Think of Those Barren Places Where Men Gather to Act in the Terrible Name of Rectitude, of Acned Shame, Punk’s Pride, Muscle or Turf, the Bully’s Thin Superiority

Some pivot happening. I have told you three time we are being reprogrammed and deactivating The Donald receptor in our head been ordered by shitlords, links below, (not a tenth of it, Donald shitfitting tonight as I type this), I tell you who our shitlords *do* find dreamy below, hey, remember when there was a worldwide pandemic and you had to wear a mask and drink government poison or your kids were seized and sold into Comet Badmitton's sex slavery operation and you couldn't go to helmetball games and hoot racist chants at your white-or-death home town team, I guess that one's not being reprogrammed just less emphasized, winter woods yesterday, yo

Laugh. I am telling you three times we are being reprogrammed and revelation of The Donald's sins are to off him, yes, but with no consequences for actions this is nothing but normalization of acceptable political practice in the soon-to-be United States of Authoritarianism Just Not Lead By *That* Jackass (and best useful (right-wing Republican Party cracker-whisperer) idiot (savant) ever)

Best cat ever yesterday, our house and the sun:

On the other hand, seasoned with bothsiderism
Nigeria is planning a false flag in Switzerland
2021 a banner year for the military-industrial complex
21st century fascism: where we are
I will bet you any number of digital pints redeemable in endless gulpable pints if we ever meet in real life, this uckfay on 2024 Democratic presidential ticket
The Strength of Kindness
Reckoning with E.O.Wilson
Attack of the transphobic Putin - Nazi Truckers
☝	It is not an accident WW3 heats up as covid usefulness ebbs						☝
Home is where the money is
FRESH HELL			Today in my complicity
Philosopher's zombie					Strategic impotence
The list of fatass novels I will never read or reread keeps blossoming as does poetry I will never reread but new poetry is what I like to fail now
Freud and the miseries of politics
Maggie's weekly links				{ feuilleton }'s weekly links
Death cults of East Anglia
Rockville's imperialist ambitions!
Our shitlords have told their propagandists it's time to off Donald
☝	He never stopped ripping things up!						☝
I don't think I've mentioned her here but I vouch for Elizabeth Taylor
Beloved Sasha Vee Mr Alarum Alexa's new music has L's seal of approval
Is old music killing new music?
You should listen to and give money to WFMU too
Note to self: evaluate policy of following twitter feeds of poets and do I really want to know their kid is sick today, for instance
Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s Lost Debut Album Appears To Surface Online After 27 Years, big if true

THE FEAST OF STEPHEN

Anthony Hecht

I

The coltish horseplay of the locker room,

Moist with the steam of the tiled shower stalls,   

With shameless blends of civet, musk and sweat,   

Loud with the cap-gun snapping of wet towels   

Under the steel-ribbed cages of bare bulbs,   

In some such setting of thick basement pipes   

And janitorial realities

Boys for the first time frankly eye each other,   

Inspect each others’ bodies at close range,   

And what they see is not so much another   

As a strange, possible version of themselves,   

And all the sparring dance, adrenal life,   

Tense, jubilant nimbleness, is but a vague,   

Busy, unfocused ballet of self-love.

II

If the heart has its reasons, perhaps the body   

Has its own lumbering sort of carnal spirit,   

Felt in the tingling bruises of collision,   

And known to captains as esprit de corps.

What is this brisk fraternity of timing,   

Pivot and lobbing arc, or indirection,   

Mens sana in men’s sauna, in the flush

Of health and toilets, private and corporal glee,   

These fleet caroms, plies and genuflections

Before the salmon-leap, the leaping fountain

All sheathed in glistening light, flexed and alert?   

From the vast echo-chamber of the gym,

Among the stumbled shouts and shrill of whistles,   

The bounced basketball sound of a leather whip.

III

Think of those barren places where men gather   

To act in the terrible name of rectitude,   

Of acned shame, punk’s pride, muscle or turf,   

The bully’s thin superiority.

Think of the Sturm-Abteilungs Kommandant

Who loves Beethoven and collects Degas,

Or the blond boys in jeans whose narrowed eyes   

Are focussed by some hard and smothered lust,   

Who lounge in a studied mimicry of ease,   

Flick their live butts into the standing weeds,   

And comb their hair in the mirror of cracked windows

Of an abandoned warehouse where they keep   

In darkened readiness for their occasion   

The rope, the chains, handcuffs and gasoline.

IV

Out in the rippled heat of a neighbor’s field,

In the kilowatts of noon, they’ve got one cornered.   

The bugs are jumping, and the burly youths   

Strip to the waist for the hot work ahead.   

They go to arm themselves at the dry-stone wall,   

Having flung down their wet and salty garments   

At the feet of a young man whose name is Saul.   

He watches sharply these superbly tanned   

Figures with a swimmer’s chest and shoulders,   

A miler’s thighs, with their self-conscious grace,   

And in between their sleek, converging bodies,   

Brilliantly oiled and burnished by the sun,   

He catches a brief glimpse of bloodied hair   

And hears an unintelligible prayer.