Sunday, January 5, 2020

They Warn Us One Night Soon the Judge Will Wake to Find His Bed Alive with Wasps, While Across Town the Night Watchman Will Stare Stunned at the Moths Circling Before He Realizes He's on Fire

I was a hearse twice day before yesterday, hauling ashes from Glen Burnie to Gaithersburg and a second set from Gaithersburg to home, 2019 buried, 2020: all I want to do is hike with Earthgirl









PRELUDE TO A REVOLUTION

Traci Brimhall

We go to prison windows and pass cigarettes, tangerines
and iodine through the bars. Anything we think
 
could heal a man. Assassins kiss our fingers.
Mercenaries sing us songs about unbroken light
 
as we mend their shirts. The bilingual murderers recite
lamentations in one tongue, and in another, young myths.
 
We fold and unfold our shawls, and the men squint
into the sunlight, dumb with hope. Some days they confuse
 
the walls of their cage with their skin. Some days,
the sky. They see their deaths in the sweat darkening
 
our dresses. To sweeten the hours we share scandals
from the city, how curators removed an elephant's heart
 
from the museum because it began beating when anyone
in love looked at it, how the coroner found minnows
 
swimming in a drowned girl's lungs. They ask if it's true,
if slaves are chained together on ships to prevent suicide.
 
We say they'll never be free. They warn us one night soon
the judge will wake to find his bed alive with wasps,
 
while across town the night watchman will stare stunned
at the moths circling before he realizes he's on fire.

1 comment:

  1. 0)that's a good looking winter forest photo

    0.3)missus charley, informed of the opinion which has been expressed that forests are most beautiful in winter, said she agreed

    0.34)this conversation took place yesterday morning while driving along game preserve road, overlooking seneca creek, on our way to the church where i, a believing unitarian, voluntarily enact the role of a practicing catholic

    0.68)later that day at home in our audiovisual area i watched and was impressed by several episodes of 'one strange rock' - although will smith narrates, the astronauts are the real stars, someone says, and i think so too

    1)speaking of the world writ large, over at ianwelsh.net, tony wikrent gets a guest weekend wrap-up of political economy news - this weekend he led off with several excerpts from ian's posting of the day before - specifically

    Strategic Political Economy ---Why US Leadership Stinks and Drone Assassination Doesn’t Matter (Leadership in Organizations People Believe In)

    Ian Welsh, 4 January 2020


    Leadership isn’t as big a deal as people make it out to be–IF you have a vibrant organization in which people believe. New people step up, and they’re competent enough. Genius leadership is very rare, and a good organization doesn’t need it, though it’s welcome when it exists. As long as the organization knows what it’s supposed to do (kick Americans out of Afghanistan), and everyone’s motivated to do that, leadership doesn’t need to be especially great, but it will be generally competent, because the people in the organization will make it so....

    American leaders are obsessed with leadership because they lead organizations in whose goals no one believes. Or rather, they lead organizations for whom everyone knows the leadership doesn’t believe in its ostensible goals. Schools are led by people who hate teachers and want to privatize schools to make profit. The US is led by men who don’t believe in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Police are led by men who think their jobs are to protect the few and beat down the many, not to protect and serve....

    Corporations make fancy mission statements and talk about valuing employees and customers, but they just want to make a buck and will fuck anyone, employee or customer, below the C-suite. They don’t have a “mission” (making money is not a mission, it’s a hunger if it’s all you want to do); they are parasites and they know it. Making organizations work if they’re filled with people who don’t believe in the organization, or who believe that the “leadership” is only out for themselves and has no mission beyond helping themselves, not even enriching the employees or shareholders, is actually hard. People don’t get inspired by making the C-suite rich. Bureaucrats, knowing they are despised and distrusted by their political counterparts, and knowing that they aren’t allowed to do their ostensible jobs, as with the EPA generally not being allowed to protect the environment, the DOJ not being allowed to prosecute powerful monied crooks, and the FDA being the slave of drug companies and the whims of politically-connected appointees, are hard to move, hard to motivate, making it hard to get to anyone to do anything but the minimum....

    So American leaders, and indeed the leaders of most developed nations, think they’re something special….

    1.3)now i feel like making another contribution to bernie

    1.4)meanwhile, this morning i saw on tv that judge judy has endorsed bloomberg, and she makes some good points, i must admit - the times i've watch judge judy's show she seemed fair, but with a lot of scorn on top - i imagine that there could be some current trumpistas whose votes might be influenced by judge judy

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