I Know That I Braid Too Much on My Own Snapped-off Perceptions of Things

• Covid test taken, one swab for both nostrils, push it in until it starts to hurt then swipe and twirl, second swab for back of throat, push it in until you start to gag then swipe and twirl
• EZ Pass transponders received, loaded now with turnpike tribute
• This block originally typed in scrivener my pens finally organized down to my favorite four pens and my four favorite inks
• I scrawl on a single line of 5x5 per inch quad
• My handwriting, you’ve seen my handwriting
• If what I’m writing might end up here I’ll spare my eyes and transcription time and scrive for here there
• Planet and Earthgirl and Maine and cairn puns, what is the best way from 95 just into Connecticut to 95 crossing the Mass-New Hampshire state line?
• But this is what I do, I migrate from tablet to tablet, from scritch to tap
• Butterfly weed season in local meadows

• Crackers: public education is a breeding ground for anti-American and anti-White Jesus indoctrination that poisons the minds of our children and I'm sick of paying taxes to prop it up AND it is absolutely imperative public schools reopen in a time of plague for the sake of the children's education
• Lid or ratchure
• On Hobsbawm, whose tetrology, even though written in English English, influences how I think about power to this day
• Modern US racial capitalism
• The system did not appear ex nihilo 
• The four centrisms
• Hey, remember when that white cop choked a black guy to death by kneeing on his neck and people were like Woah! and there were street demonstrations and at one point Bill Barr turned police loose on peaceful protesters so Trump could do a cracker-whispering photo op?
• Shithole country
• Any scapegoat will do 
• On photography, protests, and citizenship
• Anglo-America loses its grip
• Against purity
• New Basinski! Sparkle Division
• Heard this this morning from Ira's show last night:

              
THE ONE THING THAT CAN SAVE AMERICA

John Ashbery

Is anything central?

Orchards flung out on the land,

Urban forests, rustic plantations, knee-high hills?

Are place names central?

Elm Grove, Adcock Corner, Story Book Farm?

As they concur with a rush at eye level

Beating themselves into eyes which have had enough

Thank you, no more thank you.

And they come on like scenery mingled with darkness

The damp plains, overgrown suburbs,

Places of known civic pride, of civil obscurity.

These are connected to my version of America

But the juice is elsewhere.

This morning as I walked out of your room

After breakfast crosshatched with

Backward and forward glances, backward into light,

Forward into unfamiliar light,

Was it our doing, and was it

The material, the lumber of life, or of lives

We were measuring, counting?

A mood soon to be forgotten

In crossed girders of light, cool downtown shadow

In this morning that has seized us again?

I know that I braid too much on my own

Snapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me.

They are private and always will be.

Where then are the private turns of event

Destined to bloom later like golden chimes

Released over a city from a highest tower?

The quirky things that happen to me, and I tell you,

And you know instantly what I mean?

What remote orchard reached by winding roads

Hides them? Where are these roots?

It is the lumps and trials

That tell us whether we shall be known

And whether our fate can be exemplary, like a star.

All the rest is waiting

For a letter that never arrives,

Day after day, the exasperation

Until finally you have ripped it open not knowing what it is,

The two envelope halves lying on a plate.

The message was wise, and seemingly

Dictated a long time ago.

Its truth is timeless, but its time has still

Not arrived, telling of danger, and the mostly limited

Steps that can be taken against danger

Now and in the future, in cool yards,

In quiet small houses in the country,

Our country, in fenced areas, in cool shady streets.