Diminishing Returns

A flattened shopping experience feels like a symptom of
malignant narcissism.
I'm just trying to make small adjustments now,
I've got to be careful of rationalisations
they are the pathology, overspilling.

So one week I think I'm being haunted by home,
that a JD Sports will open round the corner,
be shuttered by autumn,
another and I think well, whatever informs my opinion
is just a constellation
and so my friends and where they live,
are a constellation and getting where they be
is of little consequence,
the arrival shall bleed off annoyance.

But diminished returns I keep referring to:
when the narcissist is borough bought
and sold on the town tale
to interpolate-

-that being surrounded is enough,
an elevation

but in the end dominion isn't
improvement, right?
If it's just a wrench to something familiar
if I accept JD
if I'm not running from the fire sale
I have diminished the return,
ready for the new wave
to churn the scatter,
toss out the cockles,
to wash us over.

AF #1

Fascism:

no questions no wonder no dreams.

Peace:

no secrets just gossip.

Is this what they had in mind,

from the stage?

Ripple white like the hem of a toga pulled aside

– voila for all the family men, all the polar fleece.

But fuck you from my bluetooth,

fuck you from my broom.

The tile will never be clean

the skin will never gleam

& meanwhile mineral earth 

remains unnamed:

to smell a thing  

this solemnly

scorned.

Head in the sand

These dark dark days
Stretching out the long long horizon for years
And wondering how life has gone on
Under a dictator when there's
No clock ticking

Out in the distance

Complications

Complications

Pull yourselves up from the bootstraps

we tell them, ignoring the obvious fact

that they do not have boots, that their feet

are caked with dirt and cut through with glass

from going around unable to afford any shoes.

Use your bootstraps to pull yourselves up

like our great-grandfathers did, we say, patting ourselves

gently on the backs, thinking fondly of their legacies.

The white, American farmers who were given money

to buy land and got lucky enough their slaves knew how

to make the crops survive the frosts and droughts

and luckier still their children did not all die of flu.

Hard work, we suggest, as the means to an end, when

a starving person knocks at the door–ashamed–and asks for food.

You should be fine, just walk it off, the doctor tells an old man

before sending him home. And that night he dies in his bed,

from complications of a stroke the doctor didn’t see.

Beware of Bears

i hear it's pretty hard to stop a bear with a gun
a bearded man in flannel said once
someone should tell Betsy DeVos
maybe just build a fence
and be more careful where we leave our trash
before they come for our schools