The Nights Electrocute My Fugitive

• Was looking for the photo for the gag below, found that Planet photo of Fleabus in the same folder.  Fleabus, my favorite cat ever, she's eight now, she's still astonishing, this photo is six, seven years old, she still smiles like that, is fatter now like you and you and me. I've asked Planet for new Fleabus photos, we'll see.
• While I like the MomCat banner on the page, it's actually the MomCat Signal activated - see, it says so up there: since she crawled into my lap Friday night no one has seen her. Fine metaphors abounding are not always - are as often enough not - a good thing.
• Today's monologue is actually yesterday's theme song. I couldn't wait.
• My name, by the way, is Jeff Popovich - you could have found out if you'd wanted, I'd dropped enough clues, and you could have asked and I'd told you - and I'm nobody. The anonymity was never to hide but to signify.
• Let me get this out of the way: Ratfucking Obama, ratfucking Obama, ratfucking Obama, that's it until the next new level of the ratfucking you know Obama's enjoying. But.... Cuccinelli!
• Who has a running mate who couldn't more please Democratic Party central scripting, funny that.
• Eugene Robinson's obamapostasy will never be ready.
• Democracy can be rejuvenated?
• Burbocentrism.
• New Inquiry's Sunday links.
• BRT!
• MOCO fail.
• I want to thank the Washington Nationals for reminding me not to give a fuck about them.
• Mal de coucou.
• Four foolproof ways to become a famous novelist.
• Likeable monsters.
• Calvino, for those of you who do.
• The health of poetry.
• Moment.
• Previously unheard Psycho Killer.
• We saw the new Star Trek movie Friday night, Indian food then movie with Earthgirl and Planet. I haven't seen the first one so I'm unclear and unconcerned about the timeline shift thingee re: millions upon millions of dollars on production to get to the reverse scene I'll not spoil here, but here's my takeaway: they spent millions and millions of dollars to get to the Bone's I'm a doctor, dammit, not a torpedo mechanic line, plus this was seed-bedding the product line.
• I swore off stupid-ass Star Trek allusions when professional progressive Yglesias lectured me on Star Trek, not Star Trek itself, and why should I let a motherfucking professional progressive keep me from posting stupid-ass Star Trek allusions I was asked, it won't forever, I said, in fact I give up now.

AT THE EXECUTED MURDERER'S GRAVE

James Wright

1

My name is James A. Wright, and I was born   

Twenty-five miles from this infected grave,   

In Martins Ferry, Ohio, where one slave   

To Hazel-Atlas Glass became my father.   

He tried to teach me kindness. I return   

Only in memory now, aloof, unhurried,   

To dead Ohio, where I might lie buried,   

Had I not run away before my time.   

Ohio caught George Doty. Clean as lime,   

His skull rots empty here. Dying’s the best   

Of all the arts men learn in a dead place.   

I walked here once. I made my loud display,   

Leaning for language on a dead man’s voice.   

Now sick of lies, I turn to face the past.   

I add my easy grievance to the rest:

   2

Doty, if I confess I do not love you,

Will you let me alone? I burn for my own lies.   

The nights electrocute my fugitive,

My mind. I run like the bewildered mad   

At St. Clair Sanitarium, who lurk,

Arch and cunning, under the maple trees,   

Pleased to be playing guilty after dark.

Staring to bed, they croon self-lullabies.

Doty, you make me sick. I am not dead.   

I croon my tears at fifty cents per line.

   3

Idiot, he demanded love from girls,   

And murdered one. Also, he was a thief.   

He left two women, and a ghost with child.   

The hair, foul as a dog’s upon his head,   

Made such revolting Ohio animals   

Fitter for vomit than a kind man’s grief.   

I waste no pity on the dead that stink,

And no love’s lost between me and the crying   

Drunks of Belaire, Ohio, where police   

Kick at their kidneys till they die of drink.   

Christ may restore them whole, for all of me.   

Alive and dead, those giggling muckers who   

Saddled my nightmares thirty years ago   

Can do without my widely printed sighing   

Over their pains with paid sincerity.   

I do not pity the dead, I pity the dying.

   4

I pity myself, because a man is dead.

If Belmont County killed him, what of me?   

His victims never loved him. Why should we?   

And yet, nobody had to kill him either.   

It does no good to woo the grass, to veil

The quicklime hole of a man’s defeat and shame.   

Nature-lovers are gone. To hell with them.   

I kick the clods away, and speak my name.

   5

This grave’s gash festers. Maybe it will heal,   

When all are caught with what they had to do   

In fear of love, when every man stands still   

By the last sea,

And the princes of the sea come down

To lay away their robes, to judge the earth

And its dead, and we dead stand undefended everywhere,   

And my bodies—father and child and unskilled criminal—

Ridiculously kneel to bare my scars,   

My sneaking crimes, to God’s unpitying stars.

   6

Staring politely, they will not mark my face   

From any murderer’s, buried in this place.   

Why should they? We are nothing but a man.

   7

Doty, the rapist and the murderer,   

Sleeps in a ditch of fire, and cannot hear;   

And where, in earth or hell’s unholy peace,   

Men’s suicides will stop, God knows, not I.   

Angels and pebbles mock me under trees.   

Earth is a door I cannot even face.   

Order be damned, I do not want to die,   

Even to keep Belaire, Ohio, safe.

The hackles on my neck are fear, not grief.   

(Open, dungeon! Open, roof of the ground!)   

I hear the last sea in the Ohio grass,   

Heaving a tide of gray disastrousness.   

Wrinkles of winter ditch the rotted face   

Of Doty, killer, imbecile, and thief:   

Dirt of my flesh, defeated, underground.