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lycanthrope
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Mr. Ozymandias goes to Washington. Look upon my work, alt-whiteys, and my hair.
History doesn’t repeat itself but it stutters.
But nothing rhymes with orange. Or fascist. Or orange fascist.
Everything becomes a constitutional crisis.
The constitution itself becomes a constitutional crisis.
And the judges are dying, robed already for their own funerals.
The funk died. Hereafter funk will only be used to describe other sub-genres of music –
House-funk, hip-hop-funk, country-funk.
People may well forget what it meant.
Nimble hands took to dull pills,
And the human body, an instrument less
Reliable than the piano or guitar,
Failed.
A prince caught in the pharma-thrall of that from which others sought refuge in him.
And one can only imagine the many holiday parties prior
At Merck, or Pfizer, or Roche,
Where sweaty red faced execs
Exhorted further triumphs
To the strains of “Let’s Go Crazy”
There was burning where there should have been art.
Priced out of the haute encampments at Burning Man
By sleek faceless revelers
Flush with cash from the reimagining of coupons, advertising,
And other mundane commerce,
Outside of the meatspace -
Priced also out of SOMA lofts,
The ROI was a burning not in effigy.
For all their care, they were careless too,
But fire codes are not their province,
Not a job for artists.
Everyone thinks they’re changing the world.
Everyone is right.
We lost our ambassador to space,
A thin lipped queer
Afraid of Americans
Troubled by his own past
Comforted by his own past.
Whispering amidst the
Shouting arena rockstars,
That melody will eventually
Come out.
England whined its way out of a union.
Requesting, no doubt, the same pinky up civility
Be shown them that they visited
Upon Ireland and America,
When self-rule was politely requested.
The laughter of young ghosts
Is heard in Kilmainham Gaol.
Wells Fargo rode in on its stagecoach
Like the outlaw Black Bart,
Wielding commission incentives
Like six-figure shooters
And robbed the deaf, mute, and blind.
We should have known,
That Cowboys were always anti-heroes at best.
The Sioux found out again,
That hallowed ground means
Ground we don’t need yet.
Pepper-spraying commenced,
The project was halted,
And somewhere a suit
Said, we’ll wait until
All the virtue tourists go away
And slink into court.
By 2100, global temperatures
Could be up 1.4 Celsius,
Could be up 5.8 Celsius,
Who can tell?
The seas will go on roiling,
Above us or below us.
Robbing St. Petersburg
To pay St. Paul.
We are told in this year what we wanted to search for
The moment we reach into our pockets for our phone.
The answer is always that we live in the most interesting times.
Our phones will know before anyone that we have cancer,
And will tell us, accurately most likely, but will tell us either way
they did not cause it.
The world will be increasingly augmented and virtual,
And our ad metrics will literally paint different colors
Of blue in each of our skies.
My only holdout hope for this year
Is that we are all non-playable characters
In someone else’s virtual reality game,
Locked on too high a reality setting,
In virtue too real.
They laugh with rage at the West in the Levant.
Syria, preceded only by Mesopotamia as a center
Of Neolithic culture,
Implodes in fights over arid land,
While on the far side of the world,
In an unrepresentatively spacious auditorium
There is a TED Talk on colonizing Mars.
In South Sudan there is pluralistic murder,
Between groups with no sense of larger community
That would indict it as such.
In Russia, in North Korea, the violence is monistic
And flows down like the retribution of god.
Meanwhile, stateside, every sworn officer
Of the law is mostly above it,
And some votes count more than others.
The line between violence and peace
Is thin, blue, crooked, jagged,
And there is a feeling that we are on the verge
Of violence facilitated diffusion.
There will be time in the coming days for resolutions
And the hope they imply,
But first,
Breathe what we hope is a lonely bastard of a year in,
And curse it out of your lungs -
The ritual that moves us into a new country and new music,
And things worth mourning.
Later, we hope
Much later.
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161210
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