Dream Song 105 by John Berryman

As a kid I believed in democracy: I
'saw no alternative'—teaching at The Big Place I ah
put it in practice:
we'd time for one long novel: to a vote—
Gone with the Wind they voted: I crunched 'No'
and we sat down with War & Peace.

As a man I believed in democracy (nobody
ever learns anything): only one lazy day
my assistant, called James Dow,
& I were chatting, in a failure of meeting of minds,
and I said curious 'What are your real politics?'
'Oh, I'm a monarchist.'

Finishing his dissertation, in Political Science.
I resign. The universal contempt for Mr Nixon,
whom never I liked but who
alert & gutsy served us years under a dope,
since dynasty K swarmed in. Let's have a King
maybe, before a few mindless votes.

This makes me uncomfortable

What is it that I have purchased that suggests I need my colon cleansed?

On the last night of Passover

There’s something to be said for the sour pleasure of denial, the mouthful of eager saliva swallowed in place of the exquisite meal. The banquet lying untouched before your aching desire. There’s something to be said for it, true, for that mastery over yourself. For the even voice and steady hand in the depths of the most violent rage. There’s something better in abandon. To drink in all the booze and lust and cruelty your vessel can hold, in filling yourself to the brim and overflowing your soul with everything and the last thing you crave.

I’m going to order a pizza.

Charles Simic & My Mom

I'm Charles Simic. Happy birthday, Jeff's mom. Thanks for coming to see me.

Book Review

I reviewed The Have-Nots by Katharina Hacker for Three Percent.

CUTE!

She's just about my favorite person on top chef, but not my favorite chef on top chef.

By Daniil Kharms

When sleep is running away from a man, and the man lies on his bed, dumbly stretching out his legs, while nearby a clock ticks on the nightstand and sleep is running away from the clock, then it seems to the man that an immense black window opens wide before him and that his thin little gray human soul is going to fly out through this window and his lifeless body will stay lying on the bed, dumbly stretching out its legs, and the clock will ring its quiet bell: “Yet another man has fallen asleep.” At that moment, the immense and utterly black window will swing shut with a bang.

A man by the last name of Oknov was lying on his bed, dumbly stretching out his legs, trying to fall asleep. But sleep was running away from Oknov. Oknov lay with his eyes open, and frightening thoughts knocked inside his increasingly wooden head.

Oppression

I do not believe in the value of the unique. I do not believe in the value of diversity for its own sake. I have, at times, made statements in support of globalization (I support aspects of it, in principle) and in preference for the sameness of all things. But all things should only be uniform when they can be uniformly good and it is the constant failure of the world to achieve anything good that oppresses me. I am oppressed with the choice between bad and worse, between ugly and obscene, between the foul and nauseating.

I am oppressed by this as all of us are oppressed by this.

I want neither a world full of senseless decadent choice nor a world of bland and constant cheapness. I want an orderly world and a clean world. I want good.

There is such a condition, an ailment for lack of a better word, called Stendhal's Syndrome in which people become faint when exposed to too much beauty. I have the opposite. I have my own syndrome, a condition in which I am surrounded by so much filth that I pass unconscious from nausea. Everything is so far from tolerable that I want to spend the entire day in a brick box. I have nothing against bricks.

Lunch

Pasta salad, green grapes, half of an English muffin, and warm brie with crackers.

Dinner

Spinach fettuccine with asparagus, kalamata olives, slivered almonds, tomatoes, shredded spinach, cremini mushrooms in olive oil with a little red pepper sauce, a lot of black pepper, garlic, and some parmesan cheese.

And a couple of delicious Izzes.

From Extreme Cruelty by Norman Lock

"With the murder of the Bishop, I entered my final and most heroic phase of cruelty. I plumed myself in the brilliant feathers of spite, robed myself in a magisterial iconoclasm. I beheaded the public monuments and ravaged the Governor’s flowerbeds. I stormed the citadels of virtue and muddied the waters of morality. I stooped by the ditch in which the murdered wayfarers had been thrown and withheld my tears. My perversions were various, their satisfaction immediate and inventive. In short, I became the most anathematized man in Africa."

Published here in the Absinthe Literary Review.