Tomorrow night I will be the featured poet at the Stone Soup Poetry Reading Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The reading takes place at the Yarrow Gallery (formerly known as the Out of the Blue Gallery) in Central Square beginning at 8 p.m.
To read the rest of this post, please check out The Spectacle Blog.
Sunday, October 30, 2011
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Should you lack for words, feel free to read these
Ten Times Nine Eleven: an Ode on the End of World War Four, with apologies to W.H Auden’s 1949 Harvard ΠΒΚ exercise,
‘Under Which Lyre:
A Reactionary Tract for the Times’
If Ares at last quits the field,
Will Bill Kristol’s bloodstains yield
To seeping showers
As in their convalescent state
The Neocons associate
With Thomas Powers?
On the Cambridge college plain
The Weekly Standard no more reigns
Absent Strauss's Laconic tongue
None drive the battle-weary young
To ride or beat dead hobby horses
Among the shattered appliances
Of the darker arts and sciences
AmSpec readers flit and run,
And those that steeled themselves to slaughter
Aim their laughter at the shorter
Odes of Frum.
Condi ,back from Baghdad’s frisson
Eschews her proper erudition
Though some regret it-
Although Kevlar can be hot ,
She wore hers indoors, and will not
Let us forget it.
So did we all, but her decree:
Declaring our Hegemony
To be aesthetic
As John Yoo’s call to Recht und Ordnung
Has fallen flat as waterboarding
Now reason’s grown endemic,
Yet by Olympus, Ares knows
Worse war will internecine
Flare once more twixt those
who followed Cheney all the way
And those who would sooner pray
To Hecate than Apollo.
Brutal as any Olympic game,
Fought with guile and scrimmage static,
The dialectic strife between
The Neocons must to Marxists seem
Less pious than fanatic.
For whether tweeted in the halls
Or en route to inaugural balls
By erstwhile friends,
The tracer fire of small magazines
Too often rips through grunt Marines
As it descends.
Yet Kristol’s guns we must confess,
Remain unspiked at Fox’s behest,
For Islam raves from Rabat to Hormuz,
And so the news
In lesser New York book reviews
Is very grave.
Rush Radio hammers all day long
Its under-Whitmanated song
That does not scan,
With adjectives laid end to end,
Like rolling Oxycontin to commend
Shrub’s ways to man
Tea Party Policy is no lyric thing,
Devoid of sport, and love and spring.
All blood and bluster.
In its service Spartan bards
Rehashed 300 into yards
Of epic filibuster.
While devoid of uniforms
Behind the battle-line, in swarms
To warm the fighting,
Anti-existentialists declared
They knew not big words like despair,
And went on writing.
So now our Spectator sings her blessings on
Devisers of Intel woebegone and NIE’s
Who thank great Zeus aloud their wares
Thus far by Wikileaks
Have been spared
Dispersion on the breeze.
For what both parties do in mirth
To amplify the Beltway’s girth
Swells all money belts , and gripe
All ages and somatic types-
It took far more than K-Street crooks
To populate Chris Buckleys’ books.
And so we now behold at length
Once dread, now dead and gone Osama’s
Last battalions melt away like fog,
We bid adieu and leave some counsels few
To those disposed to swallow
The Weekly Standard‘s Decalogue
Of melodramas.
Do not as the West Wing pleases,
Nor write any doctor’s thesis
On abstinence education,
Nor lie, Anne Coulter-like, supine
Before Administration.
Fib you not on questionnaires
Or quizzes on K-Street affairs,
Nor in compliance with statisticians fit
In false knowledge, nor commit
To deny science.
Be thou not on friendly terms
With focus groups or PR firms
Who fear the Muses far too much
To read the Bible for its prose.
Nor, by Jove, make love to those
Who worship such,
But trust in God
Not overmuch.
Let neocons live beyond their means
On Tigris water and raw greens.
We still survive who simply choose
To follow Ronald Reagan’s muse:
And forgetting Faction,
Espouse broad Tory views.
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