The Rain Sounds Differently

The rain sounds differently
On hemlock pine and spruce
The wind speaks with a distinct voice
In maple elm and cedar
The dryads can tell you with their eyes closed
Which is which

The river sings when she is full and rushing
Playfully joyously
Glad to be alive
The naiads dance just below the surface
On moonless nights
They hold their breath and
Leap

My American friend
Tells me he can identify
A Glock 22 a Smith & Wesson Model 340 a SIG Sauer a Ruger Blackhawk
Just by the way they sound when fired
He can blindfolded assemble an AR-15
In 40 seconds or less
Something he tells me
With obvious pride

I go home
Pray to all the gods I don’t believe in
Kiss my children
And count my dead

Locusts

I hear the voice
Of anywhere but here
Calling me calling me
Calling me away
The mountains
The oceans
The forests
The swamps and river deltas
Anywhere but here
Calling me away

My people
We go
And we stay
Just long enough
To devastate
Everything
And then we once again
Hear the voice
Of anywhere but here
Calling us calling us
Calling us away

This City

This city is an open grave
Filled to overflowing with the present absence
Of all my dead friends

This city is a slaughterhouse
And nobody is criminally
Responsible
Just fiscally
Fiscally responsible

This city is a ghostland
Hey there’s Timo
I think to myself
Hey there’s Cam
I say
Before I remember
They’re all dead

This city rewards the greedy
And destroys the kind
This city is in other words
A secure investment
Rejoice
You bankers
Take heart
You real estate developers
All your properties
Will appreciate in value
And all your enemies
Will be dead

August Reviews

Discussed in this post: 21 Books (Virtue Hoards; The Revenge of the Real; Undoing the Demos; Capital Rules; A World Without Police; How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Object-Choice; The Hero’s Way; Sync; On Time and Water; Cyclonopedia; The Society of Reluctant Dreamers; Belladonna; The Case Worker; The Death of Vivek Oji; A Touch of Jen; While the Earth Sleeps We Travel; Selected Poems of Langston Hughes; Romanian Poems; Austerity Measures; and Voodoo Hypothesis); 2 Movies (Pig; and The Green Knight); and 2 Documentaries (Framing Britney Spears; and McMillion$).

Continue reading →

July Reviews

I am still a month behind with this. Nevertheless. Discussed in this post: 15 books (How to Change Your Mind; The New Way of the World; Never-Ending Nightmare; Family Values; On Violence and On Violence Against Women; Culture Warlords; Lectures on Russian Literature; Extinction; An Untouched House; Pastoralia; The Encyclopedia of the Dead; Dancing in Odessa; Letters in a Bruised Cosmos; Becoming Unbecoming; and They Called Us Enemy); 2 movies (Fugue; and Nosferatu the Vampyre); and 3 documentaries (Heimat is a Space in Time; Perfect Bid; and All Light, Everywhere).

Continue reading →

Strange Fruit

Take me back to Erwin, Tennessee
1916
The good old days
Hard-working folks
The salt of the earth
Husbands and wives and a whole lotta Jesus
Jesus

Two thousand five hundred
Men, women, and children
At her hanging
Like a day at the circus

The day before
The White man
Her master
Hit her behind the ear
Used a metal hook
Smashed her infected tooth
Because she stopped
Reached for
Food
A Watermelon rind

And so she killed him

The local blacksmith
Shot her five times
But she lived long enough
To be lynched the next day

The chain snapped
On the first attempt
And she broke her hip when she
Fell
Little White boys and
Little White girls
Screaming and
Running and
Laughing

The second time
The chain held
And she died
Buried
Beside the tracks
In the Clinchfield Railroad Yard
September 13th
It was a Wednesday

Strange fruit

June Reviews

Better late than never, right? Discussed in this post: 13 books (Mothers and Others; Neoliberal Legality; The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism; The Birth of Biopolitics; The Ku Klux Klan in Canada; Just Us; The Cunning of Recognition; White Magic; A History of My Brief Body; Embers; Parallel Stories; A Swim in the Pond in the Rain; and Before the Next Bomb Drops); 3 movies (Identifying Features; Riders of Justice; and Vitalina Varela); and 2 documentaries (Feels Good Man; and The Rise of Jordan Peterson).

Continue reading →

Scarred and Full of Wonder

We come into the world scarred and full of wonder. We bring with us the unhealed wounds, anxieties, and traumas of our ancestors. Already in the womb, our DNA is methylated by whatever discomfort, discord, or distress existed in the environment of and around our mothers. We are born afraid of things that we have not yet encountered because our ancestors were afraid of these things. We are born predisposed to certain kinds of illnesses and dis-ease. Our deaths are already recorded in the roots of our genealogies. So we come into the world scarred. Marked. De-formed. And yet. And yet we come so full of wonder. We don’t come seeking specific answers or solutions to specific questions or problems, we come with an open curiosity. We come to the world playfully. We come predisposed to awe and laughter. And love. We come into the world scarred but full of wonder and loving unconditionally. This is the stage of childhood. Especially early childhood. Although some children are given no opportunity at all to have a childhood.

Continue reading →