a commercial promises to reduce plaque more effectively in this same tone

Get Madge off the top of the page, Violence? You're soaking in it! yo, here're mountain laurels last evening at Rachel Carson, one of two best trails in Moco for mountain laurel (the other being Seneca Greenway between Old Seneca and Berryville Roads which we'll do this weekend), we are four or five days away peak mountain laurel.

Best cat reminder from two evenings ago right before Fleabus partook of leg valley:

Seething: I must have enjoyed it to the point of addiction once, did I ever think seething unto itself a sign of posed righteousness and if yes of what? Duty? When I went to youtube to find the Crumb I had to sit through an ad created since the Uvalde Massacre by motherfucking Senate Democrats asking for donations to their reelection campaigns to help them curb gun violence, fund raising off an event regularly expected (if not each event specifically scheduled) by shitlords to maintain Shitlordistan Exceptionalism: the events themselves may be random but their occurrence planned, prompted, anticipated, profitable! If you're reading this shitty blog, why do I scream this at *you*?

THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS

William Jay Smith

Because I believe in the community of little children
Because I have suffered such little children to be slain:
I have gazed upon the sunlight, dazed, bewildered,
As is a child by nothing more than rain.

Not until I can no longer climb,
Until my life becomes the tallest tree,
And every limb of it a lint of shame,
Shall I look out in time, in time to see

Again those who were so small they could but die
Who had only their vast innocence to give:
That I may tell them, pointing down to the sky,
How beautiful it was to live.

RESPONDING

Julianna Spahr

I

This is a place without a terrain a government that always

          changes an unstable language. Even buildings disappear

          from day to day.

[gendered pronoun] wanders in this place

                                                                       [searching

                                                                                                [waiting

the condition of unbearableness is the constant state of mind

            for all occupants

we read all day in the village square during the rule of [name

          of major historical figure] a book that is so subtle

                                                   [its political content goes unnoticed

what is political content?

                                                          [the question or the statement

[gender pronoun] creates

                                        [a reader culture

                                        [generic plural pronoun] prefer both

                                                      II

realism's authenticities are not the question

the question [role of art in the State

we know art is fundamental to the [New State] as is evidenced

         in village scenes, majestic ancient views, masses and

         masses of [generic human figures] marching in columns,

         swords coded as plowshares, image as spectacle

we kn0w [name of city], [adjective], [name of major composer]

to recode [reduce] it: Linz, ambiguous, Wagner

we know [name of major historical figure] calls, authentically,

         for a more total, more radical war than we can even

         dream in the language of the avant-garde

we know a commercial promises to reduce plaque more

         effectively in this same tone

but sometimes we exceed even our own expectations to

          surprise even ourselves

something encloses the impossible in a fable

an unreal world called real because it is so heavily metaphoric

we can't keep our fingers of connection out of it

it is a ride in the country, the car crowded with children

                                                   [each child represents a different

                                                              ethnicity of [name of nation]

it is a moment of standing with light resonating around [major

          historical figure

it is a guiding of the child towards the right path

it is a picnic in a field, the spread is bountiful

[the spread of [name of nation] is represented through the

          arrangement of food on the checkered tablecloth

it is [name of major historical figure]'s Art Collection:

           figure after figure

           each carries spears, lunges, draws the arm back to pull

                   tight the bow

a ruined plaza has a [gendered human form] at its en

        trance

a [generic child] draws a sword under the guidance of

[generic possessive pronoun] [honorific denoting repro-

ductive role]

a [generic human form] raises [generic pronoun] arms and

four horses turn away

another plays a lute

an eagle holds a symbol

fake [name of nation used as an adjective] heads

while the end of lunacy in art was explicit in [name of major

         historical figure]'s rhetoric

while when nation turns to art, art loses its divergence

while the [generic human figures] come back from war, their

         legs in fog

while a [generic human figure] sculpts, small against the

          expanse of marble, giving into the monumental human

          form that symbolizes eugenic possibilities

while another [generic human figure] pedantically draws

          postcards of village centers, operas, mountain vistas

while overwhelmed by an opera [name of major historical 

          figure] plans genocide

                                                    III

we know we respond resistantly as faked children's books of

         realist adventure tales have turned into military instruc-

         tion manuals

or [name of major historical figure] hails a cab, [generic

          possessive human pronoun] hand raised here, beckoning

          as the red flag with [name of fast food chain] waves

          behind [generic human pronoun] and the red star on top  

          of the [name of cultural landmark in major city] twinkles.

many people raise their hands for different purposes all day

         long

we are always waiting for our cab to come

the question here is the same as that of a relationship

where does art define our vocabulary?

the margin declares

[it is impossible to speak about something

it is only possible to speak beside it

This Bloody Episode of Four Who I Could Understand Better Dead

I think this why, when I use my complicit access to Kids in the Hall Season Six (as they call it), though the nostalgia rushes pop and who am I to complain about about recurring gags, the times, they've out run Kids in the Hall (though Motormouth and Melanie I thought A+)
NO WAY OUT BUT WAR!
⇪	"The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No universal health care. No viable Covid relief program. No respite from 8.3 percent inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old. No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student debt. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the 17 million children who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings. No help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon."						⇪
American Times, Roman Morals
Shitlords preparing for your anger at your worsening precarity
Misinformation on misinformation
Selling the story on disinformation
⇪	Like other pathological reactions to trauma						⇪
Destroying Florida's ecology for profit
The direct correlation between white supremacy (and patriarchy) and American/Western shitlord warlordism, you're soaking in it (who am I to complain about old gags?)
Did the Democrats fuck it up?
Destroying public education the neverending fuck you
Yinz really don't like it when I rag you about helmetball and your complicit addiction to it, he types into free shitlord blogging platform obsessively
Capitalism's self-preservation society
Ranking the GOP 2024 Potus field
⇪	Virginia's Youngkin already cracker-branded a rino forever because he didn't order state police to beat the shit out of protesters outside a scotus house, and my governor, Larry Hogan, a popular Republican in a reliable Blue State with presidential aspirations as The Sane Republican didn't break the Top Ten						⇪
FRESH HELL				Maggie's weekly
I have been asked to serve on *Library Staff Excellence Awards Selection Committee,* it's as horribly uncomfortably judgy as it sounds, the email went out to ten of us, the chair needs three (disclaimer: I like the chair), I wrote back, E, laugh, surely three of the nine will leap to join you but if no then yes, I know that would delight you, I trust you not to deny a third to make me
Local radio news anchor versus Ric Flair
The principle of assholsity must stand		Mike Davis interview				25th Amendment problem
Stone Age Brain				{ feuilleton }'s weekly
I Am Small, Season 62, Episode Whatever: The Nationals suck, the Lerners must be bleeding out, while Dave on local pxp still gives a professional fuck, Charlie mailing it in, here's rooting for the Lerner's to bleed out
Someone has been reading Elkin and wrote about it
The local helmetball team relocating to Prince William County will save me in Maryland one-hundreth of a penny on the dollar, bye! it's my smallness, Season 62, Episode Whatever
Mark Ford reviews the Collected Letters of Thom Gunn

THE ENTERTAINMENT OF WAR

Roy Fisher

I saw the garden where my aunt had died

And her two children and a woman from next door;

It was like a burst pod filled with clay.

 

A mile away in the night I had heard the bombs

Sing and then burst themselves between cramped houses

With bright soft flashes and sounds like banging doors;

 

The last of them crushed the four bodies into the ground,

Scattered the shelter, and blasted my uncle’s corpse

Over the housetop and into the street beyond.

 

Now the garden lay stripped and stale; the iron shelter

Spread out its separate petals around a smooth clay saucer.

Small, and so tidy it seemed nobody had ever been there.

 

When I saw it, the house was blown clean by blast and care.

Relations had already torn out the new fireplaces;

My cousin’s pencils lasted me several years.

 

And in his office notepad that was given me

I found solemn drawings in crayon of blondes without dresses.

In his lifetime I had not known him well.

 

These were the things I noticed at ten years of age:

Those, and the four hearses outside our house,

The chocolate cakes, and my classmates’ half-shocked envy.

 

But my grandfather went home from the mortuary

And for five years tried to share the noises in his skull,

Then he walked out and lay under a furze-bush to die.

 

When my father came back from identifying the daughter

He asked us to remind him of her mouth.

We tried. He said ‘I think it was the one’.

 

These were marginal people I had met only rarely

And the end of the whole household meant that no grief was seen;

Never have people seemed so absent from their own deaths.

 

This bloody episode of four whom I could understand better dead

Gave me something I needed to keep a long story moving;

I had no pain of it; can find no scar even now.

 

But had my belief in the fiction not been thus buoyed up

I might, in the sigh and strike of the next night’s bombs

Have realized a little what they meant, and for the first time been afraid.

I Lost My Ridiculous Access Without Acquiring Another

Jeebus, that's twelve years old, done in the Blog Days of Summer in 2010. Up to you whether this is threat or not, I can tell you that while I fondled my beloved triangular scale architecture ruler last night I did not lay it on paper and drawer a line much less rustle in shoebox of watercolor tubes or wash crusted watercolors off either palette (though decided if and when I'd return to only primary colors) and while this is a typical paragraph (though abbreviated) in a typical bleggalgaze at the start of the Blog Days of Summer I typed it here not inked it in gridded lighthouse first, though I thought about it, up to you whether this a threat or not (ditto embedded haikus in grids). Monkeypox, huh.  This is the Official Theme Song of Blog Days of Summer

Not type night yet time
Philosopher of the apocalypse
running out he taps: *Today's
Global civil war: Capitalism post pandemic
New Word: Monkeypox!*				First Monkeypox poem I've seen!
Your tax dollars pay for your surveillance				Collective grieving
fettermanning seventeen
Democrats aren't even pretending anymore
Counting to five focuses
Tell me again to reason with this christer motherfucker
Abacus-
The ghost of Antonin Scalia
Me braising my beads
The animal within the animal
freight trains kettled, blueballed in
Proust: on reading				Dan reviews three books
horn, abbreviated
Joey is a Jeff too, born 71 years ago today				Return to Hot Chicken: James McNew interview

37 HAIKU

John Ashbery

Old-fashioned shadows hanging down, that difficulty in love too soon

Some star or other went out, and you, thank you for your book and year
 
Something happened in the garage and I owe it for the blood traffic
 
Too low for nettles but it is exactly the way people think and feel
 
And I think there’s going to be even more but waist-high
 
Night occurs dimmer each time with the pieces of light smaller and squarer
 
You have original artworks hanging on the walls oh I said edit
 
You nearly undermined the brush I now place against the ball field arguing
 
That love was a round place and will still be there two years from now
 
And it is a dream sailing in a dark unprotected cove
 
Pirates imitate the ways of ordinary people myself for instance
 
Planted over and over that land has a bitter aftertaste
 
A blue anchor grains of grit in a tall sky sewing
 
He is a monster like everyone else but what do you do if you’re a monster
 
Like him feeling him come from far away and then go down to his car
 
The wedding was enchanted everyone was glad to be in it
 
What trees, tools, why ponder socks on the premises
 
Come to the edge of the barn the property really begins there
 
In a smaller tower shuttered and put away there
 
You lay aside your hair like a book that is too important to read now
 
Why did witches pursue the beast from the eight sides of the country
 
A pencil on glass—shattered!  The water runs down the drain
 
In winter sometimes you see those things and also in summer
 
A child must go down it must stand and last
 
Too late the last express passes through the dust of gardens
 
A vest—there is so much to tell about even in the side rooms
 
Hesitantly, it built up and passed quickly without unlocking
 
There are some places kept from the others and are separate, they never exist
 
I lost my ridiculous accent without acquiring another
 
In Buffalo, Buffalo she was praying, the nights stick together like pages in an old book
 
The dreams descend like cranes on gilded, forgetful wings
 
What is the past, what is it all for?  A mental sandwich?
 
Did you say, hearing the schooner overhead, we turned back to the weir?
 
In rags and crystals, sometimes with a shred of sense, an odd dignity
 
The boy must have known the particles fell through the house after him
 
All in all we were taking our time, the sea returned—no more pirates
 
I inch and only sometimes as far as the twisted pole gone in spare colors

And I Won't Tell You Where It Is, So Why Do I Tell You Anything? Because You Still Listen, Because in Times Like These to Have You Listen at All, It's Necessary to Talk About Trees

Motherfucking Democrats embrace of Jesus Cracker (and its consequences)
Commence Blog Days of Summer!
A deeply fucked up thing in America
Lynn's friend's first question:
Union-busting crime wave
So, when are you retiring?
Five things the US knew about the Nakba as it unfolded
She claims she knows me
Pentagon-funded think tank simulates war with China on NBC
Gaithersburg High School
Avedon Carol's occasional links
She knows more about my life
The Great American Covid Capitulation
than I know of hers
Maggie's links				FRESH HELL
Newest theory: I
Trailhead		Ten dead in Buffalo				Crimson
too can break kayfabe, fat chance
Reading in the margins: Joy Williams
it gets broke by me
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling				{ feuilleton }'s links
Joy Williams on Miss MacIntosh, My Darling:				Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. When I was going off to college, I got two copies of this thing, this impossibly neurotic, very strange book by this woman who’d been working on it her whole life, Marguerite Young. What were they thinking?
Laugh, we talked about the cicadas on yesterday's hike
Today is Fripp's birthday, Saturday was Eno's birthday, today is Adrienne Rich's birthday, I found myself writing in tablet over the weekend when I could have tapped a keyboard, we've decided we will not be moving to Michigan, a dog almost adopted us yesterday, woke up with the above Peter Jefferies song in my head, Commence Blog Days of Summer, start overfucking the fuck it here
Why Burial's *Untrue* still effing brilliant

WHAT KIND OF DAYS ARE THESE

Adrienne Rich

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled

this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light—

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it's necessary

to talk about trees.