My Poem Would Eat Nothing. I Tried Giving It Water But It Said No

I've received two emails and one comment (which I accidentally deleted - my sincere apologies, I meant to approve it) in the last two weeks or so alerting me that this shitty blog is now fuck-all shitty to read on cellphones, and contrary to one opinion I actually DO give a flying fuck about this if for no other reason than why would I not want people to read this shitty blog? I was going to post this Sparklehorse song but can't because motherfucking youtube doesn't motherfucking permit posting a motherfucking song with fucked-up in the title, my motherfucking reaction:



It will never stop, the enshittification of everything. I can't confirm the fuck-all shittiness of reading this on cellphones since (a) I hated the internet on my cellphone when my cellphone could actually access the internet and (b) my cellphone currently can't access the internet because I don't know the fuck why and I don't care the fuck why and I'll be damned if I go buy a new phone to read the internet on the phone, which I hate. I have not changed any settings on this blog in literally at least ten years or more, so while I accept the blame for any and all fuck-ups here this particular fuck-up happened without my attempting to change something and fucking it up and in any case if I DID fuck something up I have no fucking idea how I did or how to fix (guggle's AI code recently installed along with no doubt far more sophisticated spyware, not just me, you too) it. This seems to be happening across every motherfucking spectrum of my life, every motherfucking spectrum but two. Have I told you 345,823,929 times we are being reprogrammed? Strangest fucking days of my life. Where's my kind ghost? Hear, more Sparklehouse, this is one of dozens of my favorite five songs ever:

We can’t vote our way out of this mess
The entire Democratic Party summed-up in one headline
Trump Cuts $2 Billion in Federal Funding for Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services
Secret ICE Programs Revealed
Dems Are Begging Their Own to Drop ‘Abolish ICE’
Right-Wing Influencers Have Flooded Minneapolis
"Are we allowed to say mean things about that racist piece of shit Dilbert guy now that he died? Just want to be clear on the rules"
Dingbat Imperialism, the Lowest Stage of Capitalism
The Black Book of Capitalism				"Young people on Earth will witness horrors beyond what we are willing to imagine"
The Billionaires and the November Election
Mere anarchy			Sick in a company town
Americans Are Irredeemable					Clarksburg sucks
Cows Lying Down			Wikipedia and the novel
BANDCAMP Bans AI Music					Listen to this
Listen to this			Anarchist Hymn			Larry Levis
Bobby Weir's Cosmic Touch					New SUNN O)))
Tuesday past was Morton Feldman's centenary

THE POEM YOU ASKED FOR

Larry Levis

My poem would eat nothing.
I tried giving it water
but it said no,
 
worrying me.
Day after day,
I held it up to the light,
 
turning it over,
but it only pressed its lips
more tightly together.
 
It grew sullen, like a toad
through with being teased.
I offered it money,
 
my clothes, my car with a full tank.
But the poem stared at the floor.
Finally I cupped it in
 
my hands, and carried it gently
out into the soft air, into the
evening traffic, wondering how
 
to end things between us.
For now it had begun breathing,
putting on more and
 
more hard rings of flesh.
And the poem demanded the food,
it drank up all the water,
 
beat me and took my money,
tore the faded clothes
off my back,
 
said Shit,
and walked slowly away,
slicking its hair down.
 
Said it was going
over to your place.


Anonymous submission.

Exchanging Skin for Bark, Bark for Scales, Scales for Hollow Bones of a Bird

Magachoads chant *Genocide Joe, Genocide Joe* at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania this past weekend and they are not wrong. You can support Israel blindly and attack Biden for blindly supporting Israel. Reminder: those of us who do not support Israel blindly and attack Biden for blindly supporting Israel are the evil fucks destroying America and ushering in World War 3


Hinkiest war ever (except for those killed, maimed, orphaned, and starved, etc)...

Decision from an Idiot: the wordpress will remain main hexjeff platform, the hexjeff blooger sent to minors, archive when dope remembers. Idiot promises himself he will learn how to widen the center column of the wordpress hexjeff platform though doesn't promise you he will. Hey, make sure you click the link in grid to understand why Linda Thompson called her new album *Proxy Music.* 

Meanwhile, one of my favorite novelists and essayists now writing neither novels or essays but has taken up painting and is only posting drawings and paintings so I sympathize with yinz tolerating me, I'm happy he's happy

Decision from an Idiot: this Sparklehorse song may already be one of this blog's Theme Songs, I don't remember, I may have wanted to already but didn't because of the youtube black blockage before, *I Fucked It Up* it's called, and I certainly don't remember what number it already was and if it wasn't yet what number it will be and don't know how many Theme Songs there are now and certainly couldn't name them all much less get them in the correct order. Bleggalgaze scratched. Regulars know what abounds and in what condition

What we are witnessing is moral suicide
The Exchange Rate On Palestinian Life
The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth
Israeli mobs set homes, cars ablaze in West Bank pogrom
Israel and US deliberately gutting international law in Gaza
The moral truth of Israel’s war against Gaza is not difficult to grasp
Every bomb dropped is added to a bill we pay
A historical take on defunding the UNRWA
Killing Humanitarian Workers as a Strategy: Israel’s Endgame in Gaza
"You violate a mountain of UN resolutions, condemn the UN at every turn, bomb UN schools & shelters, murder UN employees, & then you demand a UN meeting over another country responding to your bombing of their consulate"
Where is America's "rules-based order" now?
It is SO totally different and worse when Trump does this, shitlibs tell me
Alabama harvested the organs of inmates without consent, families say
The Persistence of Global Capitalism’s Long Depression
Young People Finally Starting to Recognize the Super Rich and Not Oldsters Are the Problem
A Class Analysis of the Trump-Biden Rerun
Did Trump break the kayfabe of his idiot christer faithful?
How should socialists think about political tradition?
The Flooding Will Come No Matter What
Never say bipartisanship never happens in America
Louisiana High Court: Priests Have a “Property Right” Not to Be Sued For Sexual Abuse
"Virtually all commentary on the topic has come to the same conclusion: that for better or worse, Sweeney’s breasts are a locus for the power struggle between patriarchy and the feminists who want to smash it"
Maggie's weekly				Why you are lost
Take a drive over the Key Bridge in this poignant short student film from 1987
"impossible to calculate the bullshit quotient of this image"
TICK RESEARCHER’S TIPS FOR STAYING SAFE OUTDOORS
The therapist who hated me					2024 Aprilgah
Avedon Carol's occasional links
{ feuilleton }'s			How to make a map of smell
Whales and other aliens				TIME EXPLAINED
Hand and Mind: Rothko and appearance versus the essence of appearance
50 ways to end a poem				Why you should have a cat
What can fiction tell us about the apocalypse?
Louise Bourgeois on how to peel a tangerine artistically
The Rejection Plot				The Tale of a Wall
Classical music is in crisis?						◀	I now find classical music, even those composers I once loved - Bartok, for instance - completley uninteresting and unlistenable, fuck me
What’s Next for Music Criticism?
Proxy Music: Linda Thompson's new album
"We were once paid $50 to quit": new wave heroes Devo on boos, Bowie and retiring after 50 years
Eight questions for Esther Kinsky
The Bohman Brothers playing live tonight on Daniel's show!

TODAY, MY HOPE IS VERTICAL

Jane Hirshfield

Today, my hope is vertical.
Tomorrow it will be horizontal.
The next day, cloudy.
My hope is like a Greek myth:
exchanging skin for bark,
bark for scales,
scales for the hollow bones of a bird.
In these ways my hope
attempts to escape its fate.
In myth, hope surely knows,
escape is useless.
Still, hope will try.
I, who will someday leave behind
this three-dimensioned puzzle,
pity my hope.
Poorling, I say to my hope,
even I cannot spare you,
even I cannot make you mortal.
Winged, rooted, finned,
roofed or roofless,
of all my shapes, only you, hope,
know nothing of irony,
only you cannot be cynical
or cloak yourself
in the objectivity of grammar.
Only you
cannot suffer suffering.
You exempt, you deny,
you protest with speech and with silence.
You forgive—helpless to not—
in speech and in silence.
I, citizen of perspective,
born into the tribe of time,
will vanish into its blurring distance.
But you—most intransigent,
most stubborn of all my parts—
will be forced to continue.
How tenderly, with two open hands,
you reach again today for hunger’s apple.

You Should Write Down Your Dreams Then Destroy What You Wrote

When I was ten or eleven I discovered the trick of randomly opening a novel I'm about to start somewhere near the middle and reading a paragraph out of context so that when I come across it in the normal course of the novel a wave of deja vu washes over me (L can vouch that I do this since I taught her the trick early in our relationship and she still does this also to this day). It's worked twice this calendar year, both Cormac McCarthy novels, the new one, *The Passenger,* and later *Suttree.* I started the trick on at least two dozen other novels this year but failed each and every one of them long before I encountered the random paragraph

I like to blame my eyes rather than me for my downhill inability to read much less engage a novel (and, uh-ohing in the distance, poetry too), and it's true my vision's much weaker than once, and my eyes tire me towards a nap after fifteen minutes of reading (I can't read in bed any more, it's hopeless), and I like to blame my age (and Summer past's covid) for my diminished and foggier by the day memory, and I like to blame the clusterfuckers for my self-protective reduction in overall damn towards all but me and mine, and all deserve their proportions of blame in my resistance to and simmering ambivalence towards reading, but I recognize the same symptoms towards the typed word I felt when I lost any and all urge to watch moving images on a screen twenty years ago when my eyes were good and I was young, a complete evaporation of desire to sit and watch, which is all that reading feels like to me now





Music has never sounded better to me. I still write in journal everyday, look forward to it. I hike with L every chance I get. I changed my disc bag to all DX plastic all less than 165 grams and tweaked my mechanics (it only took 25 years to figure out this basic trick to increasing body torque) and am determined to play at least once a week (Seneca, in the pouring rain with Dr Z this past Sunday, front nine 29, middle nine 30, back nine 27, pins mixed, never done that before). I think about any one painting I make more than I ever did a poem I made. I will finish *In Search of Lost Time* (the only thing I want to read right now though in fits and starts, I'm almost through "Guermantes Way," I like to blame Proust for my inability to read anyone else (but McCarthy, though I'm so done with him now)). I am not unhappy, in fact now and then I'm happy, how can I stop feeling an utter complete moral failure I not only can't finish novels now, I don't even want to start them?

Click through, it has a bad word in the title but is great song
How the United States Became a Leading Exporter of White Supremacist Terrorism
The political rise of a new white nationalism
Trump’s Rosh Hashanah message manages the unimaginable
DeSantis Won’t Hesitate to Race Trump to the Bottom
Pinochet’s Apologists Five Decades On
Today in Rhetorical Questions! Why Is It So Hard for Victims of Police Abuse To Get Justice?
A few thoughts on the Russell Brand furore
Counterpoint: more thoughts on the above
Adding, it is entirely possible and almost certainly probable that Brand is a disgusting creep AND that the campaign against him is meant to shut him up and shut him down
Maggie's weekly				FRESH HELL
Would A Chainsaw-Wielding President Be So Bad?
This Is Your Hospital System On Covid and Privatization
We've Been Misreading a Major Law of Physics For The Past 300 Years
I used to work at Dock of the Bay 40+ years ago when it was actually a crab shack, laugh
Flowerville: the formative years				{ feuilleton}'s weekly links

THE RESCUE

Ben Lerner

You are afraid to be touched because
and that’s a reasonable fear, a woman once
brushed past me in the aisle
or stairs, I’ve repressed the encounter
in amber, she said, and I was destroyed
And in the second dream she was holding the dog
back from a mourning dove and over us
the sky had what I can only describe as
exposed beams, and she said if he does
get a bird, a squirrel, he doesn’t snap the neck
or worry it, just stares at me because
holds it in the mouth, the tension between
what he has been taught and what he feels
and the word for that gap is

The vain travail. It’s the one poem I’ve
by heart, she said, the way the magician
the way the uncle finds the coin in your ear
or you’ve been holding the card this whole time
She can make you feel like a missing
word, she can smooth back your hair
and say there is all this new research about
influence, how you need to be influenced by me
In the third dream, your daughter brings
an offering in her jaws to the bed
You should be in analysis or volunteer more
You are afraid to be touched because
at the shelter. Fourth dream, fifth dream
something happened you can’t remember

until you recite it, they say “by heart”
but it’s actually lodged
here, she said, touching my neck
above the collar, and here and here
Because you are the dog and the dove
Lady and hart, the patron and system
of patronage, the tension between
us could be useful for your work, could hold
you back from the mourning
until the poem goes amber in the mouth
and speech floweth over the stone, end quote
You should write down your dreams
then destroy what you wrote, interesting
use of “exposed”

My Love, I've Petitioned the Curator Who Has Acquired an Empty Chest Representing All the Poems You Will Now Never Write

Wednesday past I bought L & me tickets to Bonnie Prince Billy w Jon Langford at the gorgeous and intimate and wonderful 6th and I Street Synagogue in Chinatown on Saturday November 18, 2023, it's general admission so buy yourself a ticket here and join us for dinner Downtown then an excellent night of music! Please!

The paperback of *Mount Chicago,* when I held it in my hands in Politics and Prose, cheaply made, cheap page paper, cheap cover paper, paper yellow, font small, my eyes said NO! so so did I, I will continue on My Complicity Reader, bright white screen with sharp black letters, font size adjustible to my level of blindness. 

I will torture my eyes if a physical book as object worth it and I WANT THE PHYSICAL BOOK AS OBJECT TO BE WORTH IT, but as cheapass a book as object paperback *Mount Chicago* is, no no no (this is not a screed again the publisher or publisher's motives, it's a going-blind grump's who has ALWAYS WANTED THE BOOK AS OBJECT A CLOSE SECOND to what's written *in* the object gratuitously bitching about a shitty paperback requiring me to use My Complicity Reader as proxy-bitching about (my complicity) my going-blind). Jon Langford? Zombie, you still kicking? Send me your favorite Mekon song as of the second you read this if you read this and I'll post it!

"Not me," says the guy with a blog who'll be 65 in a year and ten days
2023 August Right Eye Left Eye
New York Times Helps Marco Rubio Push Persecution Of Antiwar Leftists
Against the Eugenicons					Rule by Junta
Motherfucking Democrats: Wall Street Mega Banks and Their Disgraceful Bailout Charts Since the Repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999
Taxonomy of Bullshit Trumpsucker Defenses
The “Free-Speech Twitter” PSYOP
Crackerchristers and conflict entrepreneurs
Avedon Carol's occasional links
United States of Helmetball
Nothing to see here				Edgy pleasures
⇑	I have never daydreamed of being invisible nor taking advantage of reasons described above
NO HEROES: ON CORMAC MCCARTHY, 1933-2023
MY DAYDREAM IS I HAVE A MEREDITH MONK CLASS SINGING VOICE, not the worse singing voice ever which I own, proud in a stupid way, finest metaphors abounding
Mark Linkous Remembered By The Artists Who Knew Him

IN THE LAND OF LOST OBJECTS

Rebecca Lindenberg

You’ll find labels describing what is gone:

an empress’s bones, a stolen painting

 

of a man in a feathered helmet

holding a flag-draped spear.

 

A vellum gospel, hidden somewhere long ago

forgotten, would have sat on that pedestal;

 

this glass cabinet could have kept the first

salts carried back from the Levant.

 

To help us comprehend the magnitude

of absence, huge rooms

 

lie empty of their wonders—the Colossus,

Babylon’s Hanging Gardens and

 

in this gallery, empty shelves enough to hold

all the scrolls of Alexandria.

 

My love, I’ve petitioned the curator

who has acquired an empty chest

 

representing all the poems you will

now never write. It will be kept with others

 

in the poet’s gallery. Next door,

a vacant room echoes with the spill

 

of jewels buried by a pirate who died

before disclosing their whereabouts.

 

I hope you don’t mind, but I have kept

a few of your pieces

 

for my private collection. I think

you know the ones I mean.

The Censor Uses the Black Crayon to Eradicate Sex

Still haven't bought a gun, haven't committed names to a list, I'm fine, prone to distraught therapeutic hyperbolic performative daydreaming when despondent over mouth-breathing crackers and christers and their Professional Democratic enablers, thank you the three of you for checking in with me after last post, hiking with L past Saturday and Sunday indeed helped, as did discovering mocoparks finally tagged the new trails we've been hiking the past year

Danger Noodle. Built and funded by local mountain biker clubs, name silly until you consider. I mean, who *doesn't* daydream of shooting Ebsay Orkagay, the homophobic fag whale? Reminder: your condoning of behaviors all humans participate in denies the pleasurable sinfulness of behavior those who condemn said behavior enjoy when they, um, trangress, this is why they hate you. I dearly hope the Whistle Pig Loop is not named for America's orkagays

Mocoparks can name new trails whatever they want as long as they keep building new trails. Seven mile circuit - park at Bucklodge Conservancy, Bucklodge Conservancy Loop to Jewelweed Thoroughfare to Danger Noodle to Jewelweed Thoroughfare to to Bucklodge Conservancy, ten mile loop (yesterday's) add in Whistle Pig Loop and long Bucklodge Conservancy loop. 

The contest L & C want me to enter responded yesterday to my email about format and praised the sample I sent and encouraged me to enter the day after I told L I wasn't going to play one way or the other, oops, when you count on the failure of others to rationalize a decision you wanted to pretend to make. To celebrate how this news has not stopped me from daydreaming of shooting Ebsay Orkagay (or Ojay Idenbay, currently selling out DC and signaling he's OK by his silence with the orkagays' eradicalism toward trans people), here's Sparklehorse's *Cow*

Transgender people in the United States are now the victims of stage 8 of the Ten Steps of Genocide
THE DEAFENING SILENCE OF INTELLECTUALS IN THE FACE OF GROWING GLOBAL CONFLICTS
Tactical pessimism: March 2023 update
Railroad shitlordism an American tradition
WHY BIDEN STABBED DC IN THE BACK
Ten body parts you can legally sell!
Intergenerational capitalist trauma!
TIMES SIGNS			Experimental drafts blog (not mine, don't worry)
"I never said Jews should be eradicated from public life. I said *Judaism* should be eradicated from public life. I may be a buffoonish bigot who stirs rubes to violence, but my cowardice demands a smidgeon of plausible deniability. And you, sir, have libeled me by omitting it."
I also daydream of whacking crackerchristers in the head with a garden shovel and though I do own a garden shovel (well, L does), I have yet to whack a crackerchrister in the head with it
Maggie's weekly				FRESH HELL
Which makes me (a) extraordinarily susceptable to shitlord programming and (b) I know better and (c) enjoy my anger most when it's pissing me of maximally and (d) the angrier and more often we are zolted closer to civil war the more our shitlords are prepping us for World War and (e) reminder: to nine out of ten people *I'm* the weird and dangerous freak
{ feuilleton }'s weekly				Trees in themselves
The Shape of Our Dignity: She Gave Me a Safe Space…
I love birds most				and (f) fertilize w fuck-it

PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT

Claire Schwartz

The Censor uses the black crayon

to eradicate sex. On payday, he takes

his wife and son to Shake Shack. Whatever

you want, the Censor says to his wife

when she asks what she should have.

The Censor crosses provide for your family

off of the list he keeps tucked in his billfold. To track

the time, the Censor sings You Are My Sunshine twice

while his son brushes his teeth. The boy shows the glass

his shining mouthstones and growls. He is a bear. No,

he is a boy. In the boy’s drawings, the zebras

are purple and white. His mother hangs

them on the fridge. What beautiful horses,

the Censor says. His wife’s wit trembles, then ebbs.

The children’s nails are clogged with black wax.