Barbara

04:30 woke me to spattering
furtive rain
low clouds and the aftermath of a
storm someone else experienced
to the North. Late.
Dad says, she looks gray as gray.

I had to book another flight
the distance to the first one was now
out of reach by car. So I
spent, lifted, drove, checked
slid through security.
Not even my buttons are metal.
(They say the Sidhe abide neither
iron nor tune, and a pitchfork's
handy at a New Oleanian wake.)

After these rusted hours
I saw my matriarch in her
cloud pale green bedsheets
deflated
like a punctured volleyball her skull
stands out from the pillow
flesh laid back by planetary mass
liquid inside the skin, her arms bones
wavering as she gestures.

She waves at her guests, their words
low hollow loud over the blow
of O₂
and hers thin like river rushes
an oboe playing Taps
when she says she's
bored (tired)
in this place without even
televisual hypnotic medication.

So this, I think, when looking down
––Mother and pastor praying with her––
on her supine grace, slate eyes
overwhelmed and lungs
near to giving up wind and psuché,
is what staring ten thousand miles into an
uncertain reward is. Jehovah I wish
I believed in you so my curses
would have a chance to prick and pierce.

She and I have naught to discuss
as we have not been so close
as we use to be, but
still she is, lying there, my ancestor
and besides even if I didn't owe her
something I oblige myself
to try magic for loved ones.

Her flesh is warm and dry, feels
like a soft tortilla over hard
veins, pushed by ever-increasing heartrate
as gas exchange fails
and the antibiotics may save her
long enough for tumors
to finally
do her in. And if I want to
scream at the sky
motherfucker
that's nothing beside what
boils behind her slate colored
eyes, hair, skin.

If I could pray, I would pray for her
to go before it's too late.
If I could cry, I would shed sugary
water on the drooping blooms of a
lily growing from a mound of limestone gravel.

She has a tray with cold tea,
a styrofoam ice cup and pencil.
On the counter by the wall, a small
jar of baby food: apple sauce,
eaten just down to the label
no spoon in sight.

Cytotoxic chemicals yellow flowing
from one of four IV bags
and piss dripping yellow-brown
from a catherter,
these tubes are now outside
vessels and veins
for the water between her hair
and toes, her lymph––blood––
mucus––sweat system;

all regulated
filled to overcapacity
to saturate her tissues
with life-preserving elements
just long enough
to enter hospice,
where it's a little nicer to die than
here overlooking a parking lot
and thunderheads
from the top floor
no one wants
to pass by the terminal
elderly on their way
to visit their
recovering
kin.

It's time's falling quarter rainbow
––in a fading daguerreotype––
a piebald horse leaping from a whitewashed
platform under wet skies
while a street orchestra
blasts its horns drunkenly,
to the tune of Bachhus' suicide,
and sounds like watching a rocket fall
on a child in a gods-forsaken desert,
and emotional stability
approaches Ø. But the horror
of it stays behind the eyes
out of lips' reach.

Her hand is still warm
I grasp it to make my goodbyes
at the end of visiting hours the sun
sets temporarily while the solstice approaches
she smiles so sweetly that I can't help but fly
away inside while my face cracks and cleaves.
My eyes convey happiness in seeing her
before I laid eyes that wax simulacrum
recumbent in a ponderously floating box
on its way downstream into
black northern soil where the giants live
and her husband waits with a cigarette.

Your pre-existing beliefs influence your attitude toward allowed levels of coercion falling short of Date Rape.

This study suggests that having certain beliefs and attitudes toward women and sex, specifically relating to justifications for interpersonal violence and levels of trust toward women as a generalized group, is strongly correlated with acceptance of behavior norms that are (arguably, if you're an ass) conducive to perpetuation of the patriachically-approved culture of rape in this country: the "she wanted it" (secretly, once I had forced myself on her) because "she didn't complain" (because she was terrified of me) excuse.

Sexually aggressive men who reported a cognitive style that distrusted women and justified interpersonal violence (i.e., calloused sexual beliefs) took significantly longer to stop the date rape than either sexually aggressive men without this rape supportive cognitive set or nonaggressive men, who did not differ significantly on decision-making. Laboratory judgments also corresponded with naturalistic decisions as the sexually aggressive group was nearly 3 1/2 times more likely than the nonaggressive group to delay stopping the tape [simulating a date rape] until it reached intervals containing verbal threats and forced intercourse within the scenario. Although this study did not manipulate character alcohol consumption per se, it suggests that dispositional and cognitive factors, such as sexual aggression history and rape supportive cognitions, are important determinants of judgments and decisions in sexual encounters.

Yes, Virginia and Victor, there are such things as rape-supportive cognitions. One wonders whether any of the gentlemen in the study stopped the tape at the first sign of coercion? Via Jill at Feministe.

Slaughterhouse Life

R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut. One of the most sapient of Homo. Now that he's dead, I'm sure you'll all be more willing to take his advice.

icarus ii

it was an ordinary gathering of fools
gentry'd up and strutting
at the opportune moment alex spoke
just the wrong words
–she took the fools lightly–
from lips curled into themselves
in contempt

like a murder of judges
fools in flashing noses flourished
rubber knives, kung fu taunts
swooped together on an imaginary
carcass–alex's soul was gone
chased by self examination

take this, nanowrimo

Well I'm no road-hog speed freak with an endless roll of typing
paper and contempt for corrections or even looking back.
(Dylan had his back pages, too, I recall)
Nor am I a wannabe writer or even a writer without motivation.
(Who was it who said you write in a gutter or your bullshit day
job, while the Man wrings you out a bit each day, even when
your little tiny crunched-down humped-down landlady kicks you
out for leaving all those wine bottles in the hallway and
not paying a dime of rent?) But I digress–
your eyes are the least enchanting shade of evening, my deer
–and I ask whether you can Beat your way to a romance novel
or perhaps should stick to short-form
slashfic?
::page 46
had been hungry all day. Todd finally spotted a deer through
the lush summer foilage, a beautiful 14-point buck with bushy
white tail twitching as he scented a doe who was no doubt nearby
with brown spots on his hide to camoflage him from wolves. Todd
knew better how to take out this magnificent creature. He raised
his Hollytown A-46 compound bow with its twisted blue-and-white
nylon string and pulled back until the fletchings on his hand-made
::page 48
Charlene, her blonde hair stylishly lifting up and back from her
brow, crumpled her brow in worry, "Don't leave me Todd," she said,
"I'll do anything you want," she said, reaching for his hefty
::
but look maybe you shouldn't wait until the month of
publication nightmares
and a blank page waiting to chew your ideas from shit into visible
shit
but instead retreat with your pencil and yellow lined legal pad with
its useless punched trio of voids around which you can doodle
to the outhouse and amidst the flies contemplate the hurt
and pointlessness and injustice of the universe and distill with
your flexing bowel a thought which squeezes itself bloody
from your forehead, bits of you gray matter still clinging to
it, postmodern Athena clothed in graphite dust cyphers and signs,
and bury that pad then, in the earth, and return your idea to the garden
from whence it came: that compost heap where you
grow all those tomatoes and yams
and blackcurrants
from which you make the ink which you use
to ghostwrite bedtime stories told by your grandmother to your
nonexistent children, in the voice of Samuel Clemens and Goethe's
love child, from the viewpoint of a drug-addicted autodidact with
cerebral palsy and gender identity issues and also schizophrenia
on alternate Wednesdays,
and every story is both a murder mystery
and a meandering meditation on modern life
both a self-referential and endlessly clever send-up of contemporary
fiction and a sober re-invention of the drama;
and all of it poolry edited,
before you fall asleep with your significant other holding your
shoulders gently and cooing to you when you say you didn't
do anything as spectacular today as yesterday or the day before that
or even last week when you were the best new composer of
garage rock since what's-his-face, and happy
you will be, and you'll sleep.

At the seams

This is a time of year for burning the Yule log at both ends, ramping up for an otherwise lackluster election cycle by deciding to do something you'll never do, and making resolutions you don't really want to make in the face of an omnipresent self-doubt brought on by late-empire America. Like the degeneration of the traditional culture of the Romans as they became richer and more powerful and more remote from the striving for survival that is the lot of the average human in all of our species' history, we are breaking down. I'm not calling for a raturn to traditional values. I'm saying, civil society is coming apart, breaking down, dissolving. Dripping out the bottom of that handbasket everyone's always talking about.

No one interacts with anyone anymore, except by remove behind the walls of an electronic world in which physical harm is made to seem at once both remote and continually threatening. An electronic cocoon whose inner atmosphere is like the Scarecrow's fear-chemicals... I've railed against infantilization of the citizenry of, well, everywhere (elsewhere), and this is a part of it. A child needs the protection of the parent figure, but the adult doesn't require this support: she gives it. Thus in order to keep the people docile and dependent the ever-present threat of harm must seem real, must be lurking behind every shadow and person whose appearance isn't like the appearance of one's own ancestors.*

But this is obvious--see also basically anything N. Chomsky's said about the power structures of Western culture, especially since the end of the New Deal. After the establishment of (somewhat) effective social support systems, elites needed a new method for maintaining power. Thus the Cold War, thus crack addicts, thus single mothers, thus Slobodan/Saddam, thus Terra-ists. Thus liberal media. Thus democracy. But that last one isn't mentioned. To keep the people from trying to figure out what's good for them (though, they must be too busy with their lives to be able to figure that out anyway, right?), elites ought to do it for them. Gives everyone job security, as it were. Win-win.

Corporations fight corporations, trade groups fight trade groups, strongarms wrestle strongarms for the keys to slaves' chains. And what have we got? Bread and Circus. Or, obesity and "pop culture." And it's all coming down, by which I mean the facade by which elites maintain control of the purposefully mislead populace. That doesn't mean the revolution is coming. No, it means, more likely, that the revolution won't come in time, in our lifetimes. And then it's climate change and the end of fossil fuels and the end of clean water and finally the collapse of those precious structures which the aging and obsolete top .000005% are busy protecting.** A return to a township-style societal structure, anyone? Thus the "end" of capitalism is not a quiet dissolution of government, as perhaps Marx predicted, but a firey collapse. Not a whisper but a cry of agony.

*Thus mixing of the races (as it were) must be subtly discouraged. Thus mass media stereotypes by effete elites in (perhaps unknowing, see **) service to their cause.
**Class consciousness being what it is, I can't in good conscience accuse anyone of doing more in service to the elites than acting in their own (material) self-interest. Certainly usually not in their moral self-interest. Bill Gates' philanthropy is not a balance to his misdeeds or those of his issue (corporations) if any. But the net effect is very similar to what would expect if there were a conspiracy in the WTO or Trilateral Commision or Illuminati/Masons, or whatever. It's those advocating for lower echelons of society who know just what they're doing, whether futile or not. And this is itself commendable. The mutineer captain has committed to going down with the ship even if she succeeds in her coup.