Sunday night Musk Sieg Heils, Monday at noon Trump inaugurated, between noon and one Monday Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Motherfucking Obama all texted me telling me to keep the faith, keep hope alive, give them my money, I doubt any of them will read my *Fuck - and this is the important part - YOU!* replies before I told the bot STOP
So one more, I can't say last, grid of rage aimed specifically at motherfucking professional Democrats and their shitlib zealots all of whom would prefer Trump to anyone to motherfucking Obama's left. As for regular grids viz Trump's daily farting unto totalitarianism I don't know, I screamed at the fuckers whose one purported job was to prevent this who instead did their real jobs and facilitated his return in exchange for keeping their power and position. They hate you far more than they hate the crackeriest christeriest magassholes. Hate you. Have a theme song, I forget which number
"No one worked harder to get Trump elected more than the Democrats. They refused to back down from their genocide, they refused to remove Biden until it became a public embarrassment; they refused a democratic process for picking the replacement, instead choosing a candidate who had nothing to show & was deeply unpopular. They concocted a fake fervor around her, offered nothing to their base except demonization & isolation. Great work, as always"
"What a choice; a defining photo for the new gilded age. An inauguration that makes clearer than ever the triumph of oligarchy - one that isn’t incidental but intrinsic to the politics and policies that we’re seeing set out"
"Legacy media outlets ignoring the Trump/Melania crypto scams, which at any other time w/any other incoming Admin would be one of the biggest scandals in political history, shows how lost & unprepared they are for what is about to happen. They’re covering this like a reality show"
"Western billionaires want to control our data. They also want to control the information we consume about looming threats to our health. Until then, they’ll join Chuck Schumer in wringing their hands, acting as if they didn’t engineer the very crisis from which they now seek salvation.
CNN, while pointing out all the tech billionaires and CEOs present at Trump's inauguration just glosses over the millions said billionaires and CEOs funneled to Trump and instead treat it as a branding and aesthetics exercise"
Here the readers gather to watch the books die. They die suddenly, as if
thrown from an airplane, or from spontaneous cardiac arrest. They live,
and then suddenly they die, and the reader who watches this is at the
moment of the books' death bombarded with images documented through the
smiling lipstick face of a journalist who has shown up to report on the
death of the books. The milk was poisoned and forty-two babies died, she
laughs, as she fondles the ashes of the dead books. And the death of
forty-two babies is equal in value to the death of this book which is
equal in value to the ninety-year old woman who shot herself while the
sheriff waited at her door with an eviction notice which is equal in
value to the collapsing of the global economy which is equal to the
military in country XYZ seizing the land of the semi-nomadic hunters and
cultivators of crops who have lived in the local rain forest for
thousands of years. The reader opens a dead book and finds an infinite
amount of burnt ash between the bindings, and when the ash blows in the
wind the lipstick says that every death in the world is equal to every
other death in the world which is equal to every birth in the world
which is equal to every act of dismemberment which is equal to the death
of a jungle which is equal to the collapse of the global economy; and
hey look there’s another lady falling out of a window; she looks about
equal to the poet hurled out of his country for words he wrote but which
did not belong to him and whose death is about equal to the girl who
was shot on the bus on her way to school this morning which is just
about the same as the bearded man whose head was shoved into a sac while
water was dumped over it and he died for an instant and came back to
life and talked and talked and that’s about equal to the steroid
illegally injected into the arm of a beautiful man who makes forty
million dollars a year for injecting his arms with steroids so he can
more skillfully wave a wooden stick at a ball, and in the ash we see the
truest democracy there ever was: hey look it’s a little baby found in a
dumpster how equal you are says the smiling lipstick to the civilized
nation whose citizens walk the flooded streets looking for their homes,
and in the ashes of the dead book the dead streets are equal to the
eating disorders of movie stars which are equal to the dead soldiers who
are equal to the homeruns which are equal to the bomb dropped by
country ABC over weddings in the village of country XYZ which is equal
to the earth swallowing up and devouring all of its foreigners which is
just about equal to the decline in literacy in the most educated nation
in the planet. There is no end to this book. There are no paragraph
breaks to interrupt the smiling lipstick that goes on and on in one
string of ashy words about how the declaration of peace is equal to the
resumption of war and how the bodies that fall are equal to the birds
that ascend and how the bomb in the Eiffel Tower is equal to the rising
cost of natural gas, and the murmurs of the voices in the mud are equal
to the murmurs of the expensive suits falling out of buildings and these
are equal to the silence that kills with one breath and coddles life
with another.
There are a number of theories for the origin of Hell's name. The first is that a pair of German travelers stepped out of a stagecoach one sunny afternoon in the 1830s, and one said to the other, "So schön hell!" (translated as, "So beautifully bright!") Their comments were overheard by some locals and the name stuck.[7] The second theory is tied to the "hell-like" conditions encountered by early explorers including mosquitos, thick forest cover, and extensive wetlands.[7] The third is that George’s habit of paying the local farmers for their grain with home distilled whiskey led many wives to comment “He’s gone to Hell again” when questioned about their husband’s whereabouts during harvest time.[9] A fourth is that soon after Michigan gained statehood, George Reeves was asked what he thought the town he helped settle should be called and replied "I don't care. You can name it Hell for all I care." The name became official on October 13, 1841.
I didn't intentionally avoid the internet and documenting each day's clusterfuck news here or in tablet while in Michigan and didn't notice I hadn't written in tablet for four days until we were home. No subsequent epiphany graced me: I've been less here and more elsewhere of late anyway, spending more time on canvases than in tablets. The above says what I want to say better than my typing it could at this point in time though I type it here and in grid below anyway.
My daughter teaches high school on the edge of Blue Michigan so she gets kids from blue and red homes, she tells me the majority of the kids that confide in her, both kids from blue homes and kids from red homes, have no intention of voting this year if they will be eighteen in November and no intention of voting ever. Many have no plans for college or trade school or self-teaching themselves coding or some other marketable skill and they expect to work grunt jobs until forced into retirement when they will take late evening shifts at minimum wage at the local Krogers to survive their safety-net-less lives in the 2060s, not that they think they will ever see the 2060s: most think they will be destroyed from within by their coping habits if not killed first in our shitlords' wars of self-interest long before then, and neither C or me think they're wrong. (And it's not just high school kids in Michigan - I hire and supervise college undergraduates, many of them as aspirationally blah as my daughter's students.) (And it's not just the kids - the majority of teachers in my daughter's age-frame adamantly say to almost a man and woman they will never have children - it will be 2088 when a child born today is my age, what freaking world if the world still here?)
Walter Becker born seventy-four years ago yesterday. I love Steely Dan, unfollow if you must
Just received my first hate comment in years, presumably a zionist asking why I don't care about ongoing genocides in other places like I care about the Zionist genocide of Palestinians, o! he/she/they knows, I'm an anti-semitic piece of shit and he/she/they hopes I go blind, so probably an occasional reader if not a regular unless the person wishes blindness on everyone he/she/they hates
Free speech is posting on your own private space *BLCKDGRD is an anti-semitic piece of shit that I hope goes blind,* free speech was not violated when I deleted the comment unpublished
"It's grimly amusing how liberals who've spent the past 2 years cheering for the Azov battalion, the past 3 months supporting the IOF, the past few weeks calling for harsher border policy, and are now sobbing over Navalny think they have the moral authority to lecture us on Nazis"
THE SHITLORDS WHO OWN DONALD TRUMP AND REPUBLICANS AND JOE BIDEN AND DEMOCRATS, I AM TELLING YOU THREE TIMES, ARE REPROGRAMMING EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE FOR HEGEMONY FOREVER OR HELL FOR ANYONE AND EVERYONE NOT LIVING IN A LUXURY BOMB-SHELTER AND THEY SHIT IN THE WATER YOU DRINK ALL THE FUCKING TIME, THEY WILL DESTROY THE WORLD BEFORE THEY GIVE UP THAT PRIVILEGE
Any major dude will tell you *Pretzel Logic* was released 50 years ago yesterday
POEM #1022
Daniel Borzutzky
There is not much excess and what there is is barely perceptible the blank ones disappear from our vision no one notices until there is a dramatic decrease in surplus value
the war is born and the blank ones disappear again but really their disappearance is subjective some see no one while others see everyone
for some the extermination of the cancer is inseparable from the decreation of the city others associate the decreation with an unstoppable flow of leakage while others associate the decreation with falling rates of profit and the barely perceptible appearance of the human body
out of the dead refugee sprouts a breathing poem
out of the dead soldier sprouts a breathing poem
out of the dead city sprouts a breathing poem
but when the city disappears so do the poems
and when the poems disappear the dead are assassinated
picture a heart covered in dust and picture a poem sprouting out of it
picture a heart covered in dust and picture a child chasing it
picture a bullet that kills a child and picture the soldier who tosses the child into the sea
the soldier kisses the earth and says it’s not my fault the people are being born and dying
the pastor calls out the names of the children to the congregants
Today marks thirty-four years at Hilltop, the same job for more than half my life (and the rest of my life, probably), lordy, no one would have predicted this for twenty-five year old me. Two free degrees and my share of the mortgage and utilities and food and raising a daughter. The first link below Jeff Sisyphus covers what I had planned to type here better than I had yet formatted, my old judo matches with my complicity and the ever-worsening clusterfuck that has yet to directly affect me and mine (beyond my 401K's 2022 plunge (and why I will be working at Hilltop the remainder of my capable days). Here is a portrait of me as cat named K'mpec, he's leader of the Klingon High Council. Full disclosure: I've added black watercolor to my palette of only primary colors, forgive me. The new department head starts September 5, he can't be worse than Bookkeeper, can he? K'mpec was poisoned (in the blood wine), my mithridatism poisons my mitridatism, not as fun as it should be
Don’t make the world worse by suffering when your suffering doesn’t help
Here the readers gather to watch the books die. They die suddenly, as if
thrown from an airplane, or from spontaneous cardiac arrest. They live,
and then suddenly they die, and the reader who watches this is at the
moment of the books' death bombarded with images documented through the
smiling lipstick face of a journalist who has shown up to report on the
death of the books. The milk was poisoned and forty-two babies died, she
laughs, as she fondles the ashes of the dead books. And the death of
forty-two babies is equal in value to the death of this book which is
equal in value to the ninety-year old woman who shot herself while the
sheriff waited at her door with an eviction notice which is equal in
value to the collapsing of the global economy which is equal to the
military in country XYZ seizing the land of the semi-nomadic hunters and
cultivators of crops who have lived in the local rain forest for
thousands of years. The reader opens a dead book and finds an infinite
amount of burnt ash between the bindings, and when the ash blows in the
wind the lipstick says that every death in the world is equal to every
other death in the world which is equal to every birth in the world
which is equal to every act of dismemberment which is equal to the death
of a jungle which is equal to the collapse of the global economy; and
hey look there’s another lady falling out of a window; she looks about
equal to the poet hurled out of his country for words he wrote but which
did not belong to him and whose death is about equal to the girl who
was shot on the bus on her way to school this morning which is just
about the same as the bearded man whose head was shoved into a sac while
water was dumped over it and he died for an instant and came back to
life and talked and talked and that’s about equal to the steroid
illegally injected into the arm of a beautiful man who makes forty
million dollars a year for injecting his arms with steroids so he can
more skillfully wave a wooden stick at a ball, and in the ash we see the
truest democracy there ever was: hey look it’s a little baby found in a
dumpster how equal you are says the smiling lipstick to the civilized
nation whose citizens walk the flooded streets looking for their homes,
and in the ashes of the dead book the dead streets are equal to the
eating disorders of movie stars which are equal to the dead soldiers who
are equal to the homeruns which are equal to the bomb dropped by
country ABC over weddings in the village of country XYZ which is equal
to the earth swallowing up and devouring all of its foreigners which is
just about equal to the decline in literacy in the most educated nation
in the planet. There is no end to this book. There are no paragraph
breaks to interrupt the smiling lipstick that goes on and on in one
string of ashy words about how the declaration of peace is equal to the
resumption of war and how the bodies that fall are equal to the birds
that ascend and how the bomb in the Eiffel Tower is equal to the rising
cost of natural gas, and the murmurs of the voices in the mud are equal
to the murmurs of the expensive suits falling out of buildings and these
are equal to the silence that kills with one breath and coddles life
with another.
Last post until Michigan probably, driving Saturday, we'll be housed in Washtenaw County, not Jackson, though I'll be discing and hiking in Jackson, same car as in April, interested to see if I pick-up my Jackson County sheriff's car tail as before, laugh, probably can't resist wearing my mask into the same country store at least once, maybe twice, maybe three times
As I type this I am not taking new tablet, triangular architects ruler, and (update: haiku rage machine)
Digibud Brad sent notice of new Borzutzky collection, no release date mentioned in press release, the two poems in this post from 2020 presumably will be in the collection of the same title of the poems (poem at bottom from 2014)
I will return from Michigan with another one of these by an artist whose name the store manager who sells them can't remember, our reputation as the crazy cat people with far too much weirdass garden statuary needs upkeeping
THE MURMURING GRIEF OF THE AMERICAS (You are on the ground...)
Daniel Borzutzky
You are on the ground, wrapped in a ratty blanket at the edge of the
cage. The interpreter wedges her way into the corner. She sits on her
knees, brings her head to your mouth so she can hear the whispers that
barely come:
I don’t know where I am. I don’t know who my parents paid for me to get here.
She slides your hat off so the cameras can see you more clearly. You
refuse to open your eyes. It is what you have been instructed to do. But
the director is unhappy: with the blocking, the angles, the shadows. He
asks the interpreter to tell you to look into the camera as the hat is
removed from your head.
The assistants give your wrapped-up body a few rolls. They twist you
into the proper position, at which point a doctor asks you to open your
mouth, to say ahhh while you look into the camera.
This moment here, with your mouth open and the doctor looking into
it, is where the scene is supposed to turn. Something transcendent is
supposed to happen. But the director can’t figure out how to realize his
vision. He yells cut, then confers with his colleagues about what
should flow out of your mouth.
Their opinions differ. One suggests a butterfly. Another suggests a
snake. Another a stream of the most beautiful words spoken first in a
foreign language then translated by a child with a sweet voice, an
adorable accent that perfectly articulates how your body and mouth
convert the murmuring grief of the Americas into a currency of empathy,
accumulation, and massacre.
The crew meets for several more minutes to discuss what should come out of your mouth after the doctor asks you to say ahhh.
But the director pauses as soon as the cameras start to roll. He is
unhappy about something. There should not be a sunset in the background.
There should not be flowers in the foreground.
The world will be dark until we douse his body with light.
THE MURMURING GRIEF OF THE AMERICAS (there are children crossing the river)
Daniel Borzutzky
there are children crossing the river some float on cardboard and some hold on to each other and some sing we are alivethere are neon lights above the riverthe camera crews stand on the banks and film the river in the right light they film the floating children in the right light they film the sky turning purple and pink as fluffy pollen dissolves in the warm air a tree with edible fruit is in the background droopy white flowers with long petals hang downwards and by the tree a brother and sister exhausted
don’t diethe director says to the childrenif
you die we won’t be able to make this film and if we don’t make this
film there will be no evidence that once you were alive and if there is
no evidence that once you were alive no one will know that we loved you
the children step out of the river and walk to a bridge and on the
bridge there is a sign that says welcome to the promised land but the sign is not meant for the childrenit is meant for the early Americans who are chasing the children the early Americans do not enter the scene to be documented they are there to hunt the children they try to trap the children on the bridge but they do not arrive in time they meet the children on the other side of the bridgewhere the camera records one of them saying welcome to the Promised Land you little wart hogs and there is gunshot and the children run off in different directionsthe camera doesn’t know who to follow one child is shot in the leg and the camera zooms in on his blood as the early Americans drag him away
the camera catches up with the children later that night when they set up camp on a spinach farm the director takes great pleasure in filming the older children as they care for the young ones they
feed them and bathe them and sing songs and play games with them like
Simon Says and Simon tells the children to stop speaking he tells the children to stop breathinghe tells the children to stop wanting he tells the children to stop thinking he tells the children to stop being themselves he tells the children to become someone else to become something else and the children say how do we do that and Simon says you listen to the earth at the right time it will tell you what to dobut he knows that the earth is a liar
After Simon puts the children to bed the camera lingers on his face as he weepsand he tells himself stop speaking and he tells himself stop breathingand he tells himself stop eating and he looks into the camera and says the pain in my mouth won’t stop the pain in my eyes won’t stop my tongue is burning my lips are burning my soul needs to rest he says your soul?stop breathing he tells himself I need to die again he says because when I die again I will become the river that runs between myself and myself I
will become the mountains that separate myself from myself and you will
deposit new meaning into my body as I become the story you’ve been
waiting for
But in the story you’ve been waiting for I will not be an I and you will not be a you and
for several minutes water will run toward me and it will be the river
of death and I will say no no it is not the river of death it cannot be
the river of death but by the time I get the words out of my mouth the
river of death will have emptied itself out and the river of death will
be gone and the past will not be the past and I won’t know what it means
to be dead
