At some point they will push the button.
God will demand it. Or some billionaire.
Same difference.
At the faculty meeting one of my coworkers told everyone a crazy story:
They're putting kitty litter in classrooms for the furry students.
The weather is pleasant.
It's December 28 in the northern hemisphere.
"It's horrifyingly nice outside," I comment.
Mom and Dad say they've planted some trees.
"You do what you can," they shrug.
Soon the army will be securing access to water.
I don't know what narratives my parents are absorbing.
They don't watch Fox and think they aren't brainwashed,
but they're usually angry at Kim Jong Un
I want them to be angry at people with power.
They've never asked me,
but I sometimes wonder if I'll find litter in my classroom
after the next school shooting
So I can help keep things clean.
It feels like the world is ending.
The way it was supposed to in 1999.
Evangelicals want to instigate Armageddon.
Everyone's waiting
Thinking they'll come out on top.
Poetry & Fiction
Cymothoa Exigua
The fish’s tongue,
Its vessels severed,
Rots and falls away
And Cymothoa exigua
Grafts itself in place.
It wriggles one way
Taking note
It wobbles up and down
It makes a dance that seems like speech
And becomes its master’s sound
And when the school of fish consumes
Exigua-serving lies
They can see the world’s truth
With Cymothoa eyes
Errata 002 (Fish Sandwich)
More than her pugnacious breasts
Or buttocks like grapefruits in hip pockets,
Men notice her hair first:
A great silken rope swinging to her waist
They flounder for weapons
Against her strength
And hope one day to bring her down to their level;
To use her body to wipe their feet.
They find fault to lessen the terror.
Her grandmother married her to a man with 60 acres--
If a woman is a mule, let her at least be well off--
But she left him for another man.
You cain't get her with no fish sandwich.
He demanded that she hide her hair,
And when he died she let it down.
All the men came running--
Each one offering to make her a mule.
She preferred managing the store
To managing her respectability.
Until one day Tea Cake saunters in--
Camels and Courvoisier--
"Oooh! it's a lady!"
She comes home from the store,
Finding him on her porch with a string full of fish.
"Hey, sweet thang,
Can I buy you a fish sandwich?"
2024
The most important election of our lifetimes:
Trump v.BidenHarris.
I remember the excitement
when she took the corpse-president’s place.
But then we were told
nothing would fundamentally change.
Fewer still hoped the killing would stop—
but Amerika did
what Amerika does best:
Genocide. Proletaricide. Anthropocide.
She needed our votes for the crime of crimes—
to damn our souls to everlasting hell
and save the nation’s empty myth
from a faltering husk of a man.
“The fate of the Palestinians is unfortunate,
but we must think first of our families.”
I voted for her.
Claudia de la Cruz.
The working people of Palestine are my family.
The King’s English
I wonder, before mass media,
How God named Light
In the king’s English.
Ecclesiastic hierarchy, sure,
But two men cannot see the same Sun.
And when the printing press came,
How far away was mass literacy?
How long until the masses can read the news?
Martin Luther put each man in front of his own Bible.
How could one book be read by two men?
Today’s stories come from the networks.
Corporate hierarchies, sure,
But we don’t have to read.
The internet knows things for us,
But we can’t read that.
Errata 003 (The Guillotine)
Every textbook read
Teaches us to take pride in your graft
Live for you and we can eat
And hope a few survive as children
They'll endure by tooth and claw
The world is yours, the anthem sings
Said bring you the bread
Clock in clock out pray to the calf
It's dishonorable to cheat
My blood becomes your billions
Your bloody hands stain every vault
All is yours but we have dreams
But guess what we got you instead
Don't bother dodging simple math
All for one was bare deceit
There's one of you, but we are millions
The blade is clean, and sharp, and broad
We'll only keep a headless king.
Taking Time
One called Victor, a Dutchman,
The other a Scotchman called James Gregory,
And the third being a negro named John Punch.
They had run away from Virginia, were caught, tried, and sentenced in 1640.
The Dutchman and the Scotchman were condemned
To serve out the remainder of their indentured servitude
Plus one year.
And the third being a negro was condemned to serve out his life.
John Punch became the first piece of chattel.
And so, we took his time.
Eons passed.
One man might own a hundred lifetimes.
One fattened tick
That could never live a minute longer
No matter how much time he sucked.
No matter the genteel civility lavished on his equals.
The tick’s cause was lost:
Chattel disfavored;
Wages more efficient.
And criminals… who cares what happens to them?
Oh, by the way, if you don’t have a job
We’ll have to arrest you for vagrancy.
And now we have moved on from that barbaric dispensation
All the old problems have been solved.
We join together in harmony
And ignore the strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Every day in the paper I read about time.
Time taken before it was due.
How much time does it take?
Errata 001 (Shall I Phone You or Nudge You?)
He leaves work between six and seven every night.
Takes the same route home.
Obeys every traffic sign.
Pays his bills;
No bad checks;
No registered firearms:
The world's most boring human.
He has very nice garbage:
He's not looking for buff.
Rather, meticulous.
Refined.
Anal.
He eats. They linger; she fawns over him.
The busboy,
Over the whine of the vacuum,
Tells him the pair should leave.
She loves the pinched nasally whine of his voice.
Quivering, she asks him to stay and pronounce--
Sensually--
"Passport"
He does.
"You're right we should leave"
He asks if she would like to have breakfast with him.
"Sure. Fine. Whatever."
Foolishly confident, he replies:
"Shall I phone you or nudge you?"
They did not have breakfast.
A computer would never match her with him
Love Poem No. 9
There are too many love poems in the world.
It could be a conspiracy by Big Love
to sell saccharine devotional inventories.
Maybe literary prestige and ambition
inspire in the novice poet a dream
which can only be described in verse.
I think it was a basic way to test my cleverness–
the way an artist learns to master perspective,
then learns to break
the expectations of the viewer
and folds this knowledge into their craft.
It’s simply human.
One hopes we all experience love,
and maybe some of us try to distill that love
into something that insists the world know,
“I am here–
and I love in all the ways I know how.”
Remainder
You sent a picture today.
You were reminded of me
and you wanted to share the moment.
I listened
to the long stretches
of time
between the reminders
Sophistry and Solipsism in the New Millennium 