Friday, November 4, 2011

Once They Are Elected They Are Given a Bowl of Cream and a Puppy Clip




Please play that while reading the rest of this post, being careful to open each link in a new tab so you don't have to start the song over over and over. David Thomas' music has one of two permanent chairs in my sillyass Desert Island Five game.

At Thursday Night Pints, K especially, but D and L too, wanted to talk about blogging, macro/micro, general/particular, both why I do it and, more importantly, what do I hope to accomplish, I mean, why do I do it the way I do? so I told them.

Then we talked about Occupy. Like everyone else, none of us have anymore of a theory of hope than anyone else. Also, if you live in Metro DC and have blankets/old coats you don't need and want to donate to Occupy I'll come pick them up sometime Saturday afternoon and take them Downtown Sunday. You're welcome to join me.












HOW THE POPE IS CHOSEN

James Tate

Any poodle under ten inches high is a toy.
Almost always a toy is an imitation
of something grown-ups use.
Popes with unclipped hair are called corded popes.
If a Pope's hair is allowed to grow unchecked,
it becomes extremely long and twists
into long strands that look like ropes.
When it is shorter it is tightly curled.
Popes are very intelligent.
There are three different sizes.
The largest are called standard Popes.
The medium-sized ones are called miniature Popes.
I could go on like this, I could say:
"He is a squarely built Pope, neat,
well-proportioned, with an alert stance
and an expression of bright curiosity,"
but I won't. After a poodle dies
all the cardinals flock to the nearest 7-Eleven.
They drink Slurpies until one of them throws up
and then he's the new Pope.
He is then fully armed and rides through the wilderness alone,
day and night in all kinds of weather.
The new Pope chooses the name he will use as Pope,
like "Wild Bill" or "Buffalo Bill."
He wears red shoes with a cross embroidered on the front.
Most Popes are called "Babe" because
growing up to become a Pope is a lot of fun.
All the time their bodies are becoming bigger and stranger,
but sometimes things happen to make them unhappy.
They have to go to the bathroom by themselves,
and they spend almost all of their time sleeping.
Parents seem to be incapable of helping their little popes grow up.
Fathers tell them over and over again not to lean out of windows,
but the sky is full of them.
It looks as if they are just taking it easy,
but they are learning something else.
What, we don't know, because we are not like them.
We can't even dress like them.
We are like red bugs or mites compared to them.
We think we are having a good time cutting cartoons out of the paper,
but really we are eating crumbs out of their hands.
We are tiny germs that cannot be seen under microscopes.
When a Pope is ready to come into the world,
we try to sing a song, but the words do not fit the music too well.
Some of the full-bodied popes are a million times bigger than us.
They open their mouths at regular intervals.
They are continually grinding up pieces of the cross
and spitting them out. Black flies cling to their lips.
Once they are elected they are given a bowl of cream
and a puppy clip. Eyebrows are a protection
when the Pope must plunge through dense underbrush

in search of a sheep.



6 comments:

  1. “It’s getting the name out there. It’s hipster-sounding,” she said.

    If only I could take the subway from Columbus to NoMa...
    ~

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  2. Yay. Can I run upstairs and harvest Hamster's eyes and brain and bring them to Earthgirl? Cause that'd be a lot more fun than whatever else I have planned for the day.

    You understand that everyone who uses that trail is being paid by the fucking country club, right?

    Jesus, YFWP wanks. It's run Metro and Style articles for years about how fucking hip NoMa is. And now they've cut off about 7-10 blocks of it on the west side and added 3-4 blocks on the east. Mostly to keep it from running into Shaw, I think, because Shaw (which overlaps NoMa and always has, since people started using that NoManclature) has its own hip station name. It appears that Metro is into naming stations for the neighborhoods they're on the fringes of.

    On the other hand, maybe now that the stepchild station (NY Ave/Galludet/Far Eastern NoMa) has the hip appellation, Megan McArdle will start inventing people she meets on the subway instead of inventing people she meets on the bus.

    Nah, just kidding. She was lying about riding the bus, too.

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  3. Thanks for the offer. I took blankets to McPHERSON SQUARE earlier this week.

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  4. And for crying out loud, there's a Busboy's and Poets in NoMa ... that and the gay community is how it got hip. But you're right about Shaw, Landru. NoMa includes the black intellectuals while Shaw is the sort-of-old money.

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  5. I was prepared to like that Anarcho-liberal article: decent, if imperfect, concept, seems to more or less capture a real subset of the left, etc. But man is that some muddled writing.

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  6. I must confess, I sometimes forget to thank the turgidity of the writings of many of those competing to be King of Anarchists for helping me stay reflexively agnostic to most everything.

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