Thursday, August 6, 2020

I Always Lie When I Always Say I Didn't Know the Gun Was Loaded

  • The more kayfabe breaks the less bark needed
  • Friend advises me waste no gaargh on August
  • She doesn't work in education and have a wife and daughter vectoring too
  • Sorry for hectoring you before now future
  • Understanding shitlord responsibility
  • Our childlike, emotional leaders
  • The Glitterpill Chronicle 
  • In Hollywood
  • rEmEmBeR: motherfucking Democrats
  • Lots of good and important links
  • There's a new Furs album? Yes!
  • Reminder: seventy five years ago today the United States committed the worse war crime in human history, exceptionalism
  • Actuating, beckoning, cackling, dismissing
  • eliminating, festering, guttering
  • hyperventilating, irritating, jeffing
  • katebushing, lecturing, manipulating 
  • neurotic, opinionated, pestering 
  • Quark-admiring, reckoning, sectioning 
  • tractioning, (e)ulogizing, vacationing
  • wavering, Xaviering 
  • yammering, shaZaming, I apologize





ANGER

April Bernard


I
 
When in a farmhouse kitchen that smelled
of old rinds and wet cigarette butts
I hoisted the shotgun to my shoulder
and aimed but did not fire it at the man
who had just taken my virginity like a snack,
with my collusion, but still — 
 
When I sat in a conference room
in an inquisition
at the “newspaper of record,”
across from the one slurping his pipe,
the one arching her eyebrow,
and I felt the heat like a wet brand in my chest,
repaid insult for insult and left their fancy job
like a squashed bug on the floor —
  
When I was twelve, too old, the last time my father
spanked me, pants down,
because I had “distressed” my mother
and my vision went red-black and
I did not forgive —
  
When, during my travels along the Gulf Coast,
the intruder returned in the night
and I did not call the cops again but stood
with a butcher knife facing the door, yelling, “Come in!”
although this time it was just the wind flapping
and banging the screen door —
  
When across a skating-rink-sized glistening table
I told the committee chair and her brooch I was a fan of Marx
and lost the fellowship —
  
When I threw a pot of hot coffee
and it just missed a man’s head, and the black-brown spatter stains
were still there four years later long after he’d left me
when I finally moved out of that East Village hole — 
 

II

I would have had to be thinking
in order to have thought — loaded, not loaded?
 — and I was not thinking, I was only dripping hot
and oh the pleasure, I can still feel its prickling,
crackle over the furnace of my rage,
to see his face go pale, his eyes widen,
his “put it down, put it down” — and I
put it down and allowed my life as well as his
to go on.


III

I miss my anger. Decades go by
when all I can muster is absent-minded invective,
you know, directed at the news;
or a brief fantasy
of shoving someone in front of a bus. Yesterday
I slammed my fist on my desk
and then apologized, to the desk.
  
Consider the tapestry of the seven deadly sins, at Saint-Denis:
Anger, wild-haired and half-dressed,
picked out in blue and silver thread bunched
against the crimson,
rough against the fingertips, she
rides a black boar dappled with blood
and waves her double-headed axe —
 
Yes, I remember her.
I always lie when I always say
I didn’t know the gun was loaded.

2 comments:

  1. in reading april bernard's poem i find myself wondering if it is autobiographical in whole or in part - even though that may not be the important question

    i would've liked to look at the mentioned tapestry portrayal of anger but did not find it with the techniques i used during the time i persisted

    as one who intentionally exposes himself to christian and buddhist ideas of ethics i suppose there is a point at which letting go of anger is the most wholesome thing to do - although it is probably best to give it a chance to be noticed

    i don't read many novels but if i did i imagine i would like to read ms bernard's miss fuller

    after reading the poem i listened once more to hendrix's 'bold as love'

    and read again

    https://www.britannica.com/biography/Pierre-Teilhard-de-Chardin

    spouse and self enjoy the npr show 'wait wait don't tell me' - at the end of the most recent show they said 'there, we got through another week - and we can do it next week too' - may the creative forces of the universe smile in their general direction

    ReplyDelete
  2. if you wish to consider more deeply the mass murder of japanese civilians mentioned above - although without a hyperlink - you could read OR listen to (it's about an hour long) a discussion by peter kuznick and paul jay

    https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/08/peter-kuznick-why-did-americans-accept-barbaric-slaughter-of-japanese-civilians.html

    "is kuznick too hopeful that biden has learned something?" comes up in the comments there

    meanwhile, ultra-nationalists in japan are saying - the chinese, the north koreans have nuclear weapons - we need them too

    i took a political science course about nuclear deterrence once - some of my fellow students in the class were obviously military officers although they came in civilian clothes, of course

    may the creative forces of the universe have mercy on our souls, if any

    ReplyDelete