Friday, March 27, 2026
I Am the Least Difficult of Men. All I Want Is Boundless Love, or: Born 100 Years Ago Today
MEDITATIONS IN AN EMERGENCY
Frank O'Hara
Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?
Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.
Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?
I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.
Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.
However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.
My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I am curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.
Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?)
St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away,” yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and courses and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.
Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!
It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.
“Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho’ She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too. —Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her. —I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.” —Mrs. Thrale.
I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.
Four more below the fold:
Wednesday, March 25, 2026
The Censor Uses the Black Crayon to Eradicate Sex
I was reading in the staff lounge yesterday post-lunch afternoon, one not-my-department colleague present, quiet, over there on his phone, when his same-department colleague, the loudest yappiest complainingest person in the building (yinz have all known, know, and will know a new one or dozen more in what remaining time we have left) commenced kvetching. Today's waah: the AI-created, AI-driven, supposedly mandatory AI training sessions that I've refused to do (with my boss' full awareness) and have garnered no grief
To be fair, both colleagues have elementary school-age children, and the focus of their yapping centered entirely, as it should, on their kids, so their bitching necessarily for their sanity's sake assumed the shitlord sociopaths using AI to help collapse world order so they can immiserate us for profit before eradicating us as rodents are not using AI to immiserate us for profit before eradicating us as rodents. Not enough people are freaking the fuck out, a key function of our shitlord sociopaths' constant relentless reprogramming of our heads. Believe it or not, I kept my mouth shut. Believe it or not, there's new Guided By Voices
Adrian mentioned his son's eighth birthday past Sunday, when his son is my age it will be 2084, the Earth will be here, what world? August 28, 2084 I will be 125. Nick Lowe turned 77 yesterday
PREFERNTIAL TREATMENT
Claire Schwartz
The Censor uses the black crayon
to eradicate sex. On payday, he takes
his wife and son to Shake Shack. Whatever
you want, the Censor says to his wife
when she asks what she should have.
The Censor crosses provide for your family
off of the list he keeps tucked in his billfold. To track
the time, the Censor sings You Are My Sunshine twice
while his son brushes his teeth. The boy shows the glass
his shining mouthstones and growls. He is a bear. No,
he is a boy. In the boy’s drawings, the zebras
are purple and white. His mother hangs
them on the fridge. What beautiful horses,
the Censor says. His wife’s wit trembles, then ebbs.
The children’s nails are clogged with black wax.
Saturday, March 21, 2026
Thirty-Three
One of two posts a year not tagged My Complicity
THE WRITER
Richard Wilbur
In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.
But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.
I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash
And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark
And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,
And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.
It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.
Thursday, March 19, 2026
The Eyesight, Seen As Inner, Registers Over the Impact of Itself Receiving Phenomena, and In So Doing Draws an Outline, or a Blueprint, of What Was Just There: Dead on the Line
I've reached the age of needing grandpa strings for my glasses. I can't read anything within my arms' reach while wearing my glasses so I can go hours without wearing them, and if I took them off then moved from where I started reading it often takes me five blind minutes to find them. This getting old shit. Fine metaphors abound. Here's my right eye
Reading is physically harder now that my left eye can barely see through glaucoma's fog: three weeks from today it will have knives jabbed into it to try and dissipate some of the fog then stop fog's counterattack (plus eyedoc will yoink-out the old windshield and install a new one). Insurance will cover all but the deductible says eyedoc's office manager. Takes ten minutes and I'll feel zero nada no pain, says eyedoc. We'll, um, see.
But I read fine, as in I can pick up a book and see and read the text in it, engage with it. I'm reading well, as in I'm enjoying reading and retaining and thinking about what I've just read. The issue, after six decades of reading: I can't finish a novel. I set a pace that matches my interest and enjoy processing what I've read and am eager to pick it up again when I next have a minute's chance, and then I'll end a chapter or turn a page and of a sudden, SCREECH! I not only don't want to read the book in that moment, I don't to read it, viscerally, since: as I type this sentence I can't imagine me finishing any of the novels. Fine metaphors abound. Here's my left eye
It doesn't seem connected to any particular catalyst or spastic reaction to that particular day's most clussterfuckic obscenity, though no doubt Cumulative Clusterfuckic Trauma accounts for part, and that's the true clusterfuckic obscenity. And it's not just reading: I mentioned here before how certain musicians and bands that once got constant playtime in my ears and head I viscerally don't want to listen to in my ears and, especially, in my head right now. Two poets (not Ashbery, though I say something catty about *Breezeway* at the bottom of the grid below). One restaurant. A certain road in Michigan (Waterloo-Munith), the fuck did that road do to me. My home disc golf course, the one with the sign on 22 that says it is sponsored by me and Seat Six. But every novel the current ongoing eternity. I was 7/8ths through loving Faulkner's *The Hamlet* yesterday when SCREECH! BURN! Fine metaphors abound. Terry Hall would have been 67 today, this is one of my dozen favorite songs ever, still!
TAPESTRY
John Ashbery
It is difficult to seperate the tapestry
from the room or loom which takes precedence over it.
For it must always be frontal yet to one side.
It insists on this picture of "history"
in the making, because there is no way out of the punishment
it proposes: sight blinded by sunlight.
The seeing taken in with what is seen
in an explosion of sudden awareness of its formal splendor.
The eyesight, seen as inner,
registers over the impact of itself
receiving phenomena, and in so doing
draws an outline, or a blueprint,
of what was just there: dead on the line.
If it has the form of a blanket, that is because
we are eager, all the same, to be wound in it:
This must be the good of not experiencing it.
But in some other life, which the blanket depicts anyway,
the citizens hold sweet commerce with one another
and pinch the fruit unpestered, as they will,
and words go crying after themselves, leaving the dream
upended in a puddle somewhere
as though "dead" were just another adjective.
Friday, March 13, 2026
what if a dawn of a doom of a dream bites this universe in two, peels forever out of his grave and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?
I won't apologize for my constant dooming though I concede it is relentless and accusatory at you and medicinal and poisonous to me, an essential component of my mithridatism; it is as necessary to me as it is a self-defeating lifesaving self-perpetuating motion loop. I would need to truly want it to stop before I could truly try to stop and I can't want it to stop when I think everything will ever and always get worse in the shitlordocene
Obligatory and over-used gag: when my daughter is my age it will be 2059 (the year of my centenary), the Earth will still be here (I won't), will the world? Doomy too if not doomier than me, she trys to not wallow in it like me, I envy her attempts, they are as genuine as mine wouldn't be. I do understand my wallowing is a choice that I tell myself is a moral imperative. Call it boomer guilt, call it parental concern, call it self-indulgent attention sluttery, call it getting old and foreseeing my physical future (some oldsters here may remember long ago when I regularaly likened my lifespan to America's timeline to Slothrop's missiles - still true). Forgive me, the doom will continue until it won't and it won't ever won't, we're still in doom, see inklings of doomier, have no idea how doomiest it's gonna get, only know that it will. Hear, this makes me happy though it doesn't give me hope
[what if a much of a which of a wind]
E.E. Cummings
what if a much of a which of a wind
gives truth to the summer's lie;
bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanks immortal stars awry?
Blow king to beggar and queen to seem
(blow friend to fiend:blow space to time)
—when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,
the single secret will still be man
what if a keen of a lean wind flays
screaming hills with sleet and snow:
strangles valleys by ropes of thing
and stifles forests in white ago?
Blow hope to terror;blow seeing to blind
(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)
—whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,
it's they shall cry hello to the spring
what if a dawn of a doom of a dream
bites this universe in two,
peels forever out of his grave
and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?
Blow soon to never and never to twice
(blow life to isn't: blow death to was)
—all nothing's only our hugest home;
the most who die,the more we live
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