- THE ECONOMY
We used to make things we didn’t understand (Marx), consumed by people who didn’t understand us, and now we don’t even understand the people who are making them, that is us. Our misunderstandings progress.
We consume things that are familiar, and the more familiar they get, the less we know or sympathize with ourselves, the people who make them. We are not familiar with the parts of these things that other people make, but we love to use them. Technology is familiar, people are not. The people who make TVs know us from TV better than we know them or ourselves. When we are not on TV, we are waiting to slit our (their) throats. The German economy thrives because Germans make “the thing that goes inside the thing that goes inside the thing.”
Can you love people you don’t understand? With a blender and a mixer and an iPhone.
The Jesuits would be pleased.
Why would God need to choose a people when there are all these machines around.
What else would He do with the Salvation Army warehouses?
- POUND IN THE OZARKS
5 time grimace:
pro patria
pro domo
pro usura
pro forma
pro pane
3. EXPANSIVE SONG
Space is my Baby
Time is my Bitch
(with Vince Cellucci)
4. I BROKER
“in this army you break down your body like a gun ascertain its needs and reassemble it for action when they’ve been met”
The Manual
splitting hairs for commodities
the centrifugal force that dismembers matter into sellable minis
the broker broke down his body and ordered its needs from a catalogue
everything arrived by mail overnight and the broker reassembled hermself
by the time the market opened
herm hoped to make enough to post a profit
pn the increasing needs of herm body
“every day you don’t sell you buy”
herm ever-expanding ever-needy body
was an expense that had to be covered by greater profit
so when herm body incorporated the city the country and the globe
it had to be broken down and fed
by myriads of catalogues from outer space
whence the profits had to also eventually come
today herm franchised copper on mars and sold
the green algae noon meal of the cloned venus from last night
i went to sleep without a shower and woke up malcontent
but my daughters brought me time for breakfast
i was happy with the design
some retro some yet to be duplicated
what counts is attitude
- SAN MICHELE
it’s got to be raining in Venice
to write like Henry James
was never your wish in even
the most twisted version of yourself
from The Best American Poetry 2013 edited by Denise Duhamel
Love it. Is this the same wonderful fellow who used to narrate (or free-associate) for NPR?
Posted by: Leah Martinson | May 15, 2021 at 08:42 PM