I Look in That One Kind of Dwindled

• I'm not a Bernie guy, my fascination pivots on professional Democrats versus Bernie.
• I know stopping leftist populism is Job One! for professional Democrats,
• but read Sanders' diagnosis of midterms and prescription for going forward 
• and how much professional Democrats hate him for saying this shit
• not because it's true but because none of it will ever happen
• even if professional Democrats wanted it to, which
• Bernie certainly knows
• (which explains why it's personal, the seething Bernie hate, to professional Democrats, who
• can't? won't? triangulate why people like me seethe at them).

• My eye meds make my eyes red, the new Library Grand Poobah asked my boss two tiers up if I'm a stoner, would like to be, but no.
• So, a reminder (or, how did populism come to mean right-wing racism?): What does it tell us when liberals, faced with epic political corruption, spectacular bank misbehavior, and towering inequality, take that opportunity to declare war on populism? It tells us that they’ve lost any sense of their own movement as an expression of the vast majority. It tells us they have no idea why they believe they should be entrusted with power in the first place. And it reminds us that their particular brand of class-based self-delusion is a luxury that the rest of us can ill afford.
• Today in Rhetorical Questions.
• Unconstitutional, fuckconstitutional.
• Civilizational suicide.
• How to prepare for Doomsday.
• 21 unforgivable one-liners.
• How to protect yourself from the barrage of bad news.
• Please give the coins in your pocket to Arthur.
• Why Bolsonaro won: a primer.
• Three months inside New York's alt-right.
• The geneology of the worse, the better.
• Cussin' in the classroom.
• I caught myself thinking of changing this blog's background, layout, colors, going white like the other place, caught myself thinking of just moving to other place, talked myself down by recognizing any decision I make in a fit of seething I make because it feels good.

ALBUM: A RUNTHRU

Clark Coolidge

I look in that one kind of dwindled. And in this,

look up, a truncheon in my fist, tin pot

on my head, the war. My father, I’m looking at, is my

age then and thin, his pants streak to the ground,

shadows of rosevines . . . His father sits beneath

a cat. Here the shadow has more flavor than my

trains, elbows on livingroom floor, bangs that

curl, opera broadcast, The Surreptitious Adventures of

Nightstick. I lie in the wind of the sun and hear

toots and smell aluminium smoke. The tiny oval

of my mother’s youth in back and the rest is dark.

Sundays, the floor was black. At the beach, here

I’m a nest of seaweed, an earlier portrait of

surrealists I saw later, a stem of grey what

rises from my scalp. My hair is peaked in brine.

And this here hat, dark green fedora over same green

corduroy suit for a trip to the nation’s capitol,

how far askance I’ve been since and never another

hat. Cromium rods, the hand in the guide’s pocket

seems far removed. Blurry shoes on sandstone steps,

double and over exposed. Then in this one the SECRET

points to my head, shaved, and emblem, OPEN, striped

in “pirate” T-shirt and HERE IT IS. My elbow bent,

upright this time, behind a pole. I had yet to

enter at this snap the cavern beneath my sneakers.

To the right my soles protrude from beneath a boulder,

for I had trapped my mother and she asked Why.

Taken. Given. Flashlight brighter than my face,

another grotto, where the ball of twine, indirection,

gave out but we never got very far in, Connecticut.

I swim out of another cave in a further frame, cramped

gaze of sunlit days, apparel forgot. Later I reel

in a yell as my cousin takes a bite from my shank

beneath ranchhouse breezy curtains of Marion. On a trudge up

from the gasoline rockpit in the gaze of Judy Lamb,

she carries my pack, my jeans rolled as I step on

a pipe. Estwing in hand and svelte as only youthful can.

Most of those rocks remain and she married a so-so

clarinetist. My greygreen zipper jacket leans against

a concrete teepee, my father looking bullchested stands

before. Perhaps we had just argued. Central Park cement

steps of pigeons, the snow removed. Overexposed

whiteshirt at the drums, stick fingers ride cymbal

at the camera raised, livingroom Brenton with orange

& black “sea” wallpaper and orange&black tubs. I wore

a wristwatch then and never again, drumtime hitching

me past it. I graduate from highschool in white dinner

jacket and diploma and frown, too many hot shadows

back of the garage. Must roll up the bedroll with

skinny arms and lam for the caves. Dave & A. Bell by

the Ford Company Squire first time allowed alone to tool

Bleak grass scapes of Knox farm. Rope down a crack,

mosquitoes and Koolade, sun dapple leaf moss sandwiches, ache.

Then in this group more drums on the roof, the gravel

and the flat, a cover attempt for no album even thought.

I tap and step in the dim known street. Lean on a

chimney to inhabit the sky, deep with drops. Here

I’m pressed on a wall of Tennessee limes, stones-throw

from mouth of the underground we camped in. Too many

thoughts, elide. Then lie on a beach in a doughnut

pattern shirt with a stick, a pipe?, in my mouth as my

cousin grins shiny beyond. Truro, also waiting for the

caves. With the poets then I’m fat and the driveway is

dark, the clapboards all white in a day of all talk.

This then all ends in color, my red bandana and shirt out

on Devil’s Pulpit, open hand addressed to the grey

where Hawthorne and Melville now view of a highschool.

While the water still spills, and the cat squints at leaves

blown, my father wears Brahms, families lean in on one

for a group shot, and the rock remains shattered in a star.