If a Man Among You Got No Sin Upon His Hand Let Him Cast a Stone at Me For Playing in the Band

Was there. First Jerry, then Phil, now Bobby. My youth officially over. Was here too

With a Worsened Left Eye I Still Find Street Lamps Crooked

THE GODDESS WHO CREATED THE PASSING WORLD

The Goddess who created this passing world Said Let there be lightbulbs & liquefaction Life spilled out onto the street, colors whirled Cars & the variously shod feet were born And the past & future & I born too Light as airmail paper away she flew To Annapurna or Mt. McKinley Or both but instantly Clarified, composed, forever was I Meant by her to recognize a painting As beautiful or a movie stunning And to adore the finitude of words And understand as surfaces my dreams Know the eye the organ of affection And depths to be inflections Of her voice & wrist & smile

Ouch, two of my heroes gone within a month. I never did play a My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game with poets though if I did she would have owned one of three permanent spots (John Ashbery and James Tate, the only two poets with more poems posted here than Notley, and no one is even within shouting distance of those three). I wish I'd met her
RIP Alice Notley				RIP Alice Notley
Alice Notley: the Paris Review interview
Alice Notley's prophecies					Notley 101
Alice Notley and the Art of Not Giving a Damn

I SUPPOSE THIS IS ALL A LEFTHAND PLOT

Detective Hardwood looks like Batman this morning

pouty cupidy mouth

and a lot of black sculptural clanking

the statuary in my mortuary,

the Masonic Hall having burned again in dreams

but everyone still keeps skipping towards it

it's a hollow a round shell

my life as the shape of the ways I've been fucked

by prevailing thought & practice

all the conscious and unconscious sexisms

selfishnesses affluences assumptions suppressions in drift

GET   RID   OF   ALL   CONTROLS—is what the Soul keeps screaming.

____________________

I look up someone grins

you're a bloody feral wolf-face I like you.

____________________

I sleep-walked in a dream to a man's apartment—

a man I'm doing business with—

I forgot, but how could I? how I'd gotten there,

and when I die will I remember all such forgotten things 

GET   RID   OF   THE   CONTROLS

                                                                          I want to

remember now.

I apologized to the man for not adhering to office hours

it was four a.m. Office hours are better he said.

Don't arrive anywhere in your sleep

don't mix up night and day

soul and detective. No.

____________________

There must be so much to reclaim

because I'm so limited

____________________

this.

They broke your day

they fought it you

forgot how advantageous

to be fit with god and not see eye

you forgot gold sun brilliant

in this story

go in conscious.

____________________

That queen that Assyrian woman

was so cruel and that never

occurred to her ... but

those eyes saw raw smells and gods everywhere dusty

this dust I was truly assembled from

at least as you, we are communally

such.

If you say you'll hurt me, do you

really mean me

I  can't be, can I, hurt?

____________________

“Hut Sut Tut Mut there's gonna be a wedding”

I dream that's a song. Wake up with, in my head,

“They say don't go

on Wolverton Moun-tain” (“Her tender lips/are sweeter than hone-y”

____________________

Later.

I have a drop of blood on a front tooth

I kind of don't mind—

This the list of what we've done:

         It was different structure we killed it

         put beasts in the refrigerator

         and that was almost as bad as my own enslavement.

         Then I saw Christ's blood pumped into a rejuvenating mummy.

         This great sickness we're part of apple clot

         and can you really chew it detective

         Oh sure I can, I'm Robert Mitch-ham.

____________________

you've broke your own sto

I'm sort of hysterical

the E is it for hope, cutting

the E might be for Hope

Nope

and bloody, the bloodiest is Hope.

Where are the E's of exactness?

E is my middle name

*

SOULS ON METRO No one could stand it the métro was so slow later halted a man started
Strumming a guitar making patter I couldn’t hear how could
There be room for a guitar I should be like him tell you things I’m
Shy tried remembering a dream of a language of spontaneous irregular spirals
Did I even see anyone our ridiculous eyes I remember when my vision started to
xxxxxx blur at age six
I thought I was effecting this change deliberately I still wonder
Why would I have done that pushing mentally at my eyes as they worsened
Maybe they hadn’t seen right was I asking them to see more not less
The new sight would be subtly different as you joined with what you saw
My sight blurred more I felt my way more and with glasses then contacts read
xxxxxx constantly
When I was in my thirties my retina detached I began to see street lamps as crooked
We didn’t have any money then I wasn’t examined for three weeks
Waiting for the street lamps to straighten up why not
After the surgery in the hospital I gathered my wits to go on seeing
With a worsened left eye I still find street lamps crooked
I don’t know what’s really out there I’m still working on how to see
I’m tired of having separate senses though or of the idea of senses
I wasn’t really looking this morning in the métro adorable Jewish child
Alone glasses and Orthodox hat dark coat bewildered by the train’s refusal
Ladies in skirts and weirdly toed stilettos I’m always looking at the feet
Greying men wearing dignity the train wouldn’t run for them though we all saw it the same
xxxxxx way it wasn’t working
It’s just a train you’d say ephemeral I’d say I’d say souls riding nothing much
In no real clothes blurs on their way to some imagined location anyway

*

LICENSE

None of it’s there that you cared for, so familiar

furniture and paintings. The medals aren’t there either

I’m still there but it isn’t; I’m here; sword,

I have sword — imagine — and disguising protect-

ive the ancient helmet. Her head was cut off

nonetheless. The man brought the head along

to the doctor: the head said to. Shouldn’t we

bring the body I asked in case he wants to re-

attach them Oh, the head hadn’t thought of that.

 

What do you have instead of a body, there?

We have a wholeness of perception what we are

asking you to do for us, write down our poems

creates a body. Otherwise our body ... isn’t

that we aren’t sensuous ... but we decohere,

you must understand that the universe

is always developing or changing its face — 

body — whatever; we have always been it

but it’s never quite right ... pilot’s license;

 

my pilot’s license is a fossil, you said. We

need yours. We need your license.

 

When Momma first, the very first hallucination

that the decompression tube in her stomach was black ...    

It isn’t black I said over the phone well I thought

it was she said, not being fanciful, and I

was in a motel in Colorado at the time. Whose head

was it really I repeat. For we never leave here

and nothing fossilizes but stonelike mossy

patterns might be made, colors transformed

 

walk to the hospital, everyone’s mad at me, who cares?

It was my whole soul transported and all its certainties

that I existed, beneath all the legends, otherwise

as joy.

It's the kiss of the tears stinging and cold, the sum of the years, the story untold, in the heart of our hearts, the heart of the soul, at the heart of the hopes and the fears that we've known, know that we'll know, we were throwing time away, breathlessly throwing time away. Throwing time away, recklessly throwing time away: REST IN POWER, CROCUS BEHEMOTH, Owner of One of Two Permanent Seats in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game:

That's this shitty blog's Theme Song Two. There are two permanent seats in My Sillyass Desert Island Five Game, David Thomas' projects in general (and there are many - Two Pale Boys, notably) and of course Pere Ubu in particular sit in one of them. More later maybe, I'm hoping for not

My Personal Theme Song One, easily the Ubu song I've played on cassette, CD, digital, YouTube, in my head, and, wait, now the 16th time today, most, cause. Please play it loud

Rest in Peace, Fleabus, 2003-2024

At Last the Spread of Things Has Erased My Particulars

Rest in Peace, Robert Coover. You don't need to read Robert Coover's 1966 novel *Origin of the Brunists* to be astonished by 2014's *Brunist Day of Wrath* but you DO need to read *Brunist Day of Wrath,* the most American novel I've ever read, it's fourth read this coming 25 summer, might need to push up. I also recommend *Gerald's Party*, *John's Wife*, *Universal Baseball Association*, and of course *Public Burning.* But Brunists, both of them, but if only one, and only one Coover, *Brunist Day of Wrath*, best novel for explaining the United States of Assholes 2024. I'll even buy a copy for you if we're digibuds (or real life buds) if you ask nice. Here's the finished Headshot Hexjeff from the post below this one

More here. This getting-old shit. Besides all the long or recently dead musicians on the soundtrack of the formative years of my life, of the novelists of the formative years of my life - Barth, Elkin, Fowles, Gaddis, Gass, now Coover - only Pynchon still alive. Hinkiest year of my life, far hinkier than I thought it would be 50 years ago when I first read Coover at fifteen. Rest of monologue in grid, per usual. Been on a Lambchop binge, when am I not on a Lambchop binge?

Hinkiest wucking far ever, dum-de-dum, BLAMMO! crickets
"every day the White House invents new ways to offend Arab voters. They have their top scientists working around the clock, coming up with innovative, cutting edge ways to lose Michigan"
Hinkiest war of my lifetime, everything's fuckstrange
A Year of War Without End
"The real victim in a full year of Gaza genocide expanded to Lebanon is a Scottish woman living in LA"
Inside the State Department’s Weapons Pipeline to Israel
☝	"Leaked cables and emails show how the agency’s top officers dismissed internal evidence of Israelis misusing American-made bombs and worked around the clock to rush more out while the Gaza death toll mounted"						☝
For Netanyahu, Eradicating the Palestinians Is Still "Job 1"
Soil to bury our dead					Reminder, you are being trained for your turn		☝
A year into the genocide
A Ministry of Risk in A Time of War
Genocide Option			A Very Peculiar Triumph
Why Israel Gets Away With Murder in Gaza and Lebanon
How 'Israel' Is Used To Divide And Conquer The Middle East
"The cops chose to assault protesters rather than shut down the illegal land sale, which is being held in violation of U.S. civil rights laws, Biden’s executive order on the West Bank of 2/1/24, and 20 some additional state, federal, and international laws. Nassau County police swiftly arrested a protester for wearing a mask, all while ignoring the both domestically and internationally illegal sale happening in their own jurisdiction, right under their noses. Their selective enforcement of the “law” underscores a troubling double standard and their continuous efforts to protect domestic Zionist terrorists, thereby further facilitating Palestinian land theft, occupation, and Gazan genocide in the belly of the beast"
Why Palestinians won’t leave their land
Biden Chose This Catastrophic Path Every Step of the Way
"When they say there was quiet on October 6th, what they mean is that it was only Palestinians being killed, which is the acceptable status quo"
Why Europe’s leadership wants war
The Chicken Hawks Want War With Iran
Conservatives for Deepfakes?
Burn the Planet and Lock Up the Dissidents
The Fed Took $3k From You and Gave it to Jamie Dimon
Who'll	be the	next	polestar	of my	youth	to	die?
"Stick with the cautious, timid posture we saw at the veep debate, or go on the offensive? It seems extraordinary that this is a question at all"						⬅	No, actually, it doesn't, at all
Uyghur or Uygur				Maggie's		Lefebyre
She worries she's not living up to her ambitions
Josipovici			Milton berle into Tampa		{ feuilleton }'s
The Mysterious Impact of Music on the Brain and Body
Stupidass odds on stupidass Nobel lit prize
Olga Tokarczuk interview
Excellent Robert Coover interview from 1996
Lots of invaluable links for RIP Robert Coover

ENLIGHTENMENT OR SENILITY Bill Knott The night is paced with stars Day spaced with birds' wings At last the spread of things Has erased my particulars

If You Should Ever Get Normally Sentient Enough to Notice the Weather, You Might Drop a Line to your, XXX, Margie

For the past two months Chinese-based bots (according to my statcounter logs) have been scrubbing this blog from start to finish, today I received this email

(It's very urgent, therefore we kindly ask you to forward this email to your CEO. If you believe this has been sent to you in error, please ignore it. Thanks)

Dear CEO,

We are the domain registration and solution center in China. We received an application from Hongshun Ltd on May 9, 2024. They want to register "blckdgrd" as their internet keyword and China (CN) domain names (blckdgrd.cn, blckdgrd.com.cn, blckdgrd.net.cn, blckdgrd.org.cn). But after checking it, we find this name conflict with your company name or trademark. In order to deal with this matter better, it's necessary to send email to you and confirm whether this company is your distributor in China?

 

Best Regards

Thomas Liu | Service & Operations Manager

China Registry (Head Office

Tel: +86-2161918696

Fax: +86-2161918697

Mob: +86-13816428671

No. 1780 Wuzhong Road, Shanghai 201103, China

The url was provided in the signature but no, not posted here. 

Rest in Power, Steve Albini. I don't know whether said bots are scrubbing pOj (if they are, wordpress' stats thing doesn't think so and at least I had the grace to not add statcounter there) nor whether said bots scrubbing prior iterations of this blog (I killed those statcounters). The fuck? Is this phish, a prank? Fifteen seconds of Google research suggests Hongshun is big, that's as much time as I'm putting in this and I won't respond but if they write back and offer money how much should I demand? 

They are not going to write back and offer money, I'm not stupid enough to (think this anything but a scam) be flattered they liked my brandname enough to buy it (and if they read this - I have neither the damn much less the wherewithal to sue your ass if you steal it), the fuck would a Chinese corporation want w BLCKDGRD? Below recorded/mixed by Steve Albini

Meanwhile, clusterfucking still clusterfucking, see grid below. On Tuesday Joe Biden called you an antisemite with a genetic disposition to want to kill Jews and condemned student violence at protests while siccing violent police on student protests and on Wednesday put out a press statement that is certainly fake and misleading that he's cutting off Israel from 2000 pound bombs if Israel attacks Rafah, pissing off the people against his genocide and pissing off people delighted by his genocide is (a perfect metaphor for motherfucking Democrats) an excellent election strategy, the two songs below recorded/mixed by Steve Albini

Finest metaphor abounding: NYT wins Pulitzer
"The empire can handle being on the wrong side of an issue; it has all the media and mainstream culture-manufacturing institutions on its side, which allows it to frame public perception of that issue in a way that quells dissent. What it absolutely cannot handle is a critical mass of young people deciding the imperial murder machine sucks, and that opposing it is fun and makes you cool."
The crumbling of the myths of free speech and the West’s moral leadership
"Fascism is an elite solution to the organic crisis of a profit regime confronted by the threat of organized class struggle amid the vacillations of an imperialist order"
☝	Tech bro fascism looks like a lot like old-fashioned fascism						☝
We drive to Michigan Saturday for five days visiting daughter and son-in-law, this will or won't be the last post for a bit
Text of the Gaza ceasefire proposal approved by Hamas
Israel begins military operation in Rafah, hours after Hamas agrees to a cease-fire
"I think we should've gone into Rafah yesterday already... There are no uninvolved (civilians) there. You have to go in and kill and kill and kill... We have to kill them before they kill us"
Genocide Joe is beginning to stink like Lyndon B. Johnson
A Response to Zadie Smith’s “Shibboleth”
Another Bogus Antisemitism Scare
Student Protests, State Violence, and Spatial Power
Campus protest in images				England your England
Liberalism without Accountability
WHY ASSET MANAGERS OWN THE WORLD
A mystery surrounds Donald Trump: if he is so good at selling himself, why is he so bad at selling his own-brand products?
What Counts as Consciousness
New York Times editor Joe Kahn says defending democracy is a partisan act and he won’t do it
On not writing			The Unlearning Of Empathy
Exploring the mysterious alphabet of sperm whales
THE POP and STALIN THING: ART and EVIL or ART and NONSENSE or WHAT and WHY?
THE PROBLEM WITH MUSIC
A Very Selfish Enterprise: The Strange World Of... Shellac
Three hours of Albini music and Albini produced music on Therese's show last night!
Thurston Moore's RIP Steve Albini
Rest in Power, Steve Albini

FEB 25

Alice Notley

Dear Nutso,
     Wal, it's pretty blank
around here. The cat
is hungry, & Hubby hasta
get up early (those two
paired are not a sig-
nificance for your cheap
little mindlessness to ponder).
How could I ever
miss you? everytime I
do I slap myself on my
cheek & read a chapter of
The New Hairdresser's Manual.
If you should
ever get normally sentient
enough to notice the
weather, you might drop
a line to your,
                       XXX
                                 Margie