Suppose it were Friday cxxiii: As we were saying

   I'd pitch some tent for snuggling

   to drink our rising dawn, as hard

   upon the ground as I could tauten

   such a frame and its billows in a

   swell to hold it as we stretch as

   dogs, deaf to complaint of waking

  

i, iii  Blacksmith's Eye

         Cowgill Forge

         January 29, 2017

"Niggercare" Repeal Launched in GOP Congress

At last the witticism of tagging

the human right of health care to

a title identified with the alien

black menace from Africa, pounded

hysterically and nonstop into the

senses of underclass whites for

two Presidential terms, has en- 

abled the most sweeping assault

upon the poor since Jim Crow cor-

rupted Reconstruction. Coming to

enacting their own homicide near

you, are the perfected maldistri-

butions of 2 hands clapping: the

irrationality of the invisible

hand, unchecked by society, and

the gerrymandering of the US Con-

gress into impromptu islands of

aggression in a progressive sea,

in a defiant raid upon a people's

Treasury and the exemption of med-

ical industrialists from every ob-

ligation for their monopoly power.

It's almost darling: the States

become the agents of corporations.

They worked hard for this, ever

since Ronald Reagan invented wel-

fare queens, to juggle the giggles

of the Confederacy. Let them own

the name that brought them so far.

Right on track, they admit

The most unstable and destructive figure ever to hold power in the Western Hemisphere, heretofore, was known as The Goat by his own people - under their breath. A vain, lecherous, vicious lout in pimp’s clothing, storming about in an interior kingdom of grandiosity, bankrupty, suspicion and superstition, who made no effort to conceal his love of torture, corruption, and generals he could make or break. He was our pet, our bulwark in unsettled isles against the horrid onslaught of alien ideological terrorism. His name, obviously, was Rafael Trujillo. For 31 years and three months, he was the gaudiest cistern of American largesse against the rule of law and the consent of the governed in what is quaintly called, Latin America. I learned about him as a paperboy, carrying the headlines of his death. It was luridly spectacular, need I say, and the morning newsprint seethed a humid stench to tell about it.

Just as we thought our "virtual" time were safely circumspect in such disseminations, we find it exploited by a "reality" figure, who seized power by vituperations which fastened, first, upon the hateful innocence of menstruation, before garrotting every rival who protested his indecency, and warned of his incompetence. Through it all, a general assumption prevailed against streaming fact, that there is a great taste for such incontinent "carnage" on our stage.

In serial postings, acknowledging that "it's here," it is nevertheless useful to retain a sense of scale in appraising our possession. It's somewhat grave, when the highest ranking law enforcement officer in the land can lie to gain appointment one day, and lie again to say he didn't lie the next, without - you know? - the taking of steps. On the contrary; they're taking only names. But as goes the language, its letters and their words, its statements and their registry, so goes the consent of the governed, by any stretch of the imagination. If I were a student of rhetoric I would say, we don't kill lawyers first. We kill the paperboys.

  

Mario Vargas Llosa

The Feast of the Goat

2000

Edith Grossman

  translation

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001©

Explosion of the Church Tower

  Battle of the Yser

  Nieuport, Belgium

  October, 1914

Photographer unknown

Unlike Addison, Steele, and Summer Liebling

This establishment, I ask you to

consider, does not come equipped

with a research assistant or in-

tern, for fetching footnotes and

allegorical illustrations. Obvi-

ously, it shows. Needless to say

this places an arduous burden on

memory and concentration, which,

to be strictly honest, sustained

one reasonably well before teal.

The renaissance of that hue out-

side of a duck pond near you has

thrown memory back to that orig-

inator of haberdashery's explos-

ive clashes, Alexander Julian. I

wear sometime a million-year-old

baseball jacket in brown leather

and teal melton cloth, which one

acquired primarily to relieve an

other fool of temptation. It was

very Sutter Street, in its time,

but the present teal renaissance 

extends to rustic rugged Pendle-

ton, I find, taking a cue out of

LL Bean's blanket striped in it,

for a dog's bed. It works OK, if

your own colors are like Thorny,

black and white; or, either one.

If you sculpt, it might be seen.

Richard Serra

Teal corner

Kröller-Muller Museum

Otterlo, Netherlands

There we are, in the color he wants, in the age of pure credulity

    Children in Head Start,

    he wants to cut off. If

    they hear of this, what

    will it matter to them,

    that he had to exult in

    pain to be a coward; to

    terrify a people, to be

    a liar? Their own life,

    is how they understand.

Rajah Bose 

  photography

Editorial Board 

  of The New York Times

When One President

  Smears Another

March 5, 2017

Teal field, yellow balls, countless blues

   In short, our mesmerising 

   President is in Florida a-

   gain, restoring his wits

   from another confessional

   salvo of dementia, boast-

   ing of being invaded (can

   you stand it) by a black

   impostor-President. When

   he is restored to Washing-

   ton, will anybody notice?

Robert Darnton

Mesmerism and the

  End of the Enlightenment

  in France

Harvard University Press, 1968©

Martin Conte