The Curtain Calls the Ovation

• Richard Thompson is 70 today
• Click here for my standard RT birthday blurb - and lots more songs - if you'd like
• In 1996 at Lisner Auditorium, GWU, you? me? us? tour, this live

           

• and SHAZAM, my favorite RT song ever
• The collapse has already happened
• Mieville: Silence in Debris
• The argument for capitalism
• Bidenites who think if only folks would shut up about Biden's NOT NEW NEWS creepiness the Republicans would never bring it up in the general election.
• Biden's creepiness is creepy, he's an evil fuck for other reasons too, this emphasis on his creepiness - and I'm not convinced this isn't some self-inoculation by professional Democrats to rake this inevitable shit now before Biden officially commits - serves to distract from Biden's existential shittiness
• Ten essential BC Studio albums (including, of course, Swans)
• Self-Portrait as Klaus Nomi in New York
• The muscle of metaphor
• Three Poems, by Rae Armantrout
• He pissed the Molly, Gee! I hate it

                                    
THE HEART SHOWS NO SIGNS

Ru Freeman

The heart, the surgeon says, does not reveal
the small rifts, the hairline cracks which

split the hairline cracks they conceal cops
and robbers in a stretch of skin flaunting

star-scars with show of blood bone
the ledges of what it holds tight in checkmate

moves: bend this and break
fight first and bleed to earn

needle     finger     wrap     caress     balm
the salvation of sight     Behold what beauty

lasts, what outlasts itself     The curtain
calls the ovation     Seize the beginning

that ends this way: off center stage above
fractured ribs the heart succumbs in silence

All is dark. Listen     a kommos sung solo
It is too late to repair anything