Plastered with Tattered Flags of Useless Currency

A week from the moment I type this it will be our first full day on Mount Desert Island and we're waiting for our second sunset at Seal Cove. L will have kayaked and painted, I will have played thirty-six holes at Habana Disc Course in Trenton. I wonder where we hiked earlier in the day and know we stopped at the Hippie Organic Farmstore on Beech Hill Road in Somesville and beets were or will be roasted

The Michigan trip just weeks ago, the first since the shitty boss retired, the first since the best cat died, unlike and better than any vacation I can remember with a new absence of anxiety about what shittiness awaits me from the shitty boss when I get back and constant worry the catsitters can't send me daily timestamped photo proof of Napoleon's continued existence. This the second, and for two weeks, and it's L and my favorite time together, and she asked me if I want her to show me acrylics, opaque on grids instead of transparent, I'll try, I plan to have an supremely excellent time in these horrible days with the ironclad inevitably of shittiness we know can't be stopped, there's a reason all but two posts a year are tagged My Complicity 

Apparently more jeffhead flags in my future, laugh, I spent money yesterday on new tubes of primary colors, they say they are going to Maine with me (the new 1/2 inch flat watercolor brush says so too
When I recently mentioned often that the Dem geriatrics don't have a succession plan I must confess, I forgot the plan was this motherfucker
who named these four rightwing judges
A perfect metaphor for our country's future
Our entire civilization is structured around keeping us from realizing we can do this
Employment Figures				Class War: the board game
Finance caused the fall of Rome: on Graeber
Dysfunction: dereliction by design
Witness how much Democrats despise you and me, I mean, it IS in their job description and the hate is for real				FRESH HELL
Clarence Thomas' America
Maggie's blog's twelfth anniversary
Fight or flight: excellent essay on Krasznahorkai
Four miles from Fellsburg, the village my mother grew up in
Placing baby burrowing owls back in their burrow
Whatever happened to the satirical novel?
We are the black flies made screen porches required fuck your expense welts
{ feuilleton } 's weekly				This house is 300 yards from the house I grew up in
An excellent abecedarian
The English Understand Wool: serenditipity be wondrous, my first rereading of Dewitt's Samurai strong maybe for our two weeks in Maine starting next Saturday
The octopus dreams of crabs - the book we plan to listen to on the drive to Maine
The long hard road of being Van Gogh
At 11:11 PM EDT last night, in the middle of a terrific set, Zoe played one of my five favorite songs ever and one of the five most often posted songs on this shitty blog

END OF DAYS ADVICE FROM AN EX-ZOMBIE

Michael Derrick Hudson

To think I used to be so good at going to pieces

gobbling my way through the cops

and spooking what’s left of the girls. How’d I

get so far, sloughing off one knuckle at a time,

jerking my mossy pelt along

ruined streets? Those insistent, dreadful thuds

when we stacked our futile selves

against locked doors. Our mumbles and groans!

Such hungry nights! Staggering through the grit

of looted malls, plastered with tattered

flags of useless currency, I’d slobbered all over

the busted glass and merchandise of America ...

But first you’ll have to figure out those qualities

separating what’s being alive from

who’s already dead. Most of you will flunk that.

Next learn how to want one thing over and over,

night after night. Most of you

are good at that. Don’t get tired. Don’t cough

into your leftovers. Don’t think. Always stand

by your hobgoblin buddies. Clutch

at whatever’s there. Learn to sniff out sundowns.

the underneath livid reaching part

I have started with ink  pen chalk watercolors tablet again but need find my eyes and hands again, above self-portrait from 2019, I woke this morning feeling like that, I have Dr Sevrin ears
SOME OF US HAVE YODELED ABOUT THIS FOR MOTHERFUCKING DECADES AND WERE TOLD WE WERE NUTS AND TO SHUT UP AND BE CIVIL!
FASCISTS IN OUR MIDST
SOME OF US HAVE YODELED ABOUT THIS FOR MOTHERFUCKING DECADES AND WERE TOLD WE WERE NUTS AND TO SHUT UP AND BE CIVIL!
Motherfucking SCOTUS christers are LIARS
Thread: consequences of the end of Roe
ABORTION: up the slippery slope
Criminalization of pregnancy
Biden has been fighting against legal abortions his whole fucking career, people, and is almost certainly personally delighted by the Dobbs decision, dumdum
SHEEYIT, WE ARE STILL BEING TOLD NOT ONLY ARE WE NUTS BUT IT'S OUR FAULT IT HAPPENED, SHUT THE FUCK UP AND BE CIVIL
Republicans are definitely going to set up a robust social safety net now
Judith Butler on SCOTUS and Thomas
Gullibility in an age of scams
Shitlordiness in Shitlordistan
Some stupid motherfuckers here, laugh
Even the magamegaphones wouldn't run with the Rudy's been assaulted false flag attempt
DeSantis and the Rise of Incoherent Cracker Libertarianism
DANGEROUS AS THE PLAGUE!
Capitalizing on Roe versus Wade
Inflation		Hibernation		Useless		Newsbits
ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS, ALWAYS
Five illnesses spreading in a hotter world
How do you define an "invasive species?"
Maggie's weekly				History won't judge
Good god, I can't publish this
Having trouble finding a way to *stay*

BLUES FOR ALICE

Clark Coolidge

When you get in on a try you never learn it back

umpteen times the tenth part of a featured world

in black and in back it’s roses and fostered nail

bite rhyme sling slang, a song that teaches without

travail of the tale, the one you longing live

and singing burn

 

It’s insane to remain a trope, of a rinsing out

or a ringing whatever, it’s those bells that . . .

and other riskier small day and fain would be

of the soap a sky dares

 

                                               but we remand,

that we a clasp of the silence you and I, all of

tiny sphering rates back, I say to told wall, back

and back and leave my edge, and add an L

 

Night is so enclosed we’ll never turn its page

its eye, can be mine will be yours, to see all the people

the underneath livid reaching part and past of the lying buildings

the overreacher stops and starts, at in his head, in

in her rhythm

that knowledge is past all of us, so we flare and tap

and top it right up, constant engage and flap in on

keeping pace, our whelming rift, and soil and gleam

and give back the voice, like those eary dead

 

Step down off our whelm lessons and shortly fired

enter the bristle strum of Corrosion Kingdom

where the last comes by first ever ring, every

race through that tunnel of sun drop and pencil

in the margins of a flare, of higher wish than dare,

the stroked calmings of a line will spin and chime

in blue quicks of a dream blues, the chores

of those whispering gone crenulations

 

To meet a care is to dial redeem

and we limp in the time sound balms

so out of kilter is my name in the sun, and I win

in the moon and you sing in that other spelling of win

the way a blue is never singular

The Smallest Color of the Smallest Day

A box about you & me and crackers & christers and shitlords

We drive to Jackson Michigan on Sunday to see our daughter, regular fat-ass Monday post probably postponed, I have no plans to post and no plans to not post while there, I do plan to play new disc golf courses while L and C paint together

Yesterday one year since I last did anything with ink, ruler, tablet, and watercolor, this the last Flag as self portrait, ink, ruler, tablet, and watercolor sitting untouched in a shoebox, the fuck is wrong with me, I got Dr Sevrin ears

Martial masculinity and authoritarian populism
US *Intelligence* says its *intelligence* is bullshit
US officials admit they are literally lying
The Warfare State's infinitely mendacious echo chamber
Shitlordism: dividing-up the American pie
How Facebook and weapons industry profit from war in Ukraine
Out to lunch			JERK		Denial Futures
How to unionize at Amazon
Reminder: shitlords hired top tier motherfucking professional Democrats to try and kill the union
On the state of the Left in 2022
Shitlords call this amongst themselves a loss-leader
Sit back and watch Europe commit suicide
Laugh, re: box about you & me and crackers & christers and shitlords discovering the wordpress slide makes me laugh as does the poem, how to submit it even if I knew where and who I wanted to reject it
It's been too long since I gave you Zoviet France

CALMLY WE WALK THROUGH THIS APRIL'S DAY

Delmore Schwartz

Calmly we walk through this April’s day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,  
In the park sit pauper and rentier,   
The screaming children, the motor-car   
Fugitive about us, running away,   
Between the worker and the millionaire  
Number provides all distances,   
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,   
Many great dears are taken away,   
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn ...)   
Besides the photo and the memory?
(... that time is the fire in which we burn.)

(This is the school in which we learn ...)   

What is the self amid this blaze?

What am I now that I was then

Which I shall suffer and act again,

The theodicy I wrote in my high school days   

Restored all life from infancy,

The children shouting are bright as they run   

(This is the school in which they learn ...)   

Ravished entirely in their passing play!

(... that time is the fire in which they burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!

Where is my father and Eleanor?

Not where are they now, dead seven years,   

But what they were then?

                                     No more? No more?

From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,   

Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume

Not where they are now (where are they now?)   

But what they were then, both beautiful;

Each minute bursts in the burning room,   

The great globe reels in the solar fire,   

Spinning the trivial and unique away.

(How all things flash! How all things flare!)   

What am I now that I was then?   

May memory restore again and again   

The smallest color of the smallest day:   

Time is the school in which we learn,   

Time is the fire in which we burn.

War Worm Squirms in the Ear

Alternative jeffhead appropriate for today's mood
Cacopolis Now			America: a Prophecy			Class: today's reminder Duh
View from the Warehouse Floor: murder, defeat, and...
Every election is stolen even if only my vote counts
I’ve lived in a democracy of three the one not the two
I’ve never contested an election (while exercising
my right to moan about results unto perpetuity
unless concessions I have a point(s) are granted)
much less fired bombed their holiest temple
while forcibly evicting families from ancestral homes
Who would I disappear if I had a Tantalus Field?
Not you, elephant poachers, maybe, their
white brown yellow any gendered shitlord patrons posing over the kill
Rhinoceros Mutilator Facilitator Versus Trophy Hunting Sadist Shitlord: Would Jeff? If yes, which first?Your vote counts!
How can I steal this election except by not voting?
Portrait of the United States as a developing country
Who counts as a victim?				Poisoning the planet
#1214	Yes, yesterday was Stanley Elkins birthday

The traditional BLCKDGRD Holy Day Elkin birthday post, 2021 edition (now updated in 2019 by link to another Elkin birthday post, h/t Dan)

Stanley Elkin, born 91 years ago yesterday, one of my Deserted Island Five even though my Deserted Island Five (any island, any time) has dozens and simultaneously none.

Two excerpts I always use for his birthday, read then out loud, please, do it for you. The first captures one of Elkins's major themes, the second is simply the most beautiful, heartbreaking, paragraph, as stand alone but especially within the context of the novel, I've ever read:

Ben, everything there is is against your being here! Think of get-togethers, family stuff, golden anniversaries in rented halls, fire regulation celebrated more in the breach than the observance, the baked Alaska up in flames, everybody wiped out - all the cousins in from coasts, wiped out. Rare, yes - who says not - certainly rare, but it could happen, has happened. And once is enough if you've been invited. All the people picked off by plagues and folks eaten by earthquakes and drowned in the tidal waves, all the people already dead that you might have been or who might have begat the girl who married the guy who fathered the fellow who might have been your ancestor - all the showers of sperm that dried on his Kleenex or spilled on his sheets or fell on the ground or dirtied his hands when he jerked off or came in his p.j.'s or no, maybe he was actually screwing and the spermatozoon had your number written on it and it was lost at sea because that's what happens, you see - there's low motility and torn tails - that's what happens to all but a handful out of all the googols and gallons of come, more sperm finally than even the grains of sand I was talking about, more even than the degrees. Well - am I making the picture for you? Am I connecting the dots? Ben, Ben, Nick the Greek wouldn't lay a fart against a trillion bucks that you'd ever make it to this planet!

- The Franchiser

And it was wondrous in the negligible humidity how they gawked across the perfect air, how, stunned by the helices and all the parabolas of grace, they gasped, they sighed, these short-timers who even at their age could not buy insurance at any price, not even if the premiums were paid in the rare rich elements, in pearls clustered as grapes, in buckets of bullion, in trellises of diamonds, how, glad to be alive, they stared at each other and caught their breath.

 - Magic Kingdom

SOME PEOPLE LOVE WAR LIKE A SONG

Rochelle Hurt

War as social formula. War spread through word of warmouth. Then it’s war on repeat: war one more time. War, come and hit me. War as pop litany. War under copyright. Room for war sampling. Everyone loves that familiar warbeat: I know all the words to this war. War worm squirms in the ear, infectious. Can you name that tune—anything but fear. It’s just a war, baby. A very very good war. This war’s off the charts. Check Google: What’s my war rating? Bad news: war’s played out. Now war’s a bore. So take a commercial break, then back to more.

dear editor, here is a picture of me. do you like the poem written on my inner thigh? loveslut

• Gentle now, don't add to heartache
• Escaped trees of Lynchburg Virginia
• I am a ragingmess (with Dr Servin ears)

• Our shitlords
• Erasing history for Biden!
• Even American racism is exceptional
• Vector-in-Chief
• Did Sanders run the most clueless modern campaign?
• Moco morons social gathering to watch US government spend millions on militaristic propaganda instead of rent support and food and then propaganda fails to show up is fine fucking metaphor abounding 
• Corporate media deny their own existence
• Maggie's weekly links
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links
• The Great Partridge - Rundgren War that is Skylarking (h/t Hamster), my least favorite XTC album (because Rundgren won the war)

INFLAMMATORY ESSAYS

Jane Sprague

dear editor,

here is my pome. read it and publish it in your journal which I do not read and cant afford to read but I need to get my poems in print and I would read mine if you printed it. in your journal

dear editor,

I loved the anonymous rejection letter when you know me by e-mail by name. loved that. thanks. hope it didn't put you out any paper any ink.

love,
jane

dear editor,
here is my poem. I think your journal sucks but I am sending you my poem anyway.

thanks
jane

dear editor,

here is my poem print it or die

dear editor

here is some anthrax. oh, sorry, I mean, that's the title of my poem. ha!

allthebest
jane

dear editor

here is a sample of my work. I call it poems. call it what you wish. I like your journal. I'd like it even more if I was in it.

jane

dear editor,

read me and weep.

dear editor,

I'm sending you love and a poem. no one else wants either, but I thought you might.

dear editor,

love and love and maybe a slight bit of menace.
here's a sonnet for your unkind and wisecracking editorial non-consideration.

paz,
jane

dear editor,

here is some of my blood.
print it.

jane

dear editor,
PS: I am hep C neg.

love,
jane

dear editor,

send me one of YOUR pomes, why doncha?

jane

dear editor,

here is money. print me.

jane

dear editor.

here is a picture of me.
do you like the poem written on my inner thigh?

loveslut

dear editor,

my doctor says I have to stop sending you poems. here is a collection of titles to poems.

dear editor,

now I'm writing lyric essays. here ya go-

love,
jane

dear anonymous unnamed editor,

what's the price of heroin in shanghai? one of my poems!
ha!

jane

dear editor,

I'm just writing to say, hi, hello, how are you? haven't heard from you in forever, how's your health?

Jane

dear editor,

when you finish reading this letter it will unfurl into thousands of shards of invisible glass eisinglass, smoke, mission impossible acrid scented secret PUBLISH MY FUCKING POEM screams. That will start happening right about... now-

love!
jane

Dear E.,

Just sending love this time. Namaste, man.

Jane

Dear E.,

Fuck it, I'm switching to fiction.
Love,
Jane
PS: How ARE you????
Doublelove, Jane