Please Refrain from Talking During the Movie

No, not really, but taking a few days off from the noise. I'm working on something which is about the clusterfuck by not being about the clusterfuck and working on something else about the clusterfuck which is about the clusterfuck, how the value of Snowden's revelations isn't in the extent of the spying but in the reactions of people to the event of Snowden and the gut-punches of that never-ending, always craptacular, debate over less-shittiness, but the post's nowhere near ready and the yodel is old and I think I just posted enough so expect no more. Craptacularity. The regularity of craptacularity. The ubiquitous taint of craptacularity. The either/or claw of craptacularity. I'm as crippled as anyone. Anyway, I was working on both last night at the cost of not finding you reads today, sorry. Tomorrow is one of two days a year a post is not tagged My Complicity and I got a date tomorrow night, so nothing but songs and dance and poems the next few days. Fennesz cascade coming - thanks for requests, requests solicited - but not today, in which I didn't take the day off at all.





PLEASE REFRAIN FROM TALKING DURING THE MOVIE

Robert Polito

When I can’t make you understand I repeat myself

I repeat

If you don’t stop asking me all these questions how

Will I understand anything

Please refrain from talking during the movie

I need a life that isn’t just about needing

To escape my life

Please God please may Carrie please fall for me

I want to show off my hidden camera

I’m an informer but I have my limits

You hurt him once before now what

If she’s there I don’t know if I can go

Please refrain from talking during the movie

Leave a message if you can’t reach me

To exit press enter and don’t forget your receipt

When I think I read new things I want

A life where I read and think new things

Please refrain from talking during the movie

I want to know nothing

Again

Please God please may Carrie please fall for me

I repeat myself when I can’t

Make you understand I repeat

THE POEM OF THE LITTLE HOUSE AT THE CORNER OF MISAPPREHENSION AND MARVEL

Albert Goldbarth

During Napoleon iii’s coup d’état one of  his officers, Count de Saint-Arnaud, on being informed that a mob was approaching the Imperial Guard, coughed and exclaimed, with his hand across his throat, “Ma sacrée toux! (my damned cough).” But his lieutenant, understanding him to say “Massacrez tous! (massacre them all),” gave the order to fire, killing thousands—needlessly.
                   —Guy Murchie

“He was mortared to death.”

A pity, how we misspeak and mishear.

—Or “martyred”? Not that/coin-flip/either

makes a difference to the increasingly cooler

downtick of a corpse’s cells. “We heard the crazy mating joy

of the loon across the water.” Yes, but what

do we know, amateurs that we are? Loon, shmoon.

It might have been dying, announcing

its pain in those trilling pennants. It might

have been the girl who was lost in these woods last week

and never found by the volunteer searchers,

it might have been her ghost

with an admonishment. The truth is,

even among ourselves we often can’t distinguish pain

from pleasure, not in our beds, our hearts, the tone

of a poem on the final exam (a coin-toss). A pity, because

we know the urgency of some utterance;

and the intended goodwill of our listening; and

the marvelous basic mechanics of speech,

of lung: 300 million alveoli that, “if spread out flat,”

as my eighth-grade science teacher preened, “would come to

750 square feet, the entire floor space of an average house,”

and she added that tired magic about how atoms

of Julius Caesar and Napoleon and Beethoven did

their fleet anachronistic dance in every inhalation

of ours, although at thirteen I preferred to think

that the atoms of Cleopatra’s body—my Cleopatra,

inflating her see-through empresswear

with husky breaths—commingled with my blood, and also

realized in my own dim way it wasn’t only Einstein,

Shakespeare, Madame Curie populating my oxygen,

but also the smelly and scabby old man

from across the street who’d died last year

when the late-shift ward nurse heard (as she said in her testimony)

“med injection” instead of (as the outgoing

ward nurse told her) “bed inspection”—altogether

an unfortunate example of my theme . . . although

exempla abound, misapprehension

also dancing inside us at the atomic level.

Someone thought the gate was locked, she always locked

the gate in the late afternoon when the haze set down

and the sun for a moment seemed to carmelize the lake top,

so the gate was locked; except that it wasn’t,

and seven days into it nobody’s found the girl

or a scraggle of hair or a single ribbon. I tell you

we’re amateurs, we’re sometimes bungling amateurs,

of the minutiae of our own lives. When I heard the sounds

that gurgled from my chest as my wife was leaving

into the dense, conspiratorial Austin, Texas night,

I couldn’t have said if it was defeat

or relief. She couldn’t have said which one

she’d have been happiest to cause. We only knew

that I’d been wrong at times, and she’d been wrong at times,

and that our total errors, if spread out flat,

become the house we live in. They’re another system

inside us, along with the cardiac and the pulmonary,

they’re moving us toward the horizon line. And when

enough errors accumulate there, that’s what

we call the future. Even now, as you read this,

someone in that unknowable distance

is breathing you in.