The Meltflesh Under the Eyes Is the Sallow of Chicken Skin

The Egyptian Mirror.
Why did the intifada become a revolution?

Nixonland in Egypt.

Progressives, repression, echoes of history.

Spectacular infantilisation.
The trouble with normal.

• Recognizing the language of tyranny.
• On the motherfucking rich.
• Mobamafucker.
• Disemployment.
• Rumsfeldian. 
• Justice priorities.
• Gaithersburg says take that, Rockville bitches.
• The trains through Gaithersburg are eastbound or westbound, dope.
• Zero surprise in My Future Hell. Fuckers.
• Wheaton Plaza!
• Poor tax.
• Guess the densest in MOCO!
• ICC! 
• More.
• Little Danny Snyder.
• Footballism. See above. 
• Society of spectacle.
• Elizabeth Bishop was born 100 years ago today!

ONE ART

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something everyday. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing further, losing faster:
places and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

• Simic's Where Is Poetry Going? is precisely why I give you the poem and get the fuck out of its way.
• Heh, if you think I'm a relentless bastard with the passive-aggressive Kind, listen to Clay Pigeon's show.
• LCD Soundsystem shutting down.
• Everything goes to shit.
• Wells Fargo. 
• 50 druggiest albums ever? 
• PJ Harvey.
• Music and malice.
• UPDATE! Just motherfucking shoot me.
• Shot the picture. 
• New TV on the Radio coming! 
• New Bonnie Prince Billy coming!
• Who'd fall in love....
• Go back.

UNIT

Albert Goldbarth

This is the pain you could fit in a tea ball.
This is the pain you could pack in a pipe
 – a plug of pungent shag-cut pain,
a pain to roll between the thumb and the forefinger.
Here: this pain you could pour down the city sewers,
where it would harden, and swell, and crack
those tubes like the flex of a city-wide snake,
and still you would wake and
there would be more for the pouring.
Some pain believes its only true measure is litigation.
For other pain, the glint of the lamp
in a single called-forth tear is enough.
Some pain requires just one mouth, at an ear.
Another pain requires the Transatlantic Cable.
No ruled lines exist by which to gauge its growth
(my pain at three years old. . . at five. . . ) and yet
if we follow the chronolinear path of Rembrandt's face
self-imaged over forty years - a human cell
in the nurturing murk of his signature thick-laid paint – 
we see the look-by-look development,
through early swank and rollick, of a kind of pain
so comfortable it's worn, at the last,
like a favorite robe, that's frayed by now, and intimate
with the frailties of its body, and has
an easy fit that the showiest cloak of office
never could. In 1658, the gaze is equally
into himself, and out to the world-at-large
 – they've reached a balance of apportioned
disappointment – and the meltflesh under the eyes
is the sallow of chicken skin, recorded
with a faithfulness, with really a painterly
tenderness, that lifts this understanding of pain
into something so accommodating, "love" is the word
that seems to apply to these mournfully basso
bloodpan reds and tankard-bottom browns. Today
in the library stacks, the open face of a woman
above this opened book of Rembrandt reproductions
might be something like the moon he looked to,
thinking it shared in his sadness. What's
her pain? her ohm, her acreage, her baker's dozen,
of actual on-your-knees-in-the-abattoir misery?
I don't know. I'm not writing this
pretending that I know. What I can say is that
the chill disc of the stethoscope is known to announce
an increment of pain not inappropriate
to being blurted forth along the city wall
by a corps of regalia' d trumpeters.
Who's to say what a "unit" of pain is?
On a marshy slope beyond the final outpost,
Rembrandt stares at the moon, and stares at the moon,
until the background drumming-in of the ocean
and the other assorted sounds of the Amsterdam night,
and then the Amsterdam dawn, are one
with his forlornness, and the mood fades
into a next day, and a woman here
in Kansas turns to face the sky: she's late
for her appointment. She's due
for another daily injection of nine c.c.'s of undiluted dol.