As If Some Sorcery Had Shocked the Occupant's Hand Alive Again, Back to Compose a Document in Calligraphy So Dragonish That a Single Misstep Made It Necessary to Stop Right Then and There and Tear the Botched Draft Up

I bought a calligraphy pen yesterday afternoon and wrote this post's first draft to test writing with the calligraphy pen (I'd never used one before) on a piece of graph paper I'd already stained with watercolor. I wrote sentences about the routinizing (I wrote routinization - there's no back space with calligraphy pens, I discovered) of torture, how that is the greater sin to perpetually kayfabing rubes like me, not the clandestine torture we assumed was going on quietly, reluctantly but professionally while we were growing up. I was complaining, one president ago, the torture betrayal wasn't the torture but the get-the-fuck-used-to-it revelations of torture.

America tortured, tortures, will torture, America rode genocide and slavery and imperialism to empire and will use any means necessary to perpetuate that empire, including but not limited to torture and genocide, and the state of my complicity is this: I wrote the first draft of this post about my lost kayfabe innocence with a calligraphy pen I bought yesterday afternoon to amuse myself.

The manic good mood is gone, but I need to push the what the fuck before I lose that too. Also, did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team? It's true! and they have a home game tonight versus a neon lime green team, so tune in tomorrow when I drive away more readers with a game recap. Also, since Fleabus photos are back, especially greatest hits, a reminder once again that all Fleabus photos are by Planet, at least for now, I'll reevaluate come the Fall, but I've a massive archive. Also, for those of you who are back for the first time in a week or so, here, for the last time, is a link to what's up with the blue. (Also, in Thai if needed.)

• Fallen republic.
• UPDATE! Seems to be the theme of the day.
• UPDATE! Seems to be the theme of the day.
• He can't be a Westphalian state.
• Establishment liberalism's turn. 
• Twenty best Obama memes on Osama killing.
• Here's your emerging pig meme.
• Patriot's guide to still hating Obama.
• Pigs are weird.
• We visited Dickinson on one of the prospective student days. We lasted half an hour and left. Looks like our instincts were right.
• Capitalism.
• Theses on politics.
• What if Bush did it?
• Kicked upstairs or simply unleashed.

UPDATE!

RIP, Trelane:

• Facebook as spy.
• Voodoo economics.
• Things you might have missed.
• More Boorman!
• These are Dr Gonzo's cats:

• One of my goals in life is to be the cranky old neighborhood coot with more cats than can be counted and creepy garden statuary, so please send your cat photos and I'll post them. They're not just welcome here, they're solicited.
• Wonderful librarians. I am not a librarian, though I work in a library.
• Rapid transit?
• One mile from my house.
• Gaithersburg's astronomic history!
• MOCO trees!

UPDATE!

Seat Six has bagged on tonight's game v Neon Lime Green @ RFK @ 730, so I have an extra ticket! Hamster has until 2PM to claim it and has been so notified by email, but if he either doesn't respond and/or can't go, you have until 3PM to put in your claim. I will be offline from 3PM until I get home after the game, so if you want me to pdf the ticket and email it to you, you must get your email to me by 3PM.

• Lit Blegsylvania really be dying, yo.
• New Sea and Cake!
• Crossing line.
• Up on crutches.
• Lamont's lament.
• UPDATE! Washington.
• Painful nap. Please. I heard it on WFMU yesterday and thought it wonderful. People at work asked, what the fuck.
• UPDATE! Audio motherlode, volume 115.
• Also heard this Rabbit song for the first time in twenty-five years yesterday on WFMU.

THE NIGHT SHIP

Timothy Donnelly

Roll back the stone from the sepulchre's mouth!
I sense disturbance deep within, as if some sorcery

had shocked the occupant's hand alive again, back
to compose a document in calligraphy so dragonish

that a single misstep made it necessary to stop
right then and there and tear the botched draft up,

begin again and stop, tear up again and scatter
a squall of paper lozenges atop the architecture

that the mind designs around it, assembling a city
somewhat resembling the seaport of your birth,

that blinking arrangement of towers and signage
you now wander underneath, drawn forward by the spell

of the sea's one scent, by the bell of the night ship
that cleaves through the mist on its path to the pier.

Surrender to that vision and the labor apprehensible
as you take to the streets from the refuge of a chair

so emphatically comfortable even Lazarus himself
would have chosen to remain unrisen from its velvet,

baffling the messiah, His many onlookers muttering
awkwardly to themselves, downcast till a sudden

dust devil spirals in from the dunes—a perfect excuse 
to duck back indoors. (The sand spangles their eyes,

the little airborne stones impinge upon such faces
as only Sorrow's pencil would ever dare to sketch,

and even then, it wouldn't be a cakewalk, you realize.
A dust devil at sea would be called a waterspout.)

You fear that you have been demanded into being
only to be dropped on the wintry streets of this 

imagination rashly, left easy prey for the dockside
phantoms, unwatched and unawaited, and I know 

what you mean, almost exactly. This cardboard city
collapses around us; another beautiful document

disassembles into anguish—a cymbal-clap—and we can't
prevent it. At one the wind rises, and the night ship

trembles, drowsing back into its silver cloud. At two it embarks
upon a fiercer derangement. We are in this together.

And we will find protection only on the night ship.