Dark Birds Remember

Dark birds Empty fields

We left the eastern horizon

Shimmering behind us

And must invent a reason

To explain why all this

Has happened

Pills don't help

Dreams don't help

They no longer come

I watched Will Rogers

In the Modjeska

On South KK

Kinnickinnic Ave

What could that word mean

We got here so late

And we remember nothing

Names ring out

Fade and recede

Kinnickinnic

Kickapoo

Kenosha

Kaukana

We grew up

Playing in fields

Of disappearance

Massacres forts

Running past hitching posts

Walls topped

With shards of glass

Invisible lines

Drawn they say

By a distant god

In a distant garden

And bequeathed

To whites

The angle streets

Of this city

Milwaukee Clark Elston

Are Indian trails they say

How can we forget

What we never knew

But we know

Kinnickinnic means

That which is mixed

Tobacco with

The inner bark

Of willow

Or dogwood

The Merry Nights of Winter

 

Days are growing shorter My belly's growing fatter

Hope is growing thinner

In the merry nights of winter

They threw us on the scrapheap

And threw us into prison

They said that we were sinners

In the merry nights of winter

We ran out in the starlight

We cried up toward the heavens

The sleigh was going faster

In the merry nights of winter

On the yard and on the rooftops

In cornfields and in forests

We wish into the raindrops

Of the merry nights of winter

the guys on "billions"

right-angled

smoked-windowed

clock-brained

chopper-bladed

gold-bricked

cheese-mazed

rushed taut

cool glib

mansion-ed

purloined

legal illegal

emptied out

vortexed

sentiment-free

anti-self-reflective

brash brutish

trapped

crass gross

desperate

dangerous

(obviously)

imagination-less

(joyless)

ape-ing

hole-digging

self-obliterating

like a zone of density

in outer space

that grows

impenetrable

collapsing

inward

My Blaspheme: Impressions of Jesus of Nazareth After Listening to the Gospel of Matthew, KJV on audiobook. 10/2021 A.D.

This is permitted me: I was born and raised Catholic. Born into it.

Jesus of Nazareth is annoying, supercilious, hectoring, manipulative; he loves the sound of his own voice, is self-important, power-hungry, and exceedingly puritanical (excuse the anachronism, this trait is elaborated on further down).

JC is intelligent, scholarly and bookish. He is geeky about Jewish history and different traditions within Judaism in a way that's familiar to me. That is, when he talks about King David and different Jewish leaders who came after David, JC sounds like a kid going through the minutia of the Marvel Comic Universe or NBA team rosters.

JC obsesses over John the Baptist. It is clear why. JTB was as hard-core as hard-core can be regarding JC's burning and abiding focus: Bringing the worship of God out of the realm of the pomp and circumstance he perceived among certain elites of his faith and back down to the basics. Back to basics for John the Baptist meant living in the desert and living off of locusts and wild honey. Crunch, crunch.

For JC, it's all about the parables and some of his parables are pretty bizarre. They tend to focus around farming and banquets. JC got a lot of questions about the almost-here arrival of the "Kingdom of Heaven." A representative parable responding to this type of question is detailed below. In it, Yahweh's wedding banquet is the metaphor JC offers for the soon-to-arrive "Kingdom of God." God the Father is posited as the owner of a vineyard or some other agricultural enterprise. God-as-Landowner is getting married, so he sends his servants out to invite middle-income (non-servant) folks to the wedding banquet. These invitees tell the servants to piss off, that they don't want to go to the wedding! One middle-income villager is annoyed enough with the servants' invitation to whimsically kill one of them. He gone! JC's parables are full of these sudden violent, homicidal outbursts. The effect of these sudden blood blasts is jarring and disorienting on the reader.

The servants go back and tell Landowner Yahweh that the villagers said "no thanks" to the wedding invitation. So Yahweh says, Cool, then you guys are the new wedding guests. The wedding party is about to go off without a hitch, except one of the servants didn't put on nice clothes for the party. Uh-oh. Landowner Yahweh orders a group of properly dressed wedding guest servants to beat the shit out of the poorly dressed wedding guest servant and to bind him up with ropes and kill him.

Shit is like a Scorsese movie, like Joe Pesci playing God in these fucking parables. Regardless, the point is clear - Get your shit together and worship Yahwheh and - for fuck's sake - be ready to prove your faith when called upon or you're going to be shit-out-of-luck like the villagers who missed the party... or maybe you will even suffer the fate of the servant who didn't dress up for the wedding.

Embryonic Journey

I would've liked to have been just a guitar cinnamon, excuse me, just a guitar singer man. It didn't work out. A friend died in a drunk driving crash. A friend killed himself. Something bad blossomed in my brain and I couldn't get it out of my head. I moved back to Milwaukee. I had a crush on a woman who worked in a vegetarian deli. She told me, Jorma Kaukonen is coming to town. He's the guy who plays "Embryonic Journey," that Jefferson Airplane song. Oh yeah, I know that song, I said. Buh dee dee buh dee dee duh. Buh dee dee buh dee dee duh. That's a great song.

Jorma's guitar broadcast across the nondescript club with the force of 100 canoes paddling into a bay at dusk. I started putting steel pics on my fingers. Now I was broadcasting brightly on the Washburn sunburst guitar. I started playing four hours a day, six hours a day in the attic room. It was the only way to avoid the death storm of feelings and pictures in my head. I could play the guitar and be on a canoe in the middle of a calm lake, while fires raged along the shores. And I never wanted to paddle back to the shore. I kept on playing the guitar.

I was walking down Brady Street with another guitarist who worked at the print shop with me. He could summon birdsong on his fat hollow body jazz guitar. I felt something go "splat" in my thumb. That didn't feel right. I kept smiling and laughing as we walked.

I returned to the attic room and my thumb didn't work anymore. I played anyways. Then I couldn't even chop an onion or write my name. My girlfriend said, Go to to the Social Security Office. The clerk said, You can't work in the print shop because of your hand, is there any job you can think of that you can do? I paused. I could work as a security guard, I said. My friend Jim does it.

I walked through empty water meter and steel tank factories for $5.50 an hour for three years. The guy who trained me on where to find the keys in the pressed steel plant for the key clock that hung from our necks like Flavor Flav was named Gary Bach. Harpsichords, cathedrals, steel tanks for oxygen or scuba diving, great furnaces for shaping the steel, shirtless men wearing safety glasses, flames surging and whooshing.

And the 1990s were just getting started.

An Endless Cavalcade of Barking Idiots and Fabulists

I think I may understand why people are flocking to believe crazy outlandish bullshit bleated by Donald John, his trumpenfash handlers and far right* media. It's because people feel that accepting the truth about what is happening would just be too psychologically devastating. The truth is the following: The way this thing was set up - to reward aggressiveness, acquisitiveness and an atomized conception of the human self - has put the Earth, and us along with it, on a jolly little sleigh ride to Hell. It's not an easy thing to accept that everything you've believed about your life, your country, your culture and your values is coalescing to catalyze ecocide and human species suicide. So, if believing the truth is unthinkable, what remains? Utter fantasy and lunacy. FOX, OAN, Newsmax, Dan Bongino, Marjorie Taylor Greene. An endless cavalcade of barking idiots and fabulists.

I've found that facing these stark truths does not defeat one, however. On the contrary, facing such truths can feel liberating, exhilarating. (*The lies and distortions present on corporate-Democrat media like the NYT, CNN and MSNBC are of a different order and degree and have already been exposed expertly, starting with Noam Chomsky and Edward J. Herman's "Manufacturing Consent," 1988).