re-running the reels of my presence in this world

• Click for bigger and bigger at other place but still not full size at other place, neither my free blogging platform nor my paid blogging platform can fit full size of tablet three even when jpg cropped, small metaphors abound
• Scientists deciding that because they can't prove a tree has consciousness as humans understand it means trees don't have consciousness is finest metaphor abounding for anything and everything clusterfuckful
• But can turn no profit so won't happen
• Ontologies of mass violence
• No good guys, no bad guys
• White males will kill us all
• Neo-politics: an awful primer
• All Democrats are collaborators, and so are you and me, there is a reason all posts but two a year are tagged my complicity (one of them in four days)

           
                   
         
YOU'VE RUINED MY EVENING/YOU'VE RUINED MY LIFE

Tom Raworth

i would be eight people and then the difficulties vanish

only as one i contain the complications

in a warm house roofed with the rib-cage of an elephant

i pass my grey mornings re-running the reels

and the images are the same but the emphasis shifts

the actors bow gently to me and i envy them

their repeated parts, their constant presence in that world

  

i would be eight people each inhabiting the others’ dreams

walking through corridors of glass framed pages

telling each other the final lines of letters

picking fruit in one dream and storing it in another

only as one i contain the complications

and the images are the same, their constant presence in that world

the actors bow gently to me and envy my grey mornings

   

i would be eight people with the rib-cage of an elephant

picking fruit in a warm house above actors bowing

re-running the reels of my presence in this world

the difficulties vanish and the images are the same

eight people, glass corridors, page lines repeated

inhabiting grey mornings roofed with my complications

only as one walking gently storing my dream

The City So White It Is Ready for Ink

• Scanner broke at work so new poem not yet here (update: but now here)
• (t....h e...y p..t p..m I w...e in t....t)
• With an emphasis that I can't even if I wanted to today so it's easy to say this, but I am tempted to go to The Mall today to see what if anything foments at trumporgasm
• The meaning of genocide and the political stakes of naming
• Tanks for the memories
• Tonkining
• Trump is an idiot savant at playing the American id, I said yesterday to my kamalatarian colleague
• Dying of whiteness
• Indulge your jingo by torturing animals! 
• There is no difference between this shitty jingoism and trumporgasm jingoism
• A cracker could shoot twelve people on the mall tomorrow, I said to kamalatarian colleague yesterday, and if one person throws a milkshake on a cracker applauding the cracker doing the shooting the media will make the milkshake thrower the day's evilest human and direst existential threat to the Empire (update: if but New York Times columnists)

AUBADE FOR BURNING CITY

Ocean Vuong

South Vietnam, April 29, 1975: Armed Forces Radio played Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” as a code to begin Operation Frequent Wind, the ultimate evacuation of American civilians and Vietnamese refugees by helicopter during the fall of Saigon.

            Milkflower petals on the street

                                                     like pieces of a girl’s dress.

May your days be merry and bright ...

He fills a teacup with champagne, brings it to her lips.

            Open, he says.

                                        She opens.

                                                      Outside, a soldier spits out

            his cigarette as footsteps

                            fill the square like stones fallen from the sky. May all

                                         your Christmases be white as the traffic guard

            unstraps his holster.

                                        His hand running the hem

of  her white dress.

                            His black eyes.

            Her black hair.

                            A single candle.

                                        Their shadows: two wicks.

A military truck speeds through the intersection, the sound of children

                                        shrieking inside. A bicycle hurled

            through a store window. When the dust rises, a black dog

                            lies in the road, panting. Its hind legs

                                                                                   crushed into the shine

                                                       of a white Christmas.

On the nightstand, a sprig of magnolia expands like a secret heard

                                                                      for the first time.

The treetops glisten and children listen, the chief of police

                                facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola.

                                             A palm-sized photo of his father soaking

                beside his left ear.

The song moving through the city like a widow.

                A white ...    A white ...    I’m dreaming of a curtain of snow

                                                          falling from her shoulders.

Snow crackling against the window. Snow shredded

                                           with gunfire. Red sky.

                              Snow on the tanks rolling over the city walls.

A helicopter lifting the living just out of reach.

            The city so white it is ready for ink.

                                                     The radio saying run run run.

Milkflower petals on a black dog

                            like pieces of a girl’s dress.

May your days be merry and bright. She is saying

            something neither of them can hear. The hotel rocks

                        beneath them. The bed a field of ice

                                                                                 cracking.

Don’t worry, he says, as the first bomb brightens

                             their faces, my brothers have won the war

                                                                       and tomorrow ...    

                                             The lights go out.

I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming ...    

                                                            to hear sleigh bells in the snow ...    

In the square below: a nun, on fire,

                                            runs silently toward her god — 

                           Open, he says.

                                                         She opens.

Sideways

Landru's surprise cameo in yesterday's lifetimeline - he can vouch, no pies for Planet - sent me happily sideways, I took this photo and turned it upside-down the night before yesterday and posted it yesterday at other place (where you can see last night's non-revisable poem below bigger if you don't want to bigger here (though you won't read either)), Serendipity Be Blessed, I got Doctor Sevrin ears

Or an Assassin Bug Squatting Over Us

• Too tired to read and staring at wittertay on my pleapay onephay to stay awake for not here
• I see Sanders must be leading in both party's internal polling so wetworked Bernie ordered
• Nothing raises Sanders more in my esteem than everybody who I hate hating him 
• UPDATE! I got Doctor Sevrin ears
• (it's a new flavor of my seething, seasoned by what won't be here of course but more by the abolition of Kayfabe by fucks fuckers and fuckees and simultaneous enforcement of Kayfabe for anyone fucks fuckers and fuckees hate, an old song, true, I know the lyrics by heart, bark)
• puts my favorite Cohen song in my head every time, Sanders assassins will interview with a celebrating Hannity on air, neerapodesta office parties everywhere

• Good news of collapse.
• Isolationism as slur.
• Power versus the press.
• My favorite activity in the world is going to make me horribly sick if not kill me.
• The heatwave and nightlife politics
• >> (massize) Deleted Bleggalgaze (yes, I did play the same Wire song two posts in a row on purpose)<<
• Maggie's weekly links. 
• Why he still reads.
• Ineffable but fake frontier.
• Why he does and doesn't blog.
• Madcap vidcrap recap. 
• UPDATE: Kavan's *Ice*
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• UPDATE: a little dizzy
• Living post, as in, it's done or it's not, just like my days
• UPDATE: Seven notarikon poems
• Twelve heart-breaking sounds that will remain when there is no heart to break for them.

                                
SELECTED RECENT AND NEW ERRORS

Dean Young

My books are full of mistakes

but not the ones Tony’s always pointing out

as if correct spelling is what could stop the conveyor belt

the new kid caught his arm in.

Three weeks on the job and he’s already six hundred

legal pages, lawyers haggling in an office

with an ignored view of the river

pretending to be asleep, pretending

to have insight into its muddy self.

You think that’s a fucked-up, drawn-out metaphor,

try this: if you feel you’re writhing like a worm

in a bottle of tequila, you don’t know

it’s the quickness of its death that reveals

the quality of the product, its proof.

I don’t know what I’m talking about either.

Do you think the dictionary ever says to itself

I’ve got these words that mean completely

different things inside myself

and it’s tearing me apart?

My errors are even bigger than that.

You start taking down the walls of your house,

sooner or later it’ll collapse

but not before you can walk around

with your eyes closed, rolled backwards

and staring straight into the amygdala’s meatlocker

and your own damn self hanging there.

Do that for awhile and it’s easier to delight

in snow that lasts about twenty minutes

longer than a life held together

by the twisted silver baling wire

of deception and stealth.

But I ain’t confessing nothing.

On mornings when I hope you forget my name,

I walk through the high wet weeds

that don’t have names either.

I do not remember the word dew.

I do not remember what I told you

with your ear in my teeth.

Further and further into the weeds.

We have absolutely no proof

god isn’t an insect

rubbing her hind legs together to sing.

Or boring into us like a yellow jacket

into a fallen, overripe pear.

Or an assassin bug squatting over us,

shoving a proboscis right through

our breast plate then sipping.

How wonderful our poisons don’t kill her.