Friday, August 28, 2020

Let Fate Have What Is Fate's

  • Today marks sixteen days since I wrote with an ink pen in a 5x5 per inch grid tablet
  • seventeen days since I inked, penciled, chalked or watercolored on gridded paper, plain paper, glossy poster paper, or cardboard
  • Strangest, no fret, something else that's changed in the last weird year
  • my constant need for an new old flag hasn't waned it's just waxing in a typed direction




  

2020 AUGUST 28

PJOEPF OF VRIECYH

I don’t feel haiku
tonight don’t feel ink type don’t
want reconsider
  
clusterfuck more side
ways than fucking yesterday
I expected more
  
from kayfabe breaking
People hoard polish tablet
tattoo promise, broken promise
  
over-promise, ur
worship kayfabe abandon
kayfabe institute

new kayfabes my first
broken kayfabe a crucial
role in my certain
  
tea, my never wrong
insufferability.
I am 61
 
today. I know 8
syllables last line 4 stan
zas up, my gift to me













THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GHOSTS

Tom Clark

Whoso list to haunt could do worse than to
Obtain the license, get the picture.
Spook finders must find spooks to put the face,
Name and space coordinates together.
What is kept in the mind perimeter
Retains a wild autonomy through fate.

I will retreat to the precorporate.
Let fate have what is fate’s and allow
This spirit to slip through time’s difficult
Nets with the devious fingers of
A wild wind, while I run along behind.

2 comments:

  1. i see that poetry magazine regrets publishing a poem with "uncritical use of racist language" so much that not only have the president, chair of the board of directors, and editor resigned, but the poem has been banned from online publication and will not be added to the archive

    so yes, cancel culture really is a thing

    by looking around i found that the offensive word is - and i will substitute * for the vowel - the most common letter in written english - see wikipedia on letter frequency -


    n*gr*ss

    i am so old [the first couple years of the baby boom] that i remember when the non-feminized form of this word was polite

    and so the truth of the following observation from the obliterated poem is a matter of my lived experience

    "oh they are always changing what they want to be called"

    the speaker is then depicted as behaving quite rudely to a woman of colour - she drops her purse on the bus, the woman of colour hands it back

    she put out her hand to receive it the whole time looking out the window
    never said a word


    this action, by the person who previously used the word today's critics are complaining about, shows her as someone who is clearly racist - so i think it is a misinterpretation of the poem to say that the complained-about word is being used 'uncritically'

    i have quoted this fragment from Scholls Ferry Rd. by Michael Dickson from a tweet complaining about it's having been published

    https://twitter.com/HanaShapiro/status/1275943163690131456/photo/1


    when i read this i see the poet's recounting of the imagined or remembered incident as depicting racism, not endorsing it

    as todd rundgren put it in his 1993 song worldwide epiphany

    We got the right to know, which means we got the right to misunderstand



    ReplyDelete
  2. Have some pickled beets to celebrate!

    ReplyDelete