Placate the void, feast until sick

The women with their ladles ladling out gray gravy onto lumpy potatoes, pivoting from one serving dish to another in smart slacks and sensible shoes, taking care not to let too much dead time pass before one asks a question of another. Small talk is not too much a distraction from adding heaping piles of steaming lasagna and filling styrofoam cups with cider. More than one thought this might be her last year of going through these wretched motions, that next winter might fill up with a cruise to Juneau or ten day stay a Tucson condo or a respiratory illness for which convalescence was an impossible ask. One never could tell what might happen, even when what was happening had been happening here, in this church basement, for longer than anyone could remember.

The men, those few who still came, sat hunched over their plates, maneuvering forkfuls of limp green beans into their mouths without tasting them, because they had tasted them before, because they had been eating the same green beans for fifty years, because they knew that no matter how much time passed, a plate did not serve its function until it was clean, and belonging to the club whose members hewed to that rule was not just a point of pride, but the non-negotiable crooked timber of being. This might be the last supper to attend, if courage had any substantive say, and so might as well feast on the perversities at hand.

My poverty but not my will agrees to the updated terms and conditions

In place of aesthetic fecundity, we have a frictionless expanse of the inoffensive. Ozempic shrinks the paunch the way methamphetamine used to hollow the pitted cheeks, which is, undoubtedly, a kind of metonym for the American pilgrim’s progress.

The frictionless expanse of the ineffably inoffensive kicks us loose from sense and nonsense. Daft hunks of meat speak with trumpet mouths into the bell of which a mute is forever lodged. Maximalists walk around with hammers for hands and see nothing but screws. They put their hands to ill use and make a mash of things.

The future we have lassoed unfurls only when desire is anesthetized. Excellence packets get distributed per the pro rata of prime numbers, lumping Pareto with the assimilating precision of Acronym’s inhouse speculative scribe. Consequently or independently - it’s hard to tell - an oily algorithmic residue clings to the cathedrals’ ceilings.

Come join me in the suffocating monotony of the online souk, which we would call dark ten years ago when USPS was a primary plug. But now the fentanyl sells itself. All of the dragons there were then have since become geckos and no longer spit insurrectionist fire but now grow new limbs on command.

This is how to supplant grandeur (or so nostalgia would have it) with seamless consumption (or so our less fortunate, more principled friends would frame their interdiction and tempt you to draw cold but aspirational comfort from believing in the virtues of making nothing new.)

This is how to buy into a compromised lot and foreclose on any schema of knowingness which has squatted on what to you ought always to be Terra Incognita in the desert of pure feeling.

The business of art is form, which sometimes is money. A tall bald man teaches that a cue card with a delineated process is the thing to catch the conscience of the king. With sorry on their lips, his proselytizers warp time to go back and make a magnanimous picture-talk feature. They can be overheard telling Philip to step out of the path of their sun, but no one in this canon’s dream realizes it was Alexander who listened and actually complied with their gospel. The focus on the weeping is misplaced - it’s the sound of the tear sliding down the cheek that does the underwriting, and without shame.

All of which is to say that aesthetic chastity, were it to exist, would not occupy a more privileged or more perspicacious position. The idea that comes only after the check cashes still stands or falls on its execution, and the jiggery-pokery criticism of the ascetic purists won’t prop it up or make it come crashing down, either.

Knowing this is ennobling. Just as poets create their predecessors, not all cynics’ skins can be scratched to mine cadmium squares. Heraclitus did not come to debase the coinage, but to call logos into being, into account. We would be fools to sing for a symbolic supper when the daily bread at hand is rising.

a sage for whom awareness is the live wire on which anomalous whims of ghosts and girls and eggs subsist

It isn’t just the vicious disregard for keeping one’s affairs to oneself, outside the realm of two factor authentication. It’s not just the decades’ long saturation with the culture of self-celebrity and pic or it didn’t happen (all those who sat on the bleeding edge 15 years ago repeated that phrase like a kind of self defeating koan). It’s how throughly we all have forgotten the ways in which silence visits violence on the foes and sycophants we’d all do well to vanquish.

We are against content production and those who produce it. First things last, on that account.

We prefer that the tincture of time not be wasted on those who would not withstand having their pupils dilated naturally, as though everything significant has always already happened. Give them the syringe with the drugs that can’t be swallowed.

We are against escaping lives of quiet desperation by increasing the volume of the desperation and the writhing spectacle of those in its throes.

More training reading the ones for whom making a moment is a death-in-life affair. It’s the mark that makes the picture, not the dent in the universe that the picture inflicts. Reception - the consequence of having looked and the effect of having been read - comes to wise fools and ascetics who have not lost an avaricious need for more feasts that hold the gaze.

We find that beauty makes its own argument, collapses its own interior walls, runs the score up doing desire’s blind bidding, and still makes time to strip from every interlocutor the first-person microphone.

The return of the dispossessed, but with oomph and clattering brio

Two skulls clatter down from a

predestined perch

In the catacombs in Paris

And I think of you and how much

More ink you’ve spilled than

blood you’ve let.

As I confessed the last time

My dour catastrophes unspooled

Across yours,

I am not yet past my spelunking phase

But with compulsive computation

About what might have been

I am fully pierced and run through

I stoop to put these benighted globes

back up to their polite place but

Take no solace and take no prisoners

So I kick them loose into darkness.

I straighten up, standing in an

Enervating memory of

an earlier last time we collided

Into spooky action orbits,

After the suitcase and orange milk crates

And soft recrimination had been stowed,

When I said what you told me were

All the right words

Before telling me that you

Couldn’t any longer see me

as someone who

Could possibly mean them

And then we laughed until it

Hurt differently,

skin flayed and

Brains deleriously broken.

I didn’t have the heart to say that then

but I meant to,

Even though I wouldn’t have known

Whether I meant it until I had

cupped in my soft hands my pallid heart.

I still had the words “faith” and “hope”

and “love”.   Still have, oddly.

But the nervy pluck to act,

Rather than to apostrophize,

has always been

Just beyond me.

I never saw you as just a reticent vessel

and

You never saw me as just bread crumbs

Strewn on a path away

from pitiless locked-in confinement.

It worked for awhile,

our mutually respectful solitude

Masked as cohabitation

With intermittent fucking,

Drifting through the age

of wire and string.

Sharing in the idea that gold seams

can put broken vases

into wholeness,

we traced those maladies together

and without too much confluential jest,

Sprinkling just enough of

the categorically interesting to save room

for the zany paranoia

which eventually might overcome

the christening guilt.

This goal without a plan is a penny thrown

Down a depthless well, and knowing that

It will never reach you because I will

Never hit send is just another erratic

Exculpating line,

Just another earnest hand held out

In empty space,

waiting to be read out loud

These caves of the dead

ache with echoes

And I don’t know how much yield

The quarries have in the offing or

How much more play in the joints

the uses of enchantment

Have left.

But so I won’t pretend to forestall

The delamination further

It won’t do to deny that two plus two

Is not what we are here for,

Because what we are here for

depends upon more than what

our hatched dependents,

reaching for the blue sky,

can possibly grasp.  

This is what excess running amuck is for.

And, unless I’m behind on all things you,

The one thing we still share

is having no one

reach or grasp

On our behalf once we go.

Ok sure but aren’t you forgetting Biggie Smalls?

The Italian mafia and RICO, a removable abscess runs into a cauterizing scalpel. Gerald Stern could no longer make exculpatory rabbits emanate from black hats once he became a witness.

And the come up at the same time of the redemption arc rappers who didn’t have to do crime but could rap about having done crime, about how Christmas missed us, and 80% or more of the literati couldn’t track it, but the youngsters could and did and some of them fell in love with language then and there and only later came to see the same patterns, the same magic in the canon but without any preening pose of false fidelity to the idea that it amounts to a closed off pinnacle of human achievement.

———) Irish Ballads are ballads and narcocorridos are too.

——-) Ether is not the bullet or the ballot, but it stands as art sure as Richard Corey does.

————-) Souled American is a distilled howl of discontent and also why shouldn’t we all do better.

————-) It’s easy to forget that yes we can answered to a yearning that originates in Whitman.

————-) It’s easy to discern that the journey to the end of the night is execrable and still ache from its beauty.