Tottering and Elastic, Middle Name of Groan

• Here's one on Alexander Cockburn, who I read enough to need to note his death but who did not move me enough to eulogize him now.
• Liberalism agonistes.
• The careerists.
• Shit.
• Triptych.
• Politics of the unconscious.
• Myths of human nature, part one.
• Empty pitchforks.
• Republicans, public goods, sheer idiocy.
• Republican governor, presidential hopeful based on his fiscal conservative posturing, asks for federal aid. YMOBMC.
• >>>Deleted bleggalgazing<<<
• The people of the other village.
• On Sally Ride.
• Stop time.
• The view from Missouri.
• Buy me Kapow for my birthday, please.
• Too late.
• Mary Garth. It's been a decade since I reread Middlemarch, probably time to make time again.
• A little touch of Schmilsson.
• Mission of Burma.

PEDESTRIAN

Thomas Lux

Tottering and elastic, middle name of Groan,
ramfeezled after a hard night
at the corpse-polishing plant, slope-
shouldered, a half loaf
of bread, even his hair tired, famished,
fingering the diminished beans
in his pocket—you meet him.
On a thousand street corners you meet him,
emerging from the subway, emerging
from your own chest—this sight’s shrill,
metallic vapors pass into you.
His fear is of being broken,
of becoming too dexterous in stripping
the last few shoelaces of meat
from a chicken’s carcass, of being moved by nothing
short of the Fall of Rome, of being stooped
in the cranium over some loss he’s forgotten
the anniversary of.... You meet him,
know his defeat, though proper
and inevitable, is not yours, although yours also
is proper and inevitable: so many defeats
queer and insignificant (as illustration:
the first time you lay awake all night
waiting for dawn—and were disappointed), so many
no-hope exhaustions hidden,
their gaze dully glazed inward.—And yet we all
fix our binoculars on the horizon’s hazy fear-heaps
and cruise toward them, fat sails
forward.... You meet him on the corners,
in bus stations, on the blind avenues
leading neither in
nor out of hell, you meet him
and with him you walk.