Last Time I Fell in a Shower Room I Bled Like a Tumbril Dandy and the Hotel Longed to Be Rid of Me

Yes, motherfucking professional Democrats ratfucked and will continue ratfuck so this leftwingshit never fucking happens again, but blame Americans first, those who got theirs say go get yours you can't have any of mine

• I got Dr Sevrin ears
• Sanders. He will not be snuffed on October 1st with a 20 point lead
• a corpse walking beating him
• I've yodeled this on twaater: the coronavirus freakout hurt Sanders most, not a game-changer but not insignificant, in times of crisis humans seek out the shitlords they know
• More significant than Warren not endorsing him, Warren voters, fuck'em, each and every one of them, more fraud than she is and she's a motherfucking professional Democrat
• As ye sow, Joe shall reap
• Already setting you up to be blamed when Trump wins steals whatever the election
• Damn, my Robinhood is fucked
• Left behind: suicidal America
• Digital infantilism
• The trolls of academe
• Humans are morons
• of slimmer chances when washing hands
• Query letter (Jim, look at this, you've been here, I think)

VERTIGO

Les Murray

Last time I fell in a shower room

I bled like a tumbril dandy

and the hotel longed to be rid of me.

Taken to the town clinic, I

described how I tripped on a steel rim

and found my head in the wardrobe.

Scalp-sewn and knotted and flagged

I thanked the Frau Doktor and fled,

wishing the grab-bar of age might

be bolted to all civilization

and thinking of Rome’s eighth hill

heaped up out of broken amphorae.

    

When, anytime after sixty,

or anytime before, you stumble

over two stairs and club your forehead

on rake or hoe, bricks or fuel-drums,

that’s the time to call the purveyor

of steel pipe and indoor railings,

and soon you’ll be grasping up landings

having left your balance in the car

from which please God you’ll never

see the launchway of tires off a brink.

Later comes the sunny day when

street detail whitens blindly to mauve

   

and people hurry you, or wait, quiet.

I Trust the Spoor of Botch

• Today in things I can't write about here.
• The Petrified Forest.
• The best news you'll read today.
• Sheeyit, *I'm* not currently a criminal target either was my first response to a tweet where I saw news that Savior Mueller will not save us.
• Brahmin Left v Merchant Right.
• Take me to the garretts where the artists have died.
• Atlas of the Midday Fund.
• Hawthorne at his horniest. If they don't come now, Ed, they never will.
• The care and keeping of notebooks, which I can write about here but no one wants me to but me.
• Speaking of which, new at the other place.
• Colin Newman interview.
• An American Poem.
• On old New Order.

THE PRIVACY OF TYPEWRITERS

Les Murray

I am an old book troglodyte

one who composes on paper

and types up the result

as many times as need be.

  

The computer scares me,

its crashes and codes,

its links with spies and gunshot,

its text that looks pre-published

  

and perhaps has been.

I don’t know who is reading

what I write on a carriage

that doesn’t move or ding.

   

I trust the spoor of botch,

whiteouts where thought deepened,

wise freedom from Spell Check,

sheets to sell the National Library.

  

I fear the lore

of that baleful misstruck key

that fills a whiskered screen

with a writhe of child pornography

   

and the doors smashing in

and the cops handcuffing me

to a gristlier video culture
coralline in an ever colder sea. 

In Massed Farting Assurance We Spasm and Scream

I hear a Spoon song on the radio and think: why the fuck don't I love Spoon? I should LOVE Spoon, it's smart tight pop, I love smart tight pop, I love this song right now. The song ends. I don't think about Spoon until next time I hear a Spoon song on the radio, wonder, why the fuck don't I love Spoon?

• So have five.
• Postcard from dystopia.
• The dystopia next door.
• Life in the Griftocene.
• I am telling you three times: Everybody who's anybody in professional politics is delighted with the Trump presidency.
• Grifters. 
• The project to make grifter an honorable goal for everyone leads to....
• Life in the Assholocene: Everybody who's anybody in professional politics knows how to appeal to the asshole in every little.
• Spend your Kindness well, and locally.
• The ill he had and theodicy.

 

• That? Is a great fucking pop song.
• I should love Spoon. As in own some and put some on now and then.
• The Fugs - exorcism of the White House.
• No, poetry does not defeat politics.
• Frances' latest article in Indian Country Today.
• Art and Capitalism: the problem won't go away.
• I love some of Spoon's songs but never once, in all the years, air-guitared one.
• His life with New Order. 
• Of course I have a theory and of course the theory involves Guided by Voices/Pollard: Pollard has one song he reworks over and over, and fandom consisting primarily of pride in insider-knowledge of the subtle differences between versions of the same song, and while I really really really really like Britt Daniel's one song, I don't love it enough (I don't know why, so the question's not answered) to devoutly discover the difference of every version.

LES MURRAY