It Is the Unremarkable That Will Last

Yes, I changed the font in the grids to spectral, kept the serifs, going blind I need clutches, created more leaf space in the same space, neither elephant note or blooger offer spectral, this type in a grid in gaggle sheets and copy/paster to blagger, using two of my oligarch shitlords products yo, letting my yacht-owning owners track me for years, the shut-up or be shut-down be coming (tomorrow's update)

HEY! Marathon time at WFMU, they can't keep going on my support alone, completely independent, completely listener supported, archives everything (but Yo La Tengo playing requests for donations on the second Saturday of every Marathon so you'll just have to listen to Todd's show) (Ira the K has a show on WFMU, not in rotation now but go to archives, amazing sets), what? Russians are shelling Europe's largest nuclear power station twaater blaats as I type this, DONATE WHILE YOU CAN! Disclaimer: I will never force you listen to this radio station no matter how much power over your life and death I acquire, please consider throwing them the coins in your pocket

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Making sense of nuclear psychosis

I daydream of shooting this motherfucker

Stop killing animals for your eating pleasure

The elephant in the courtroom

The varieties of bullshit

Making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich

So the winner is.... the United States?

Russia's motherfucking crackerchristers

How to talk to a motherfucking crackerchrister

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End of the World-Building

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Blooger-inspired bleggalgaze

Reading *The Books of Jacob*

New Belle and Sebastian for those of you who do

You may be shocked to learn there's new GbV

Bandcamp sells its soul

MY WORSE NIGHTMARE REALIZED!

I can't stop listening to this song, laugh!

TO A WREN ON CALVARY

Larry Levis

It is the unremarkable that will last,

As in Brueghel’s camouflage, where the wren’s withheld,

While elsewhere on a hill, small hawks (or are they other birds?)

Are busily unraveling eyelashes & pupils

From sunburned thieves outstretched on scaffolds,

Their last vision obscured by wings, then broken, entered.

I cannot tell whether their blood spurts, or just spills,

Their faces are wings, & their bodies are uncovered.

The twittering they hear is the final trespass.

                                         ~

And all later luxuries—the half-dressed neighbor couple

Shouting insults at each other just beyond

Her bra on a cluttered windowsill, then ceasing it when

A door was slammed to emphasize, like trouble,

The quiet flowing into things then, spreading its wake

From the child’s toy left out on a lawn

To the broken treatise of jet-trails drifting above—seem

Keel scrapes on the shores of some enlarging mistake,

A wrong so wide no one can speak of it now in the town

That once had seemed, like its supporting factories

That manufactured poems & weaponry,

Like such a good idea. And wasn’t it everyone’s?

Wasn’t the sad pleasure of assembly lines a replica

Of the wren’s perfect, camouflaged self-sufficiency,

And of its refusal even to be pretty,

Surviving in a plumage dull enough to blend in with

A hemline of smoke, sky, & a serene indifference?

                                           ~

The dead wren I found on a gravel drive

One morning, all beige above and off-white

Underneath, the body lighter, no more than a vacant tent

Of oily feathers stretched, blent, & lacquered shut

Against the world—was a world I couldn’t touch.

And in its skull a snow of lice had set up such

An altar, the congregation spreading from the tongue

To round, bare sills that had been its eyes, I let

It drop, my hand changed for a moment

By a thing so common it was never once distracted from

The nothing all wrens meant, the one feather on the road.

No feeding in the wake of cavalry or kings changed it.

Even in the end it swerved away, & made the abrupt

Riddle all things come to seem ... irrelevant:

The tucked claws clutched emptiness like a stick.

And if Death whispered as always in the language of curling

Leaves, or a later one that makes us stranger,

“Don’t you come near me motherfucker”;

If the tang of metal in slang made the New World fertile,

Still ... as they resumed their quarrel in the quiet air,

I could hear the species cheep in what they said ...

Until their voices rose. Until the sound of a slap erased

A world, & the woman, in a music stripped of all prayer,

Began sobbing, & the man become bystander cried O Jesus.

In the sky, the first stars were already faint

And timeless, but what could they matter to that boy, blent

To no choir, who saw at last the clean wings of indifferent

Hunger, & despair? Around him the other petty thieves,

With arms outstretched, & eyes pecked out by birds, reclined,

Fastened forever to scaffolds which gradually would cover

An Empire’s hills & line its roads as far

As anyone escaping in a cart could see, his swerving mind

On the dark brimming up in everything, the reins

Going slack in his hand as the cart slows, & stops,

And the horse sees its own breath go out

Onto the cold air, & gazes after the off-white plume,

And seems amazed by it, by its breath, by everything.

But the man slumped behind it, dangling a lost nail

Between his lips, only stares at the swishing tail,

At each white breath going out, thinning, & then vanishing,

For he has grown tired of amazing things.