fleeting arc 

a star’s fleeting arc across the night
a bright and obscene refulgence
a cold relief buried in that errant ecliptic
it shapes itself as the sky congeals around it

goes on to better things
does not go on at all
now gone

consumptive
reductive
absent

What I’m Reading:

Violence against nature always goes hand in hand with violence against people.

— Stephen Markley / The Deluge

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Rather, the secret of our success is that we are talented at using information to connect lots of individuals. Unfortunately, this ability often goes hand in hand with believing in lies, errors, and fantasies. This is why even technologically advanced societies like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union have been prone to hold delusional ideas, without their delusions necessarily weakening them. Indeed, the mass delusions of Nazi and Stalinist ideologies about things like race and class actually helped them make tens of millions of people march together in lockstep.

— Yuval Noah Harari / Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

When the prison door
bangs shut behind your back—
that’s when you think about freedom.

— Tomica Bajsić / “When You Hit Yourself with an Axe While Chopping Wood”

For someone openly campaigning to get a Nobel Peace Prize, Donald Trump has been going about it in an unusual way. Early last month, the President proclaimed in a press conference that the Department of Defense would thereafter be known as the Department of War. At the same briefing, the presumed new Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, promised that the armed forces will deliver “maximum lethality” that won’t be “politically correct.” That was a few days after Trump had ordered the torpedoing of a small boat headed out of Venezuela, which he claimed was piloted by “narco-terrorists,” killing all eleven people on board, rather than, for instance, having it stopped and inspected. After some military-law experts worried online that this seemed uncomfortably close to a war crime, Vice-President J. D. Vance posted, “Don’t give a shit.”

— Benjamin Wallace-Wells / “Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and the ‘War from Within’ “ / The New Yorker

I just remembered, remembered
freedom was life’s great lie,

remembered body is another
word for cage, remembered

night knew my name before
I ever had reason to fear.

— Alison C. Rollins / “Springtime Again”

American white supremacists have tried to justify their position by appealing to various hallowed texts, most notably the U.S. Constitution and the Bible. The U.S. Constitution originally legitimized racial segregation and the supremacy of the white race, reserving full civil rights for white people and allowing the enslavement of Black people. The Bible not only sanctified slavery in the Ten Commandments and numerous other passages but also placed a curse on the offspring of Ham-the alleged forefather of Africans-saying that “the lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers” (Genesis 9:25).

— Yuval Noah Harari / Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

The rubric of our history is synonymous with loss.
But haven’t we built such beautiful homes
on the hillside coming down.
Empires of one-one brick and pillar post.
Empires of galvanise and dirt.

— Anthony Joseph / “Empires”

Information is the glue that holds networks together, and when people are fed bad information, they are likely to make bad decisions, no matter how wise and kind they personally are. For tens of thousands of years, Sapiens built and maintained large networks by inventing and spreading fictions, fantasies, and mass delusions-about gods, about enchanted broomsticks, about Al, and about a great many other things. While each individual human is typically interested in knowing the truth about themselves and the world, large networks bind members and create order by relying on fictions and fantasies. That’s how we got, for example, to Nazism and Stalinism. These were exceptionally powerful networks, held together by exceptionally deluded ideas. As George Orwell famously put it, ignorance is strength.

— Yuval Noah Harari / Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

What I’m Listening To:

Like Saint Joan
Doing a cool jerk
Oh, I want you
Like a kanga roo
Ooh

— Big Star / “Kanga Roo”

It Is Little Wonder

It is little wonder — this ill wind.

We’re the largest exporter of young martyrs. They travel with confidence and exotic lawyers, falling into maggot defences, and jaunty tweeds in cooler weather. All so sanguine. Are you afraid?

A single empire in its crosshairs — colonial possessions and all else thanks to their regrets and embarkations on cancelled television series.

Touch yourself not … I’m kidding, touch yourself all you please, and go ahead place your hand on the hot burners and watch your skin slough off. 

Elsewhere, readers sing concatenations of the mining of rare earths and rejoining the arms race. Two right arms for your left, please. Either you colonize yourself or settle for an enema. 

Wit and worth are absent, and inspections are rare. Do you sniff the familiar trope of boy loses girl?

Social commentary need not apply. Violence will. Let’s chart the protagonist’s intellectual and moral emotion and touch nothing. Fall back or spring forward. See if anyone cares.

You randy chatwit, nitwit, godwit water wading sand flea. See if I care. 

Go ahead and snift your brandy and enforce your immigration law writ large. Wade into proofing wool and gather your navel gaze. 

Now you’re smart enough to be an American Prez.

What I’m Reading:

Since the world is ending, why not let the children touch the paintings?

— Ben Lerner / 10:04

Gutbucket In Buffet Time

Mutagens remain in the environment. The disaster follows a now familiar course. During the early stages of the emergency clean-up a bestial man cried:

I sing in praise of older gutbuckets. I pledge to be benefic and soporific at court gatherings. I will pray 23 times daily and take no more than 5 morning constitutionals. I will no longer place myself in front of others (as naturally my space is above all others).

I will play my left handed guitar twice each morning and I will remain ghastly and pale in the afternoon cloud light. Later, by the night light, I will blow my right handed harmonica.

Play! Go, daddy, go!

If someone, anyone, calls me a child of the universe — I will go apeshit and devalue their municipal bonds and charge remainder pay to the government coiffers in buffet time.

Such is the nature of my sardonic tonic.

It blasts a hole in my imperium. Someone say, Amen, and shut up! Because that is what I’m about to do.

What I’m Reading:

The tendency to create powerful things with unintended consequences started not with the invention of the steam engine or AI but with the invention of religion. Prophets and theologians have summoned powerful spirits that were supposed to bring love and joy but occasionally ended up flooding the world with blood.

— Yuval Noah Harari / Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

Shadow Language

This fridge arrives with a toothache, and the dialectical fright squad was chop-licking with overwet prosody. It is poor form to be rich and our canines are oversharpened while our molars have ground down to battlefield dust.

The government of alchemists — seeking admixtures of lucre-baiting consciousness — without tongue, without signifiers, within a sangfroid winning way are lost in a ruthless world dominated by amateur dentists. 

These burial lands are infested with cicadas charging oppressive rents — their gestures the  shadow language of cargo cults and trepanators. 

Is that a hole in your head, she says.

We are fractured and without shelter.  All exhortations are moot, but with a side of mediocre marmalade. Huckleberry. 

Accept this gilt logorrhea as a guilty pleasure averted. We’re a surly lot full of liquid loquacity misplaced. This is irreconcilable, but it is nonetheless. Nonetheless. 

This is the twilight of empire!

Look, it’s lunchtime!

(Insert appetite here)

What I’m Reading:

In the end we knew what was ahead. 

Postapocalypse was our present tense.

— Alison C. Rollins / “Springtime Again”

point of illumination

sitting on a box of squirrels smearing graph paper archives with bodily fluids

it seems meaningfully aligned with bit rot aloof
feldspar arrested in amber

something i recovered from the rubble of the present tense presented on mute

my eyes occluded by pellucid water easily understood to be thematic sludge

life only gets darker from the point of illumination this much is visibly blinding

life only gets darker
life only gets starker

tear tear tear until there is nothing left to shred there are only three words to listen for —

we’ve forgotten what they were

What I’m Reading:

Some days are measured by caesuras,
some hours by snakes in the grass.

— Alison C. Rollins / “Springtime Again”

The Tuneless Ballad of Rostay Toonany and Chemo Destrapè (redux)

Clowns and claustrophobes both. Masters of microbes and microbiomes—and bonhomie. Too much probiotic nonsense squelching their wheelhouse one day, and they took to fisticuffs.

Oh, what a dastardly day for all! The day the two friends took to whinging, winging and knuckles. The magpies alighted on the witch alder to watch. The eastern cottontail hare trained their mysterious obsidian eyes on the row. The red efts and copperheads ignored each other in utter transfixion—neologisms were created for the event—so rare it was.

Rostay Toonany landed sharp jabs, but Chemo Destrapè eager to be done with the punch-out threw a barrage of roundhouse lefts and uppercuts and dinged Rostay’s temporal lobe—bumping about in his skull—trebly charged, in a timbre of orange and reds.

The bestiary cackled, hissed, and meeped.

It was bitter-cold day that—the day of the bust-up. But Chemo’s arms were raised forevermore in victory and infamy—the day the protozoan roared.

What I’m Reading:

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

— Allen Ginsberg / “Howl, Part II”

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

How empty does your message have to be for a deranged right wing to even have a chance of winning? Of all the epitaphs that may one day be written on the gravestone of Western liberalism, the most damning is this: Faced off against a nihilistic, endlessly cruel manifestation of conservatism, and somehow managed to make it close.

— Omar El Akkad / One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Who’s that on his bike
Tears on cold cheeks . . .
. . . Most odd to be crying
And pedalling hard

— Seamus Heaney / “The Race”

You can feel the onset of authoritarianism in your central nervous system: shock, disbelief, fear, paralysis. Familiar norms and rules disintegrate every day, but the ultimate consequences remain unclear, and Americans don’t know how to assess the danger. We haven’t lived under authoritarianism. We haven’t experienced this level of sustained polarization and vitriol since the run-up to the Civil War. During the McCarthy era, careers and lives were ruined, but the White House didn’t lead the pursuing hounds.

— George Packer / “America’s Zombie Democracy” / The Atlantic

Fall fell wind-wise today—
trembles of dried lilac stalks, dead
hydrangea that couldn’t reach
water, all the finches and wrens
boldly on the move. Fall fell, my friend.

— David Roderick / “Message for Jim in Syria [Fall fell wind-wise]”

. . . Las Casas issued a famous declaration: Todo linaje de los hombres es uno—All humanity is one.

At the same time, the New World’s conquerors mocked the idea of humanity’s oneness, laying the foundation for race supremacy. Spanish settlers and colonists legitimated cruel killing on an unprecedented scale, forcing the New World’s inhabitants to labor in mines, fields, and waters, to extract the riches of America—gold, silver, pearls, dyes, and soon sugar and tobacco—that Europe would use to gild its empires, muster its armies, fund its wars, build its cathedrals, and pay for more voyages of conquest and enslavement. Never mind what priests like Las Casas were saying. Theologians were known to say one thing and its opposite. Indians were little better than apes put on earth to serve man. To dominate them was just. To work them to death no more a sin than to butcher a hog.

— Greg Grandin / America, América

in my home town, when I was a child
in elementary school, faithful in my recitation
to the flag, the L.A.P.D. pounded into a man’s body
on the side of the freeway, caught on tape,
the camera candid, the verdict not guilty,
my neighborhood ablaze, the smoke visible
from the kitchen window and on TV.

— Donika Kelly / “What I Might Sing”

The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question, asked over and over again: When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power? What makes moments such as this one so dangerous, so clarifying, is that one way or another everyone is forced to answer.

— Omar El Akkad / One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

What I’m Listening To:

They swerved around the planets
A thousand times a minute,
Singing songs, I sang along
But my heart wasn’t in it.

— Jad Fair & Yo La Tengo / “Texas Man Abducted by Aliens for Outer Space Joy Ride”

(exhaust)

there’s a trace of optimism beneath your heels —
are you walking on your hands?

i’m perilously close to using a capital letter
in my suicide note unsent / unspent

i’ve a taste for the macabre stewed in offal
awful & awe-filled from watching monochromatic aurorae

it’s not bright enough, this anhedonic scrim
what did you expect — a gloating of fog horns?

i preferred the meep, meep of my volkswagen bug once
now i prefer to suck the rusted exhaust —

a pip of a pipe —
too exhausting to contemplate

What I’m Reading:

This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space . . .
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
if you’re going to say “I lived” . . .

— Nâzim Hikmet / “On Living”