And the Thing Is, It Stays Still Before Speaking Of

I was sixteen, two months from seventeen, for the Bicentennial. That August, at the Montgomery County Maryland Fair, I bought this Jimmy Carter for President poster

I either lost it or tossed to my great regret now. Republicans viciously called him a communist and but he beat Gerald Ford anyway if only because of Ford's pardon of Nixon, who the face-mullet called Vance the other day said was treated unfairly by un-American Democrats. I don't remember corporate Democrats then professing their undying devotion to full capitalist exploitation like they are now as they accuse Democratic Socialists of being communists far more dangerous to the United States of Assholes' future than their genuinely fascist teammates in the Republican wing of Shitlord Inc headquarters, though they did hate Carter and worked to defeat him which is why I bought the Carter poster (and voted for him once of legal age when Reagan kicked his ass). Sigh, a week ago I was on this Lake Michigan beach at the northern tip of the Leelanau Peninsula, it feels like it was fifty years ago too

I love Swans! I did not hear or see a single thing about the United States of Assholes' 250th birthday celebrations on Leelanau, in Traverse City, on the drive to and from Traverse City from Chelsea, in Chelsea itself and in Ann Arbor the last night in Michigan when we ate at the single best Indian restaurant I know, Shalimar on Main, whereas I remember the 200th, before the fall of the Soviet Union and the advent of Citizens United cemented Shitlord rule forever, as loud and buoyant and sparkly and loud and ubiquitous and, get this, relatively civil. To the best of my memory, I don't remember federal agents brazenly and proudly snatching people off the street or Gerald Ford selling his own personal currency, but it was 50 years ago and my memory's edge has dulled a bit. I hadn't read Zinn's *People's History of the United States* (I did when it first came out four years later and sealed my deal) but I already had flipped on this country. Most people then thought I was nuts and wished I'd shut up, many more more people now agree with me and wish I'd shut up. Swans?

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BUT IT SAYS NOTHING

Clark Coolidge

But it says nothing. And one is as quiet

as if to say nothing moves me. Then

there is the chair. And one speaks of

the chair sitting at the table.

Scraping against surfaces, opening the mouth.

The object is a piece of thing before. One

shifts in a chair and opens the talk.

And the time it says nothing one moves.

The table is too long as the wall. Not

a thing but it stays and one opens

as a mouth will begin. Speaking of

the table, nothing but to avoid that of

the wall. One could return over and over

to the chair, the wall one is sitting at.

Least ways it says nothing. And the

thing is, it stays still before

speaking of. The object of nothing, even

speech.