The Poet Is a Radio. The Poet Is a Liar. The Poet Is a Counterpunching Liar

I waited a day to post this monologue and the grid below (I've stopped trying to stop), both fat with contempt for and loathing at motherfucking Democrats' contempt of and loathing and FEAR! of the ascent of Zohran Mamdani (and those who defiantly and fuckyouingly, against company orders, voted for Mamdani), especially it's leadership, specifically the senator from New York who said he didn't endorse Mamdani for mayor (and said he voted and strongly implied he voted for Cuomo) because his self-legacy is first and foremost his loyalty to Zionist Israel, so we could enjoy the total magafreakout at Mamdani's win for a day. Hey, my Brian Jonestown Massacre binge continues. Yes I know Anton is a whack asshole. FMA.





Then there's the ex-CIA-operative Democrat that won the Virginia gubernatorial election whose margin of victory was twice that predicted because of the Mamdani-bounce who stink-eyed Mamdani in her post-victory comments. Yes, Trump will savagely invade NYC with the worst of his goons the day after Mamdani's sworn in, that's nothing compared to what mountains Democrats will move to ensure Mamdani fails and his winning strategy discredited. Economic populism, fuck that. Tuesday's successful election results the worse possible news for professional Democrats. This is at least the third time I've posted this song in 2025





Holyfuck, I love that song. I've received texts from the bots of Bernie Sanders, Gavin Newson, Nancy Pelosi, Bill Clinton, Hakeem Jeffries, the senator from Israel, both my Maryland senators, my congressman, many more, in the glow of Mamdani's victory asking me for money to maintain and increase the anti-Trump anti-maga momentum while no doubt simultaneously in urgently scheduled zoom meetings top Democrats and their Shitlord donors debated strategies on thwarting the anti-Trump anti-maga glee and momentum from the base before said Shitlord donors turn off their $hit $pigot





I'm glad you and I had a lovely yesterday break from our never-ending ever-darkening hopeless powerless enfeeblement and despair before Our Shitlords' Deliberate Clusterfuckication of what to them is eradicating your roach-existence, but I need to remind you and me today that regardless the infinitely slim chance that Mamdani's victory gains another inch of momentum it will be in spite of not because of motherfucking professional Democrats, all of whom see more danger to themselves from Mamdani than they ever will Trump. Their jobs depend on it





I like hearing a Dandy Warhols song when one comes on the radio and they will never get a binge, but no, I had no dog in the infamous BJM - DW wars. Yes, I was born without the Lou Reed gene and yes, I hear Lou Reed in many Anton songs, sometimes weird is wonderful

"The country’s highest profile Democratic politicians spent the day valorizing Dick Cheney while Democratic voters were busy electing Zohran Mamdani"
THE DARK LEGACY OF A WAR CRIMINAL
One of, if not THE, shittiest humans of my lifetime
➥	"It terrifies Hillary that Americans are finding out not only about this lie - but all the foreign policy lies they have been told"
"Obama bailed out the banks while they foreclosed on millions of households and gave us a donor-approved health insurance bill instead of the promised public option so it’s wild he’s out there pretending he opposes the very same people he spent his presidency selling out to"
"This piece shows that even at this late hour, the Dem Party still refuses to grapple with how Obama’s economic betrayals created conditions for Trumpism. The whole piece is about Obama bewildered at what’s happened & Dem elites worshiping his celebrity"
"@Barack Obama is a blood-soaked war criminal, a psychopathic servant of billionaires who has remained silent throughout two years of Zionist holocaust in Gaza. Nothing good can come from him"
"It’s a disgrace that the leader of the senate Democrats refuses to endorse his own party’s nominee, and we should remember it next time we are asked to endorse whatever shitty centrist nominee they want us to support in futuret’s a disgrace that the leader of the senate Democrats refuses to endorse his own party’s nominee, and we should remember it next time we are asked to endorse whatever shitty centrist nominee they want us to support in future"
"Every single Democrat in the Senate - plus Bernie Sanders - voted to confirm Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. The Democrats are not an opposition to the illegal war-loving GOP, they are its enablers
"The Obama administration cut SNAP benefits by nearly $9 billion in 2014. Democrats didn't say a word. Neither party cares if you eat or not"
"Yet Obama himself intervened in the 2020 democratic primary to stop Bernie on behalf of these very same people
"Remember when this guy had the opportunity to put every banker in jail for 2008, and instead gave them a bailout while he was busy being the architect of mass deportations? Fuck off"
"Remember, when Obama left office, rather than becoming a grassroots promoter of populist anti-billionaire politics, he went and hung out with billionaires and got millions of dollars from wall street"
"The job of R politicians is to extract wealth for the elite. The job of D politicians is to prevent the people from stopping or punishing them. That is why Ds would rather lose than undermine the elite’s ability to control elections and politicians"
"I'm amazed by the shamelessness with which people pretend that the Democrats embraced leftist politics over the last ten years. As a leftist I remember the past decade as a string of constant defeats, with corporate centrists aggressively keeping the party from going populist"
"At the risk of sounding petty, calls for Democratic unity going forward are all well and good, but let’s not forget that the reason Cuomo ran against Mamdani in the first place was a last-ditch effort by the New York Democratic Party to ratfuck their duly elected nominee
I. Hate. Motherfucking. Democrats.
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
➥	People comment on that Bezos Post editorial board's toddler shitfit anti-Mamdani oped
"It's uncanny how Cuomo has been laser-focused at appealing to the absolute worst qualities in people - their insularity, their tribalism, and now their fear. A campaign monumental in its cynicism, a colossal bet by this man and his billionaire backers that people are basically bad"
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
"Nice to be reminded that all the Never Trumpers praising Dick Cheney today had no problem with evil they liked"
I. Hate. Motherfucking. Democrats.
"It’s not just that the far right is reactionary, that it reacts to something, but it’s a preventive counter-revolution”
Western Political Lies Signal The End of an Era
"Mamdani's People-Powered Win Is a Rebuke of Democrat Cowardice"
How the Cold War Created the Culture Wars
YouTube Quietly Erased More Than 700 Videos Documenting Israeli Human Rights Violations
The state of play in late 2025
DHS Gives Local Cops a Facial Recognition App To Find Immigrants
Are You on Trump’s List of Domestic Terrorists?
White Man Jump Scare		Catalog of Dark Patterns				Maggie
Falling Off the Map				Cash is peasant
A brief art history of grief					Eco-Marxism and Prometheus Unbound
When We Devalue Art (Books!) We Devalue the Future
{ feuilleton }			The paradox of clothing
Why So Many Humans Miss Grumpy Cat Signals
Tom LeClair reviews *Shadow Ticket* versus Pynchon's "monsterpieces"
➥	I'm in, at least for now, though I realize one of my problems with *Shadow Ticket* is the same as one of my problems with *Inherent Vice* and *Bleeding Edge:* I don't like detective novels! and never have
"This demographic already has been / is already being replaced by young American millennial readers fixated on Bolaño, Cărtărescu, Sorokin, Knausgaard, Lentz, Moresco, Krasznahorkai, Tokarczuk, Fosse, Ernaux… We just need more bold anglophone writers in the mix…"
Excellent piece on Jack Spicer and his poetry
Richard Dawson's 13 albums that influenced his music

SPORTING LIFE

Jack Spicer

The trouble with comparing a poet with a radio is that radios don’t develop scar-tissue. The tubes burn out, or with a transistor, which most souls are, the battery or diagram burns out replaceable or not replaceable, but not like that punchdrunk fighter in the bar. The poet
Takes too many messages. The right to the ear that floored him in New Jersey. The right to say that he stood six rounds with a champion.
Then they sell beer or go on sporting commissions, or, if the scar tissue is too heavy, demonstrate in a bar where the invisible champions might not have hit him. Too many of them.
The poet is a radio. The poet is a liar. The poet is a counterpunching radio.
And those messages (God would not damn them) do not even know they are champions.

Rest and Look at this Goddamned Wheelbarrow. Whatever It Is

No, Zohran Mamdani is not going to save you even if the world's shittiest people let him try, which they won't*, but yes, Mamdani's victory against the will and might and money of the world's shittiest people satisfying, but a vital reminder: in the immediate grid below a catalog of horrible crimes currently being executed by the world's shittiest people who think the greatest threat to their power is a smart, charismatic, self-proclaimed socialist who believes in rent control and thinks public transportation and child care should be free. 

*They are going to FREAK THE FUCK OUT! and ALL! of it will be genuine, and the noise their shit-sprewers will generate will provide cover for Trump to move HARD right which the shit-spewers will venerate (rimshot). Professional Democrats will support this with their silent complicity at best, though most will cheer in their amoral heads. I'm glad Mamdavi won, mind, cause what the fuck, better start fighting now, just be ready, the fuglier than documented in the grid directly below gonna start soon

"Whatever you once thought or dreamed or hoped America was before, this is what America is right now. And if we don't change it – by any means necessary – this is what America is going to be from now on"
"A pregnant woman lost her baby after ICE refused to give her prenatal care. She begged for help and was denied. She was fed food full of cockroaches. She was forced to sleep on the floor. This is absolutely disgusting and we should all be outraged"
"I am simply asking the press to cover the government sending masked thugs to rip people from their crying children and shipping them to a foreign concentration camp with the same ferocity they cover a trans kid playing jv tennis in sheboygan"
"Starting to think everything he does w/r/t Iran right now is motivated by his delusions of winning a Nobel Peace Prize"
"They're not going to let any journalists into Gaza until the whole thing's emptied out and they've hidden all the evidence of their holocaust, and then they'll call you an antisemitic conspiracy theorist if you say it happened"
Gaza: The War on Dialysis
"Please Don’t Criticize the Devastating Work I Do at the Misery Factory"
➥	Acting ICE director demands Americans to stop criticising ICE
"This is the most prominent "leftist" politician in the US, and he is spouting genocidal Zionist propaganda that his own base and the majority of the American public do not believe. That is how much of a depraved fanatical scumbag Bernie Sanders is and has always been"
POKING AROUND AS THE PERFORMATIVE BULLSHIT CONTINUES
Official Enemy Inc.				SHITLORDS		SHITLORDS
New Face of Surveillance Doesn’t Need Your Face
The Hot, New Plan to Bribe States Into Deregulating Artificial Intelligence
I found a watercolor block, one tube of red gouache, and had the barest remainder of white fountain pen ink infused in clear elmer's glue							☟

The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
"Oligarchs whose yachts have yachts are freaked out by a candidate proposing some free buses to transport workers to their jobs cleaning the yachts"
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
"The fact that free buses, affordable childcare and housing, and access to grocery stores scares these goons so much it's a great sign that we're doing the right thing. The amount of cope and seethe that will happen if he wins the primary..."
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
➥	The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
➥	"Soon very soon the whole world will be able to see what a sell out Colbert is. Traffics in morality, gets bought by zionist climate criminal billionaires"
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
"They're giving Zohran the evil Muslim header photos now"
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
➥	"At a party last night with politically active San Franciscans and we were all electrified by Zohran and hoping his win in NYC inspires others to run in San Francisco to make it more affordable for everyone not just for the tech charlatans"
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
➥	"Really wild to think how there are millions of Americans who see this and go "Higher wages, cheaper housing, affordable things, civil rights, not being kidnapped off the street and disappeared? No thanks."
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
"They're so desperate to credit anything other than the fact that he's a socialist who ran on socialist policies"
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
"Can we talk about the power of that Bill Clinton endorsement?"
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
➥	"oh no please don't make a young, handsome, well-spoken, relatively popular guy the face of the party heretofore known primarily as the afterlife-anteroom for gaggle of conspicuously sundowning Lifetime Senators"
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani

Woke up with *Yalla Yalla* in my head, strangest days, I listen to the Mescaleros all the time, I can't remember the last time I put on The Clash
Beyond parody			Pittsburgh has 1 plumber and its city-run drinking fountains are out
My cousin Jennifer had EVERY Tiger Beat (and like magazine) photo of Bobby Sherman on her bedroom walls when she was ten years old fifty-five freaking years ago
NOT ALWAYS SO				3 Spicer Marxist Essays
in/consequence: a brief series of texts submitted, read, and published anonymously, with the agreement of the author not to reveal themself
Alice Notley’s Life and Legacy
Letters from Jack Spicer

A RED WHEELBARROW

Jack Spicer

Rest and look at this goddamned wheelbarrow. Whatever
It is. Dogs and crocodiles, sunlamps. Not
For their significance. For being human
The signs escape you. You, who are not very bright,
Are a signal for them. Not,
I mean, the dogs and crocodiles, sunlamps. Not
Their significance.

I Am Thinking of How Many Times This Poem Will Be Repeated

Hey, I wanted a back-up to Melon's and mastodon sucketh, someone recently sent me a key, I'm now on bluesky, @blckdgrd.bsky.social

My right eye. New town every hour, search it, a twitter (and Bluesky too) account I scroll daily because its creator obsesses over maps like I do, mapped places you've been in person before you looked for it on a map and places you've seen on a map before actually visiting and the world as a map of itself of course. He had been offering bluesky keys and while I didn't ask directly for one (but yes, was hoping) I genuinely asked how does he have so many keys when I've been wait-listed for months? He sent me one. Here is my avatar there (for now and maybe forever but)

The urgency for a lifeboat should SS Melon sink has passed (and it was the threat of twitter's death and the end of my network there that panicked me about Melon, not Melon the Shitsmear himself: there's a reason all but two posts a year are tagged My Complicity). I think my calming the fuck down about it and what the fuck riding with it, aided by mastodon's massive suckage (my frantically chosen first lifeboat) and Bluesky's refusal to send me a key a contributing factor to many of my old digital habits pleasantly less compulsory, less mandatory, less spazzticknessity

Painting now compulsive, obsessive, watch me fuck it up, I insist. If you're on Bluesky please let me know, I'll be as busy there with it as it is with me. Gridolinks usually compulsory here, not today, progress offsetting regression bleggalgazewise, have a song, a poem, they're still and will always be mandatory

PSYCHOANALYSIS: AN ELEGY

Jack Spicer

What are you thinking about?

I am thinking of an early summer.

I am thinking of wet hills in the rain

Pouring water. Shedding it

Down empty acres of oak and manzanita

Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun,

Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.

Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana

Driving the hills crazy,

A fast wind with a bit of dust in it

Bruising everything and making the seed sweet.

Or down in the city where the peach trees

Are awkward as young horses,

And there are kites caught on the wires

Up above the street lamps,

And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.

What are you thinking?

I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer

As slow getting started

As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza

After a lot of unusual rain

California seems long in the summer.

I would like to write a poem as long as California

And as slow as a summer.

Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow

As the very tip of summer.

As slow as the summer seems

On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside

Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road

Between Bakersfield and Hell

Waiting for Santa Claus.

What are you thinking now?

I’m thinking that she is very much like California.

When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways

Traveling up and down her skin

Long empty highways

With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them

On hot summer nights.

I am thinking that her body could be California

And I a rich Eastern tourist

Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas

Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California

That I have never seen.

Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady,

Send them.

One of each breast photographed looking

Like curious national monuments,

One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway

Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging

In the world’s oldest hotel.

What are you thinking?

I am thinking of how many times this poem

Will be repeated. How many summers

Will torture California

Until the damned maps burn

Until the mad cartographer

Falls to the ground and possesses

The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.

What are you thinking now?

I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.

Ridiculous How the Space Between 3 Violins Can Threaten Our Poetry

Monday past I wondered what will kill me first: nuclear incineration, death by cracker, death by cop/military (who is just a cracker in an official uniform (as compared to vigilante crackers cosplaying as cops in camo)), death by a schizophrenic's AR-15, or death by natural (and human-aided) disaster, and again reminded myself it's me who makes myself sideways, as kneejerk and spastic as when I sing out loud the famous "But you blew my mind" line everytime I hear Roxy's *In Every Dreamhome, A Heartache:* my devout faith in metaphors based solely on my owning the single worst singing voice in human history, L can vouch I both sing the line and that my voice horrifies

We drive to Allegheny and Garrett counties tomorrow. the two most western counties of Augusta, the cracker counties that want to secede from Maryland, whose economic driver are the multiple Maryland state prisons filled with inmates from Baltimore City and Baltimore County (inner suburbs), northern Anne Arundel and Prince Georges and Montgomery (east of Georgia Avenue and south of Randolph Road), the feeder counties *not* joining Augusta. L is one of 30 people out of 2500 that applied for big plein air event based in Cumberland that got invited, she's thrilled.We will be driving through Westernport and Luke, Oakland and Accident and Friendsville and Frostburg and Grantsville and Cumberland - Cumberland is freaking beautiful. We're taking the long weekend to scout out where and what she wants to paint and hike new trails. There may be a report (with photos) of what we saw posted from the breakfast lounge of a mid-range hotel for the first time in a long while

After Monday's what-will-kill-me meditation I bought concentric metal cookee cutters so I can paint circles from inside as well as outside, best anti-sideways plan since he last until the next needed sniper nest, so yes, no links today and yes, my ferris wheel's gondola almost topping where boys' just-dropping balls squeal delicious uh-oh, wait, this is odd, there's a new Guided by Voices song?





CANTATA

Jack Spicer

Ridiculous
How the space between three violins
Can threaten all of our poetry.
We bunch together like Cub
Scouts at a picnic. There is a high scream.
Rain threatens. That moment of terror.
Strange how all our beliefs
Disappear.