Work with me: substitute Dianne Feinstein for Queen Elizabeth, Lanky Pete for the CIA, all other fine metaphors abounding are yours to choose.
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Also too, 99 is 81 today:
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- The state as Ouroboros?
- How the FBI has been working hard to deport the friends of the guy they killed during interview about Boston bombing.
- Ionization.
- This week's Food Links.
- White Flint fire station?
- 31 poems using the word NAIL.
- Holy Dying, part three.
- Library Rules from Gass' Middle C.
- Three hours of Professor Dum Dum! from early this morning.
- Great weirdass pop songs?
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THE TRAGIC CONDITION OF THE STATUE OF LIBERTY
Bernadette Mayer
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Give me your
gentrificatees of the Lower East Side including all the well-heeled
young Europeans who’ll take apartments without leases
Give me your landlords, give me your cooperators
Give me the guys who sell the food and the computers to the public schools in District One
Give me the IRS-FBI-CIA men who don’t take election day off
Give me the certain members of the school board & give me the district superintendent
Give me all the greedy members of both american & foreign capitalist religious sects
Give me the parents of the punk people
Give me the guy who puts those stickers in the Rice Krispies
Give me the doctor
who thinks his time is more valuable than mine and my daughter’s &
the time of all the other non-doctors in this world
Give me the mayor, his mansion, and the president & his white house
Give me the cops who
laugh and sneer at meetings where they demonstrate the new uses of mace
and robots instead of the old murder against people who are being
evicted
Give me the landlord’s sleazy lawyers and the deal-making judges in housing court & give me the landlord’s arsonist
Give me the known & unknown big important rich guys who now bank on our quaint neighborhood
Give me, forgive me, the writers who have already or want to write bestsellers in this country
Together we will go to restore Ellis Island, ravaged for years by wind, weather and vandals
I was surprised and
saddened when I heard that the Statue of Liberty was in such a serious
state of disrepair & I want to help
This is the most generous contribution I can afford.
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re Gass's "library rules" - these are good if the objective is to avoid changing the condition of the book
ReplyDeletebooks i own i will sometimes make marginal notes in, although not as often these days as earlier
missus charley tells me there's a saying in her country, 'someone who lends a book is a fool - someone who returns a borrowed book is a bigger fool'
“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”
― John Milton, Areopagitica