Laundry list

Obama caved to the Republicans, the bankers, the billionaires, the worthless monied classes, yet again. This time, he not only signed off on giving trillions of dollars in tax-breaks to the wealthy, he in effect gave his blessing to increasing taxes on the working-poor.

If he is not himself corrupt—a possibility I am starting to doubt—he is ineffectual and weak to the point of cowardice.

It is cold and gray here, and filled with people I don't understand.

The Cowboys are 4-8. Don Meredith died.

I think maybe I'm beginning to doubt the efficacy of my devotion to poetry. I cannot live in it, cannot justify myself from it, cannot assign it supernatural powers. Having seen it up close, I can tell you it has been abducted by forces of largely mediocre ability. No ransom can save it. And hardly anyone gives a fuck about it anymore, even when it is good.

Good people, smart people even, don't like Keats. How can I understand a world like that?

Jonathan Franzen reigns atop fiction's shit-heap.

Thomas Wolfe is seldom taught anymore. Harold Bloom is licking his lips somewhere, thinking obscene thoughts about Sylvia Plath, while Camille Paglia metaphorically fellates his stingy, clammy whiteness.

There's a shitty poem stuck in my head. It won't shut up.

My fucking gym is starting to piss me off.

Is my brain turning to pizza?

Don't get me started on the snow.

Here's a fragment from another shitty poem.

...It comes, I think, to this:
All's been done so many times
and nothing's left to say.
Desire, need, possibility—
just words, anyway,
and they've all been said.
do-able done, thinkable thought.
Saleable sold, buyable bought—
and what has changed?
Not a fucking thing.
'Cause I'm still here
and she's still there
and you're still wherever
the hell you are
and I've grown tired—really tired.
A dragon, you said.
A pyromaniac— made weary of fire—
and of everything
but stars.
And maybe, in the end,
that's all
there ever was.

So, yeah.

Shitty line-breaks. Shitty poem.

No irony at all. Going on about stars, again. Still, maybe they are all there is. Or will be. Or ever was.

But maybe they ain't here, neither.

Maybe all that's real is this feeling.

Or maybe I've been asleep, since September 24, them years back. Or maybe I passed out in Mark Kimbrough's car, after drinking too much PBR. Or some other time. And I'll wake up back of a green Chevy, and hear a cheesy 70's song playing on the radio. Cathy Cee will be stroking my hair. Danny and Steve and Don (his head in tact) dancing with their girls, under the gentle Texas moonlight.

Or maybe I'm a vagrant thought, ghosting the dream of a girl with dark wavy hair and a gap in her teeth, who is crushed beneath the ruin of a 1972 Sprint. Maybe I am the gall she's been given with the vinegar that agitates her waning moments.

Or am I a figment originating with you?

Soon as someone knows, tell me, okay? Motivation is a key component of The Method. Wouldn't want to fuck it up.