It's That Etcetera

It's been gorgeous since last Friday's thunderstorms, as good as it gets in DC, Thursday Night Pints sitting outside, the tables surprisingly empty, D buying rounds as is still his debt. There was no such bet last night and no one brought up the particular motherfucker though the general clusterfuck was acknowledged, we're all fucked, et al, tropes of why and how much condensed to birdsong, yadda-yadda, yadda-yadda. Then Hilltop-Hilltop, weather-weather, family-family, keep-keep, seeya-seeya. Next week-next week.

• The police as expression of bourgeois subconscious.
• Americans don't care about civilians.
• Americans love drones.
• First the killing, then the propaganda.
• Erika America.
• What would Augustine do? You mean, besides consign Christianity to sexual neuroses for centuries?
• Don't forget the fucker Aquinas.
• Should Christians be anarchists?
• A challenge to the Left.
• Missile-packed blimps!
• Another war criminal cashes in.
• Graeber interview.
• The police and Occupy.
• Sixty-three point five.
• Head shot.
• Sign of the times. The worst restaurant meal I've ever was the Applebee's in Greenfield Massachusetts when we were on a New England college tour for Planet.
• A consensus under siege.
• RIP Paul Fussell.
• Illuminate, eliminate, elucidate, eradicate, investigate, inoculate, interrogate - I need more four syllable words that rhyme and rhythm with the above for a project, please.
• I have never heard of Natasha Tretheway.
• Half wolf dances mad.
• Shostakovich at war.
• RIP Bob Welch.
• New Rebecca Gates! Spinanes this weekend. Promise.
• HOLYFUCK! Stockhausen archive!

[BIRDSONG, FACE IT, SOME MALE MACHINE]

Marianne Boruch

Birdsong, face it, some male machine
gone addled—repeat, repeat—the damage
keeps doing, the world ending then starting,
the first word the last, etc. It's that

etcetera. How to love. Is a wire
just loose? Build an ear for that. Fewer, they say.
So many fewer, by far. He's showing off
to call her back. Or claiming the tree.

Or a complaint—the food around here,
the ants, the moths, the berries. She's making
the nest, or both are. In feathers, in hair or twigs,
in rootlets and tin foil. Shiny bits seen

from a distance, a mistake. But fate
has reasons to dress up. Stupid
and dazzling have a place, a place, a place
though never. She can't sing it.