Acheron

There's a sort of tired like a secret —
a small bite from the inside, where the worry-marks nag;
a toroid jitter like a zero coming into itself,
its collapse a relief.

Were there one to take my hand,
to peer into my palm,
to count the tears cried it,
I would know this as love.

A Consolation Elsewhere

… So much for the hordes mad to redeem legislated dreams, mad to buy, mad to fatten fleeting moments in the caress of the well-turned bauble …

Upon entering the wholesale club today I saw an old man pause before a plasma television. His face slackened before it, becoming smooth again like a child's. His eyes took him to where he was no longer — basting in brute splendor and feats effortlessly fell, off-handedly manly.

On its electric surface doe eyes framed with lashes like lazy punkahs batted at him and implants thrust achingly forward. Clefts beckoned, swells cajoled. Under the spray-on insulation and girders and halogen lights the box wove its spell. A bright bit of moisture on his lip told me all I need to know. I pressed on to lettuce and socks secure in the sexlessness of it, in the stripped down necessity of having to feed and dress day after day after day.

Someday, a coffin makeweight.

Perhaps this old man and I are already dearly departed, trapped in bodies whose failures signify, whose successes are purely nugatory (“Went the whole day without a twinge in my hip ...). We share this life where life — real life in its ruddy, muddy essence — is a mere memory flung in our face by the beautiful big boxed-in world and it shapely, deathless fauna.

"The Time Is out of Joint"

Perhaps the stars grow fainter and the sun dimmer because they recede from us.

What would time be, I wonder, after the earth has uncoupled from its parent? How would the last timekeeper, before joining his fellows in freezing, measure those last extra-solar hours, minutes, seconds?

The earth spins and hurdles, punching itself through space's dark breast, and we can't seem to keep concerned, choosing to chew instead the lotus of a billion pixellated come-ons, ones which tell us our best "us" rest on the other side of its convexity: the lies that lubricate things, the cable wefts that bind us, taut 'til made to shake our blood into a thousand frenzied droplets.

A debt to pleasure, to be sure.

Meager Ambits for Those Imagined Mighty

The butcher'll shave it as thin as you like it,
but you must — you must! —
insist that he change the blade,
'cause on the one on there now
deliquescent clots gather unto them legions
so infinitesimally infinite and arriving as if on cue.

Do I sound like Howard Hughes?

Well, a sneeze,
a panspermic peopling, no less;
that wee fleck feeds multitudes,
one of which will find that one corner in the miles of you
unpatrolled by any cells o' the watch —
that batch of sandwich steak looks fresh.

Is his thumb on the scale?
No sale!

The Wedding

The jagged prize that fell to him
Offered him so little that humble he
(One so backward and behindhand he frequently

Can’t see 'round his own head)
Stood there like a mound of goddamn fantastic,
Painfully attuned to the piss, Rabelaisian,

Consecrating the ceremony, only hoping
The whole fucking embarrassment of it
Would dribble away like spit

Around a newly breached tooth in a toddler’s gum;
Only hoping his monster'd be made to scrape and toe
The morning into novel convolutions, though

Only hoping; only he,
Humble he, hoping —
Hoping for only . . .

All of this
As I listen
To talk of Jane Austen.

Multiculturalism in Crisis

On NPR's On Point the host, Tom Ashbrook, is currently interviewing Robert Putnam, the sociologist who wrote Bowling Alone, a work  anatomizing the retreat from public life that characterized the late decades of the twentieth century. He's just published an article that finds that the more ethnically diverse a neighborhood is, the less likely its denizens are properly to trust others, to vote, to engage in public discourse, to place faith the government, and the like. In fact, as Prof. Putnam so pithily pointed out a moment ago, the only things that increase are "protest marches and TV watching."

Alarming stuff. And Prof. Putnam, if his voice is any indication, seems exceedingly uncomfortable making his assertions; he keeps protesting his staunch liberalism, but his stammering manner suggests that he's well aware his remarks cast such bona fides in doubt — and having Pat Buchanan, also invited to the table today, in his corner has certainly not put him at ease. After all, the phenomena Prof. Putnam describes certainly lend force to the conspiracy theorists' argument that Leftism in the US and elsewhere, as underwritten and inspired by such things as the Communist International, was really cultural warfare intended to undermine the bastions of Western democracy — and thus Western culture.