Thursday, March 8, 2018

While Horseflies Harangue



  • That's my WFMU Swag-for-Life membership card, it's Marathon time, give them money.
  • A Popovich makes The OnionSeething after watching his players allow the wealthy to control the legislative process totally unopposed, head coach Gregg Popovich reportedly blasted the Spurs Wednesday for completely missing America’s descent into an oligarchy. “Wake up out there guys, how many times do I have to point out that trickle-down economics does nothing but consolidate wealth into the hands of the elite?” said Popovich, who furiously scrawled out a chart on his whiteboard that illustrated stagnant worker wage growth skyrocketing executive salaries. “You guys are running around like you can’t see cutting corporate taxes does nothing but increase the deficit and aid entrenched powers. Ginobili, Gasol, we’ve gone over Citizens United in practice for weeks. Didn’t we study all that video on how the middle class is being gutted? How are you not seeing this?” At press time, Popovich was admonishing the team for not spotting their own complicity in the unequal system while they ran back on defense.
  • Update: I'm one, name's above white cat at left (while this post is top of blog). Bottom of blog always.
  • Nonetheless, fuck the motherfucking Democratic Party, I said to a Hillaryite Colleague yesterday haranguing me for hating motherfucking Democrats.










THE MEADOW

Tom Sleigh

Across the road from where we nap
under a dead elm dazzles the meadow
where the partisans strung the traitors up,
                      
the meadow which their dangling shadows stain.
Belly up in vines a blasted tank
rusts flake by flake to lichened scrap iron
                           
while horseflies harangue
the rippling green, July
a limbo of quavering yellow...
                           
We wake to cattle lowing at dawn,
grass overgrowing summer—so like us
in love each hour with the noonday sun
                      
that neither toils nor spins, its brightness
hovering, blinding us...
What would the dead say if they could see us,
              
lounging, talking, peering through brambles
at cemetery photographs sunk beneath
the undertow of milkweed shadows,
                     
death dates smoothing back into the stone?
I think of Goya’s demon, old man flesh
hanging from his bones, long teeth bared in
              
an ass’s grin as he scrawls on a schoolboy’s
slate, What more can be done? Nothing...
while behind him a noose etched clean as
                  
the moon rises through the inkblot
spiraling back into the hanged man’s mouth
as if blackness poured from his throat:
                  
“When will you tire of us bogeymen,
caricatures of your father’s war,
our crimes half-forgotten, unforgiven?
                  
All future blotted out when they hauled us
from our beds, our minds went dead
to everything but fear: Nightshirts
                    
soaked in snowlight’s pall, we hunched in mud, each step
loud, too loud beside the farmhouse wall,
the seconds teetering till we drop...
                    
What our betrayals were we know
with a knowledge intimate beyond revenge,
history the needle’s eye you can’t squeeze through.
                     
The partisans cut us down, heaped us
in a mass grave our relatives dug up: Yes,
there were tears—even for us...
                         
Now, like aliens from space on your TV shows,
we ravel into mist, surrounding
you the moment your eyes close...
                    
Our pupils search out yours from behind
the mirror with your father’s stares,
fathers and sons melding in one mind—
                         
but who are you to call us traitors, an outsider
judging through the smoke-haze of home:
Each blow exact, our own neighbors
                         
beat us till the blood ran, beat us black
and blue...Even now, would they dare take us back,
older, wiser, necks broken by the yoke?
                          
Moving in time as to a dance we buzz
and swarm across the meadow, dissolving
and glinting like fireflies in the hedge,
                            
blown like milkweed in the moon’s wall eye.
But under your lids, you see us locked in cold,
shattered wheatstraw flecked in ice:
                         
Chill as the night air on your sunburned neck
our eyes like X rays pierce the frost,
stalking every step the living take.”


3 comments:

  1. Coach Popovich was an intel agent for USAF in Vietnam. I doubt he has any problems with Oligarchy and he's certainly a war criminal.

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    Replies
    1. Good hearing from you, it's be a while.

      I've never googled the Coach so I've no idea of his history - I've seen him saying some anti-Trump things, and The Onion piece *is* a decent parody of *me*, but posted mostly because as a Popovich I am asked constantly when someone first hears my last name if this guy is an uncle of something.....

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    2. Cool, I won't report you to the Presidium, lol.

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