These Are the Poems of a Man Like Plato, She Said, Meaning Something I Did Not Comprehend but which Nevertheless Offended Me

Nap last night. He knows the sound of my car, or if not the sound of my car then the angle of my headlights as I pull to the curb, but however he knows it's me - and pang goes my heart - when I'm sixty feet from pulling my emergency break goodnight he runs up the sidewalk from the beneath the front porch of our next door neighbor's (where besides shelter is no doubt game, a blog friend recently tweeted of a feral rocks-off torturing a baby squirrel, they're cats, it's what they do).  >>Deleted bleggalgaze<< Hey! Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?





It's true! and the first guy in that commercial? he scored for Albania in a WCQ last week, he's so deep in St Benny of Olsen's doghouse he hasn't played for DCU in six, seven or more weeks. The fourth guy in the video is, even on his career's downhill slope, still United's key player and now he's injured, gone for the season. Anyway, home game tonight. Only two after this (unless they make the playoffs, which they might, who knows), one I know I'll miss in October, one a week from tomorrow I hope to be at but might miss because love elsewhere wins. It doesn't trouble me that love elsewhere wins though it troubles me my regret at missing games isn't greater, more oh-shit than oh-well, here, elsewhere (but not everywhere).

• O look, Fuckface Hiatt instructs Mitt Romney on how to win Fuckface Hiatt's heart. It doesn't trouble me I don't give much of a damn, it troubles me I give a damn at all.
• Fucking shoot me.
• I had coffee yesterday with a neo-con professor who disconcertingly is a funny, generous, nice guy, a friend. Here's my translation of his view of a neo-con view: of course we're assholes, the world is full of assholes, if you're not an asshole the other assholes will kill you. So yes, it's what you thought it was too.
• Truth game.
• Debt resistors manual.
• On the debt resistors manual.
• Bill Motherfucking Clinton.
• Police state.
• Libertarianism: what's going right.
• He repeats himself.
• Crazy like a fox.
• Death and politics in the Great American Water Wars.
• My year of militant surrealism.
• Chronos.
• Poetry and the unpoetic.
• I am unfamiliar with Robert Bringhurst. Thanks MW.
• At this moment I seem incapable of reading fiction.
• Today's Bringhurst poem below found here. Thanks.
• Shostakovich birthday in ten days. Requests solicited, or never mind.

THESE POEMS, SHE SAID

Robert Bringhurst

These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man
who would leave his wife and child because
they made noise in his study. These are the poems
of a man who would murder his mother to claim
the inheritance. These are the poems of a man
like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not
comprehend but which nevertheless
offended me. These are the poems of a man
who would rather sleep with himself than with women,
she said. These are the poems of a man
with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s
hands, woven of water and logic
and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These
poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant
as elm leaves, which if they love love only
the wide blue sky and the air and the idea
of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said,
and not a beginning. Love means love
of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.
These poems, she said....
You are, he said,
beautiful.
That is not love, she said rightly.

A Myth Is an Expression, Unable to Surrender

• OK, have links, none are those lost yesterday. Still clobbered: yes, it's mostly self-indulgence, but I also haven't the time or damn to translate the aboves into bleggalese. Besides, I'm hopelessly first-drafty, which explains why second and third rereadings aren't re-searing like once and why all I want to hear are songs I've never heard before.
• The territorial logic of the capitalist state.
• Capitalism and insanity.
• Strikes, not elections.
• Privileges and not rights.
• Entirely avoidable outcomes.
• Blowback.
• People who can't teach write about teachers.
• Five Liberal pundits!
• Do Liberals and elites hate teachers?
• Your afternoon CTU reading list.
• Police state.
• Police state. Occupy started a year ago three days from now.
• Conspiracies of convenience.
• The banality of hyperbole.
• Boss Rove's justice.
• Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team? It's true, and on multiple levels the acceptance of just how fucked they are on multiple levels is setting like grey Soviet-era apartment complex concrete.
• I love MOMs.
• Beckett, for those of you who do. We honeymooned in Nova Scotia, go for Halifax alone.
• Gass' tunnel. Since this isn't the proprietor of the shop, I'll post. I'd buy the audio book for a Planetless drive to Gambier and back, but the person sitting next to me wouldn't dig at all.
• More Gass. I've never audio-booked it occurs to me. It was never a conscious decision -  to kindle or not to kindle was a moral dilemma of a particularly - for me, not necessarily you - self-indulgent wank, but honestly, it doesn't occur to me to listen to anything but music or the radio in the car, it doesn't occur to me to listen to a book if I'm not in a car.
• Beckett, for those of you who do. We honeymooned in Nova Scotia, go for Halifax alone.
• Never heard of him. I am blessed to have access to a university library stacks. I'll post some.
• No, I'm not going to do the Kovalenko gag, though I thought of it.
• I hadn't heard this in at least thirty years until listening to this last night.
• Heard this too.
• Shostakovich's birthday in eleven days. Requests solicited.
• Friend sent me this:

[]

Arkadii Dragomoschenko

Translated by Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova

Deceitful honesty and an honest lie - which
                                              should be given preference?
This sentence is a consequence
                             which you have not yet written,
corroborating the representation of time,
                                                               forestalling reality.
Pine forest solstice. The sea gull's insupportable stance
                                                         within the wing's boundaries.
The whole does not exceed the part, requiring a division
                                                                                              of spaces.

A myth is an expression, unable to surrender.
Transparency, asserting affinity, is more awful
                                                               than disintegration.
The birds turn yellow fiercely - the light has pressed
                                                                  their Archimedes flesh
displacing the equilibrium of resistance and force,
                                                      just like ice and water.
A warmblooded diamond, where the cell's instructions gathered,
the axes of bones, of magnetic fields: a ball of spirals,
                                                                the web of a nomad camp.
Steam from the mouth
                                           in September
and a tense procession of blue.

The cosmos of the plant is submitted to the hollow chain
of a handwriting that knows it better than the hand.
Is it sap cooling on the cut bark of a tree,
Is is apathy in the restoration of qualities
                                          to their things.... But the center
of life flows from everywhere
                          like a downpour of maple seeds
                                                                        of a pedestrian
in a mathematical text. And so, one can hear,
                                                       "You have your consolation,
a consequence and transformation of transformations
instead of a flying object musing on its own self-assessment."
As for lovers:


we will extend the body divined in a form
that after examination permits us to invent its properties
                                                           - description,
condemning no one to the torments of authority.

Fear Not the Tarnish and Diminishments of Age or Its Insane Revelations as You Creak, Leak, and Freak Your Way to the Grave

So I went to bulletpoint today's links. I bold them all then hit the bullet option on blooger's toolbar but I brainfarted and hit the Link link which ate all the links, hours' work poofed. Here's what you're missing: Teacher pay versus selected others. Two visions for Chicago schools. Class warfare in the classroom. Carbon Democracy. Spooked-up asshole. Villager Court Jester dances on Romney's grave. Professional progressive dances on Romney's grave. For the record, I've been offering 4-1 pint bets since 2008 that Obama wins POTUS 12. Ring of Fire. Krugman's obamapostasy will never be ready. Look! Corpse of bin Laden! Obama lies too. Same as Bush (with more killing). Compromising positions. My future hell. Some poems, some songs. You know the lyrics, can fill in the (b)links all by yourself, but blessed serendipity of a brainfart, I'm reminded of a lesson in dance and damnlessness I already knew but mostly ignore.





MIDLIFE LULLABY

Amy Gerstler

Fear not the tarnish and diminishments of age
or its insane revelations as you creak, leak, and freak
your way to the grave. Never relinquish ties
to exiles, to juiced-up boozers and the bamboozled.
Like you, they're solid citizens anguish nearly polished
off (but not yet!), burnished veterans gilded by loss,
who glint like old bowling trophies in the right light.
"Extinguishment is still far away," we repeat under
our breaths at bedtime, like children who can't
remember their prayers. Come morning we'll step
out for a meatloaf sandwich (one our grown son
dubbed "meat-load" sandwich back when he was a ticklish
kid squishing it flat with his little hand so it'd fit into
his mouth). A humble dish with radish garnish,
it gives sagging spirits a life and beguiles our tongues
with onions, mustard, and mortal sweetness welling
up from deep in the beef, which, if meat could speak
might moo or sigh: "Yes, I too was well fed in my time."

Eyes Missing, or Stuck Open or Closed

Oofdah, clobbered on multiple fronts (and may be the rest of the week), though I need ask, POTUS 12, tenor has changed past couple days, time for real shittiness, yes? Oh, and today's pukestorm, jesusfuck. Other than that links Yo La Tengo songs and a poem is all I got.





Opportunities. Hiatturd sees an opportunity. Romney and opportunism. Ryan and Rahm.  Karen Lewis. UPDATE! This. I'd forgot the unbump I get when I praise teachers as I did yesterday, admitting my bias. Growth is the problem. Politicopsychopathology. Great minds and all. Illtophay only up 1? Woe on campus. On the USMNT v Jamaica game. On United's season possibly being over. Fuck Notre Dame, fuck the ACC. Sebald for those of you who do. Hymn to the Neck. Can visionary poetry be edited? Delia Derbyshire. Whale Season.





TOURING THE DOLL HOSPITAL

Amy Gerstler

Why so many senseless injuries? This one’s glass teeth
knocked out. Eyes missing, or stuck open or closed.
Limbs torn away. Sawdust dribbles onto the floor
like an hourglass running out. Fingerless hands, noses
chipped or bitten off. Many are bald or burnt. Some,
we learn, are victims of torture or amateur surgery.
Do dolls invite abuse, with their dent-able heads,
those tight little painted-on or stitched-in grins?
Hurt me, big botched being, they whine in a dialect
only puritans and the frequently punished can hear.
It’s what I was born for. I know my tiny white pantaloons
and sheer underskirts incite violation. Criers and crib-
wetters pursue us in dreams, till we wake sweat-
drenched but unrepentant, glad to have the order
by which we lord over them restored. Small soldiers
with no Geneva Conventions to protect them,
they endure gnawing, being drooled on, banishment
to attics. Stained by cough syrup, hot cocoa, and pee,
these “clean gallant souls” wear their wounds as martyrs’
garments. We owe them everything. How they suffer
for our sins, “splintered, bursted, crumbled . . .”
Every bed in the head replacement ward is occupied tonight.
Let’s sit by the legless Queen doll’s tiny wheelchair
and read to her awhile if she wishes it. In a faint
voice she requests a thimbleful of strong dark tea.

What Should We Place, in All Good Faith, on the Horizon? A Stone? An Empty Chair? A Submarine?

I haven't given my standard full disclosure in a while: both my parents were teachers, my favorite aunts and uncles were teachers, a beloved friend is a teacher, my wife is a teacher, I have many friends who are teachers including my beloveds at Thursday Night Pints, some of the most influential people in my life have been teachers - I am incapable of an unbiased opinion when it comes to teachers. Thank a teacher today. Having said that, regarding the Chicago teachers strike, please READ THIS. I'd only add, good thing motherfucking Obama makes himself available constantly to reporters and constituents so when he's asked where he falls in the battle between teachers and his motherfucking former chief-of-staff he would certainly answer.... kidding. And anyone who bitches against the teachers because s/he thinks it might damage Obama's reelection campaign can, as Ed correctly guessed, grow fresh tomatoes, hello.

• Arvo Part is seventy-seven today.  Anti-aargh.
• Why they are striking.
• Why they are striking.
• The implications.
• An interview.
• Your fucking Washington Post.
• Five facts you need to know about the shit state of Chicago schools.
• Fuck Terry Moran, whoever the fuck he is.
• Fuck Terry Moran, whoever the fuck he is.
• Boatload of links to Chicago (and much more).
• Obama exceptionalism.
• Motherfucking Obama.
• Police state.
• Code is law.
• Put not your faith in princes.
• An imperial nostrum.
• Motherfucking Bill Clinton. Fucker sure can give a speech though.
• One year away from global rioting.
• ICC! crumbling!
• Ruefle interview.

ART CLASS

James Galvin

Let us begin with a simple line,
Drawn as a child would draw it,
To indicate the horizon,

More real than the real horizon,
Which is less than line,
Which is visible abstraction, a ratio.

The line ravishes the page with implications
Of white earth, white sky!

The horizon moves as we move,
Making us feel central.
But the horizon is an empty shell—

Strange radius whose center is peripheral.
As the horizon draws us on, withdrawing,
The line draws us in,

Requiring further lines,
Engendering curves, verticals, diagonals,
Urging shades, shapes, figures…

What should we place, in all good faith,
On the horizon? A stone?
An empty chair? A submarine?

Take your time. Take it easy.
The horizon will not stop abstracting us.

Pollinated by Bats (which Tickles!) We Ripen the Mind

Stopped this morning at the 7-11 on Wisconsin in Bethesda like I do every morning on the way to work for coffee, LOOK! a fine metaphor abounds, if I wanted a large (or an extra large or a medium or a small) I had to choose, I was not offered a third choice. Fuck that. I've kept the all-white cup I got at the bakery on Arlington Road I bought after, I'm going to take a sharpee and write on it, NEITHER MOTHERFUCKER, Motherfucker! and stop tomorrow morning at the 7-11 and snap a photo of the above two next to my cup. Or not. More fine metaphors.

That's the very top of Sugarloaf, shot taken yesterday - the most beautiful day of weather in my world in months, mid-seventies, no humidity - hiked with Earthgirl between bouts of work suck for both of us and unbelievably suckful dying mother suck for Earthgirl - send Kind thoughts to Earthgirl. We are rededicated: our fat asses are gonna get fit again, we are going to mountains any and all weekends we're not going to see Planet (or we will once the must-not-speak-evil-of-the-dying dies, though I will give you cash money if my brother-in-law disappears without a trace and I can't be tied back to it). Back to the work suck: Links tomorrow, probably, two songs and a poem today.





CHANT OF THE HALLUCINOGENIC PLANTS

Amy Gerstler

God made nothing in vain. All herbs have purpose.
Pollinated by bats (which tickles!) we ripen the mind.
Sip our bitter milk. Smoke these weeds and shepherd
the immense. This blossom, when swallowed.
makes cowards eloquent. Haze of consolation
robs grief of her sting. Everything drips and merges.
Phosphorescent radiations overtake you. The banal
becomes ecstatic. Everlastingness pours forth.
Wrapped in a flame-colored cloud, swaddled
in mirth and trembly tenderness toward earth,
one prefers not to stir from this cave. God
is a substance, a drug. These erotic shocks,
this blizzard of images, this ambiguous wink
is his. Man is only a weed in these regions.

How Many Calories Are Consumed while Lolling in This Dimness, Mentally Lamenting the Lack of Anything to Indicate Some Faint Mirage of Right-Mindedness Has Been Sighted on the Horizon?

Woke up with that in my head, be in yours. Colonel Sanders was born one-hundred twenty years ago today. I saw that, thought, Hey, the Colonel Sanders scene in Elkin's The Franchiser when Ben Flesh is fooled by a fake Colonel Sanders, I'll post the spectacular paragraphs when Flesh realizes and reacts, fine bleggal-metaphors abound, but then I realized I loaned my copy to Pheven Stillups, I know you're reading this Pheven, if you've finished the book return it please, if you haven't finished the book finish the book and return it please. No, that's not bleggalgazing's end: I've been adding good new links, especially to Because Left, I've discovered Blooger has a limit of 125 per blegrell, so I've begun moving the moribund to Canned Hiatus below. No one has been purged; I doubt any of them read this bleg, but still. Also, suggestions for good reads always solicited. Also, as always, thanks for the Kind.

• Now that's in my head.
• Carnival to commons.
• Give us more time! They'll get it, everybody chill. 
• Ten reasons not to vote for Obama.
• Is Romney ready for the kill list? Yes, again.
• Van Fucking Jones.
• Caliban and the witch, for those of you who do.
• Monopoly and capitalism.
• This is the second time I've seen not voting for Obama compared to voting for cancer.
• I work at "the very heart of American empire" apparently. I once was worthy, now I'm not.
• Stinging rebuke.
• It's not just for enemies of the state. Or yes it is.
• Help us destroy Jesus!
• How many Jews know that their God was amphibious?
• Sideshow's links.

• Want to drive up your pings? Don't think about google repercussions of a post with Ducking Fogs in the title. HEY! There are no fogs ducking at this shitty blog. Jesus.
• The steady pounding of repeating.
• Ragtag bloggers.
• Frank O'Hara's great cat Boris.
• On centenaries.
• Swans Swans Swans Swans Swans Swans Swans Swans. Swans.
• Boatloads of John Peel Show recordings.
• Orbit Baby.
• Great pianists of the 20th C.
• Summer's Cauldron.
• Pink Flag.
• Rudder. 
• OK, now this is in my head:

DOOMSDAY

Amy Gerstler

The dark that’s gathering strength
these days is submissive,
kinky, silken, willing;
stretched taut as a trampoline.
World events rattle by like circus
trains we wave at occasionally,
as striped, homed and spotted
heads poke out their windows.
Feels like I’m wearing a corset,
though I haven’t a stitch on.
Burn the place setting I ate from,
OK? and destroy the easy chair
I languished in. Let birds
unravel my lingerie
for nesting materials.
Fingers poised on the piano keys,
I can’t think what to play.
A dirge, a fugue?
What, exactly, are crimes
against nature? How many
calories are consumed while
lolling in this dimness,
mentally lamenting the lack
of anything to indicate
some faint mirage of right-
mindedness has been sighted
on the horizon? The world
is full of morbid thinkers,
miserable workers and compulsive
doodlers. Darling, my mother
used to croon, you were a happy
accident, like the discovery
of penicillin. When I sense
the zillions of cells in my body
laboring together, such grand
fatigue sweeps over me.
Once in a blue moon I smell
the future’s breath,
that purgatorial whiff
shot through with the scent
of burnt hair, like when sailors
have been drifting at sea
for a long time and suddenly
they see gulls circling
and the ripe composty odor
of land unfurls in the air,
but they’ve no idea whether
an oasis of breadfruit
and pineapple awaits them
or an enclave of cannibals.