to the door and dropped it. She loves us. She was at the party Sunday too.

Holyfuck! Look what I just found looking to complete a joke in links:

• Not satire.
• Corpocracy and justice.
• Suck it up.
• Invisible hand slaps invisible forehead.
• Yes.
• No (is the answer to the question in the sub-lede).
• How to start a revolution.
• Wah, you just winged me, see.
• You're right, I haven't written about Anthony Weiner. 
• Also.
• Media priorities.
• Creamy is the female of the three feral children of the mother who had the litter in our shed. She's the one we tried to convert to an indoor cat because her two brothers chase her when they see her. She's always been the best hunter of the three. She's a sweetheart and purr-machine.
• Bleggalgazing!
• Which isn't to say I'm not going to post what I'm not writing about here elsewhere (though in my scribbled calligraphy) or that I'm not going to write sideways here what I'm not writing about directly here.
• I love United, but I'm quickly dying re: Corporate Soccer. 
• Also, I've a Hilltop lurker(s). The catalytic incident is in real life, yo.
• Saw the police presence. 
• OK, two words: gloat; wetwork.
• Ideas of reference. 
• I remember being floored the first time I read White Noise. I remember Underworld boring me. DeLillo short stories, mostly old, out this Fall.
• Church of poetry.
• Church of women.
• Yes, that joke. I love XTC.
• Easy peasy.
• Struck dumb.
• Westerberg.

WEDDING THE LOCKSMITH'S DAUGHTER

Robin Robertson

The slow-grained slide to embed the blade 
of the key is a sheathing,
a gliding on graphite, pushing inside
to find the ribs of the lock.

Sunk home, the true key slots to its matrix;
geared, tight-fitting, they turn
together, shooting the spring-lock,
throwing the bolt. Dactyls, iambics--

the clinch of words--the hidden couplings
in the cased machine. A chime of sound
on sound: the way the sung note snibs on meaning

and holds. The lines engage and marry now,
their bells are keeping time;
the church doors close and open underground.

The Chimney Is Fifty Years Old and Slants to One Side

Twice in the same week in the morning before a celebratory event for Planet I post doom I wrote the night before. It wasn't intentional, just happened - I didn't think to notice until last night. When she turns my age in 2044....

The doom isn't (mostly) for you and me, though as I was deservedly chided, fuck gloom. And another wonderful day: Thank you very much to my dearest friends and family, all of whom recognize that if anyone can save the planet it's Planet.

• The depression and the future.
• Neo v post.
• On the above.
• In which a question is raised. 
• A choice to kill.
• On the above.
• One reason my Jeremiah bones are jangling: a professor/friend, an Arabist with connections in Lebanon and Israel, tells me the vibes from Israel suggest a war by end of summer.
• Seven-dimensional chess.
• FMFML.
• The most divisive word in Britain. 
• Meant to mention this last week.
• Greatest day in Frederick history!
• Spanking Franzen!
• To the Alps.
• RIP Martin Rushent.
• RIP Martin Rushent.
• Dot dash.

THE PLAIN SENSE OF THINGS

Wallace Stevens

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.
 
It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.
 
The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.
 
Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence
 
Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

Simultaneously, I Escape the Territorial, While Remaining within the Burning Loops of My Own Momentary Seizures

Yes, you're right, there was no Theme Song May 2011, the first month I couldn't find - and I looked, I listened - a song to theme the month since I first started that stupid bit six or seven years ago on two or three blogs ago. Thank you for playing along!

Play it now please while you're reading this post. There can never be a Theme Song May 2011 and this isn't June's theme song just this post's excellent theme song (though Holyfuck! finding my Yo La Tengo stash looking for something else, it's like love again).

Speaking of old bits, my canary synapses are chirping, my weathervane's frantically aiming at impending KABOOM! my Cassandra predictions are dependably predictable, my fool says some major man made shitstorm of some paradigm shifting - as in reinforcing then advancing Corporate's paradigmatic dream of reduced you, greater it (and Corporate's paradigmatic nightmare of reduced it, you peasant bastard!) - kabooms soon.

• On neoliberalism.
• Bears repeating. 
• Selling out.
• On selling out.
• Bacevich screed.
• Motherfucking Democrats.
• Motherfucking Obama.
• The other Gitmo.
• Stockholm syndrome.
• William Pfaff makes a funny.
• Police state.
• No, fuck you.
• FMFM&L.
• Resource wars.
• Resource wars.
• Dana Milbank explains Villager protocol.
• We are so screwed.

• I watched Willy Bayne almost drown falling drunk out of a canoe on Tridelphia Reservoir thirty years ago or so.
• Poetry and dissent.
• Speaking of theme songs.
• Black flowers.
• Overlook.
• Autumn Sweater.

ON ANTI-BIOGRAPHY

Will Alexander

For me, biography is a lantern, burning in the midst of parenthetical opaqueness. In a sense, it is a ruse, a phantasmic meandering, brighter or dimmer, according to the ecletic happenstance of terror.

Me, I've been sired in anomaly, in an imagery of brewing grenadine riddles, a parallel poesis spawned from curious seismographic molten. I say curious, because the original stalking arc has disappeared into the wilderness of an a priori blizzard, which gives birth to a level, like a portal of fire conjoined with the lightning field of mystery. I call it the poetic guardian dove, the hieratic alien wing.

It is the non-local field, the non-particle acid, flowing into my cognitive iodine rays, into the vicious fires of my tarantella marshes. So I dance with vibration, with the solar arc spinning backward around the miraculous force of a double green horizon. Simultaneously, I escape the territorial, while remaining within the burning loops of my own momentary seizures, guarded by ferns, legs plowing land, the face and the mind guided by stars.

So, I am a martyr of drills, of spates of specific lingual flooding, casting at times, a mist or a mirage, like a caravan of yaks, transporting tungsten and water. Conversely, to give a graph of dates, to single out a bevy of personal social lesions, would invert me, would turn me around a diurnal bundle of glass, staggered, with a less than fiery temperature, partially nulling my sensitivity to falling phonemic peppers, to the inclination towards victory which burns in the dawn above heaven. For me, this is the green locale, the pleroma of eternal solar essence, glinting, full of fabulous maelstrom diamonds, an empowered hegira of drift, of claustrophobic rainbow spectrums which empty themselves, and return to themselves, like having an image go out and return to itself, so that it's power transmutes by the very energy of its looping; and I think of myself, the poet sending signals into mystery, and having them return to me with oneiric wings and spirals, so much so, that I forget my prosaic locale with its stultifying anchors, with its familial dotage and image reports, with its dates inscribed in trapezoidal faces. I am only concerned with simultaneity and height, with rays of monomial kindling, guiding the neo-cortex through ravens, into the ecstasy of x-rays and blackness.

Gax 0, United 0

Stayed up to see the red kits (fuck the red kits) and watched until Wolff gacked a Najar cross around 25, went to bed convinced the scoreline would hold at 0-0.

Everything I've read suggests it was (for reasons logistical, practical, and self-preservational) the correct, if horribly disloyal, decision. Blah game. Selfishly, I'm glad. Apparently Wolff gacked another chance in the second half, as did Davies. The backline threw a shutout, which is a positive even if Gax was without Donovan.

And if I'd been offered four points out of road games in Portland and Los Angeles before United got on the plane west, I'd have snapped them in a second.

Also, Buzzard Point? Fuck me jig.

UPDATE! Here's Fullback's quick observations on last night's game.

Also, I realize I wrongly assume that everyone understands my allusions and bits even if they've only got here seconds ago or been here for years, so to clarify the Fuck Me Jig: so certain am I that United will not get a stadium in DC (or within any of the immediately adjacent jurisdictions) that in a pathetic attempt at reverse god-taunting four or five years ago at one or two blogs ago I promised to do a Fuck Me Jig in front of my seat in a new stadium, a Fuck Me Jig that will be videoed and uploaded to youtoob and posted on this shitty blog.

I would be delighted to do a Fuck Me Jig in a new Buzzard Point stadium.

At Least Embarrassment Is Not an Imitation. It's Intimacy for Beginners, the Orgasm No One Cares to Fake.

Palin was discussed over Thursday Night Pints. Why wasn't Palin riding shotgun on a Harley her Dukakis in a tank moment, wondered L. She's a grifter, said D. Say, said me, she's not only a grifter but a world class grifter, a once in a lifetime grifter, a genius grifter that at this dawning moment in American consciousness of its empire's imminent collapse understands America wants one last American gold standard conman and Palin instinctively, deliberately, brilliantly, delivers?

Shame you can't write novels, said L. Didn't we have this conversation two, three weeks ago, asked D, each winning a ridiculously priced Scotch. What fascinates me, I said, is how she can simultaneously be both a rodeo clown and capitalist superstar, she transcends either/ors. The stupider she makes herself - what if she's brilliant and chooses to act stupid - the larger and loyaler her following. She brands herself as the anti-what makes her money, and the angrier we get at the tacky obviousness of it, the more money she makes.

You don't believe that, do you, L asked, that she's brilliant and acts stupid for profit. It's wishful thinking, I said, that she's a devious and subversive mastermind, a canny manipulator and brilliant actor rather than a cartoon grifter filling a vacuum in Crackerstan, a cipher and avatar of vacuous late American capitalism and collapsing American empire. There's hope in the former, tomorrow in the latter.

• Yes, the above holds true for Obama too. And though I posted this from Jack yesterday, make sure you go back and read the comments.
• Where is your vortex?
• Satire, meet reality.
• One percent holds thirty-nine percent. Not enough for the one percent.
• Humpty Obumpty and the Middle East.
• Train wreck.
• We're all going to die.
• Wall Street and narco-trafficking.
• Romney and the conservative elites.
• Motherfucking christers.
• Word Salad Annie.
• Pastor Sanctimonious chubbies Cameron.

• Curiosity in philosophy.
• One of the blogs that doesn't update on the blogroll is :::wood s lot ::: which provides me lots of stuff I show you. His rss feed works fine if you want to subscribe.
• People are stupid.
• ICC!
• Peruvian election and NOVA traffic jams.
• Blogging.
• Brettschneider! Game tonight at eleven. Might watch it tomorrow.
• Gauguin.
• I was made to read Naipaul once for a class. Suck. And that was before I knew he was a total and thorough asshole.
• Ten great authors of 1963.
• 5/4. 
• Into an animal together.
• Guardian angel.
• If you were a priest.
• Globe of frogs.
• I wanna destroy you.

 ABOUT FACE

Alice Fulton

Because life's too short to blush,
I keep my blood tucked in.
I won't be mortified
by what I drive or the flaccid
vivacity of my last dinner party.
I take my cue from statues posing only
in their shoulder pads of snow: all January
you can see them working on their granite tans.

That I woke at an ungainly hour,
stripped of the merchandise that clothed me,
distilled to pure suchness,
means not enough to anyone for me
to confess.  I do not suffer
from the excess of taste
that spells embarrassment:
mothers who find their kids unseemly
in their condom earrings,
girls cringing to think
they could be frumpish as their mothers.
Though the late nonerotic Elvis
in his studded gut of jumpsuit
made everybody squeamish, I admit.
Rule one: the King must not elicit pity.

Was the audience afraid of being tainted
--this might rub off on me--
or were they--surrendering--
what a femme word--feeling
solicitous--glimpsing their fragility
in his reversible purples
and unwholesome goldish chains?

At least embarrassment is not an imitation.
It's intimacy for beginners,
the orgasm no one cares to fake.
I almost admire it.  I almost wrote despise.

Only a Dog Who Chews a Ragged Rawhide Chew Toy

While waiting for the graduation procession to begin on Tuesday, SeatSix and this guy were telling me how much this blog sucks, especially trying to read it on a phone the size of half a graham cracker - (use your imaginary whiny voice) the photos are too big, the youtubes take too long to download, the motherfucking blogroll scrolls and scrolls and scrolls, it takes forever for the fucking blog to load, and then there's that whole links won't open in another window piece of blooger shittiness (that was me). (Speaking of blooger shittiness, what the fuck is that +1 box next to a 0 box doing down at the bottom of every post? I didn't put it there.)

I agree completely, it takes too long to load, though know this: the too big photos and youtubes are non-negotiable: they stay, you go. But I've reduced the number of posts per page from ten to four and I've changed Because Left and Because Right blogrolls (which are stocked with new flavors, yo, and suggestions are always solicited) to only show the twenty-five most recently updated blogs. I have not disblogrolled you; you just haven't posted rapidly enough. Sometime, if I get around to it, I might create a sub-Because for those sites that don't feed the updating blogroller. Or not. And until blooger gives me a links open in separate window toggle switch, please right mouse; I'm not fucking with html.

It seems to make some small but good difference loading on my laptop. As always, thank you for the Kind; please nudge me if I'm not reciprocating.

• Clusterfuck.
• Perpetual war: The Pentagon, trying to create a formal strategy to deter cyberattacks on the United States, plans to issue a new strategy soon declaring that a computer attack from a foreign nation can be considered an act of war that may result in a military response.
• The accidental bombings will continue.... Here's what we're doing in Afghanistan: floating the ponzi, for one, you can figure out numbers 2 through X all on your own....
• Class and common sense.
• Zombie politics, democracy, authoritarianism.  
• B-movie.
• Conspiracies for you and me.
• Thick as thieves.
• Oinker.
• Oinker. Gov. Chris Christie arrived at his son's baseball game this afternoon aboard a State Police helicopter. Right before the lineup cards were being exchanged on the field, a noise from above distracted the spectators as the 55-foot long helicopter buzzed over trees in left field, circled the outfield and landed in an adjacent football field. Christie disembarked from the helicopter and got into a black car with tinted windows that drove him about a 100 yards to the baseball field. During the 5th inning, Christie and First Lady Mary Pat Christie got into the car, rode back to the helicopter and left the game. During a pitching change, play was stopped for a couple of minutes while the helicopter took off.

• I'm certain the media will focus on his budget-cutting credentials. And yes, I know he's not the first, the last, of either party, who's done, is doing, and will do this. The fucker.
• Sarah Palin is authentic. The issue isn't the fork, the image is the fork.
• Sarah the angry bear. 
• On Palin.
• Motherfucking Democrats.
• On the above.
• Oinker.
• He likes girls. 
• Boatload of links.
• Things you might have missed.
• I wonder if Boorman knows about impending Captain and Tennille. 
• Worms from hell! 
• Of course. Since the first female boss.
• Little Bennett! Some decent hiking.
• My future hell. 
• Purple line.
• Where I and Landru and Elric went to high school!

• I'm not going to blog Gold Cup like I blogged WC10, though I'll post things like this if I see them. And yes, fuck Bob Bradley.
• New word marks for Maryland.
• Johnny Halladay.
• John Fowle's typewriter.
• Notes on the future of academia.
• HEY! Look what Irwin played yesterday!
• Followed by Amanda! Listen to Amanda. Both of them. And Joel Clark and Dan Tullis. Fuck it, listen to the entire show. Start to finish. Do it.
• Because you won't, after that song and Amanda and then scramble he played this. At least listen to it loud for me. No; for you.
• Pardon my heart.
• I know what I want and I want it right now.
• Finally we are no one.
• The same mistake. 
• Obscure Sound's best of May.
• Where I'd be if I could be (music, not the lectures).
• On Feldman.
• Crippled Symmetry.
• For John Cage.

SPACE STATION

Tom Sleigh

(Note: a space station generates gravity by revolving one way and then another. When it reverses direction to revolve the other way, there are several moments when gravity is suspended.)

My mother and I and the dog were floating
Weightless in the kitchen. Silverware
Hovered above the table. Napkins drifted
Just below the ceiling. The dead who had been crushed
By gravity were free to move about the room,
To take their place at supper, lift a fork, knife, spoon—
A spoon, knife, fork that, outside this moment's weightlessness,
Would have been immovable as mountains.

My mother and I and the dog were orbiting
In the void that follows after happiness
Of an intimate gesture: Her hand stroking the dog's head
And the dog looking up, expectant, into her eyes:
The beast gaze so direct and alienly concerned
To have its stare returned; the human gaze
That forgets, for a moment, that it sees
What it's seeing and simply, fervently, sees...

But only for a moment. Only for a moment were my mother
And the dog looking at each other not mother
Or dog but that look—I couldn't help but think,
If only I were a dog, or Mother was,
Then that intimate gesture, this happiness passing
Could last forever...such a vain, hopeless wish
I was wishing; I knew it and didn't know it
Just as my mother knew she was my mother

And didn't...and as for the dog, her large black pupils,
Fixed on my mother's faintly smiling face,
Seemed to contain a drop of the void
We were all suspended in; though only a dog
Who chews a ragged rawhide chew toy shaped
Into a bone, femur or cannonbone
Of the heavy body that we no longer labored
To lift against the miles-deep air pressing

Us to our chairs. The dog pricked her ears,
Sensing a dead one approaching. Crossing the kitchen,
My father was moving with the clumsy gestures
Of a man in a space suit—the strangeness of death
Moving among the living—though the world
Was floating with a lightness that made us
Feel we were phantoms: I don't know
If my mother saw him—he didn't look at her

When he too put his hand on the dog's head
And the dog turned its eyes from her stare to his...
And then the moment on its axis reversed,
The kitchen spun us the other way round
And pressed heavy hands down on our shoulders
So that my father sank into the carpet,
My mother rested her chin on her hand
And let her other hand slide off the dog's head,

Her knuckles bent in a kind of torment
Of moonscape erosion, ridging up into
Peaks giving way to seamed plains
With names like The Sea of Tranquility
—Though nothing but a metaphor for how
I saw her hand, her empty, still strong hand
Dangling all alone in the infinite space
Between the carpet and the neon-lit ceiling.

Orbiting in the Void that Follows After Happiness

A truly wonderful day with Earthgirl, my parents, my brother SeatSix, and this guy at incredible Planet's graduation (and excellent dinner with a favorite aunt afterwards).

As for yesterday morning's despondency, once we engaged with the event Planet's lungs ached less and my back unseized and Earthgirl's grieving evaporated.

That's it for today. Got home around eight, had no urge - felt no obligation - to aargh-bait or bleggalgaze or otherwise confront my complicity. All will return tomorrow, probably, Friday is the latest I believe I could keep from scratching, and when it does return it will include the poem that contains this post's title.