Jacob Bacharach's Blog, page 17

Urinetown

We bundled the children into the car and went

into Manhattan; the attendant at

the Icon garage wore a knitted hat

and smelled like grass; he had some kind of accent.

O, City of Finance, thin-crust slice, cement!

We expected young men dressed like cats,

beautiful, manly, in their junkyard habitats,

instead our babies saw some gender-bent

weirdos, two young women, clearly not

identified as male, one in a near

I-Dream-of-Jeannie outfit, enter the gents!

My boy began to cry. “Daddy, I’ve got

to pee!” Think fast, John! “Peeing’s queer!”

I cried, the modern father’s last lament.

Et in arcadia egomaniacs

Delete your account. Go into the woods

and find a stream. Become a rainbow trout

flashing in the shallows. Become a deer. Get out

of your body. Give away your purchased goods.

Be present, mood-less, beyond woulds and shoulds.

Muck in the rotting leaves with your whiskered snout.

Eat shit. Piss anywhere. Forget all doubt

and reason. Forget your streets and neighborhoods.

Let us do it together; let us be

as the first men and women were, wild

and naked, animals only, full of the sweet

fruits that the earth, a garden, gives for free

to all beasts, the bright sun mild,

the green, the cricket’s trill, the bird’s tweet.

Cura te lorem ipsum

“Hillary Clinton wasn’t adept at using

a desktop for email, inquiry is told”—

she traveled too much; was busy; she’s very old.

It’s not so much the law that she’s abusing;

it’s our credulity. Look, choosing

to act the royalist is undersold

as a public good—at least it puts in bold

letters the truth America’s refusing

to admit: law, the rules, and decency

are for the little people. There is no aisle

dividing left from right; there is a gulf

between court-hassled masses and the truly free

princes of the world, a void of a million miles,

a dying echo: emailer, email thyself.

Peter Thiel Sues Gawker

Every night, lonely and scared, a Crassus

retires to a private screening room to view

a phony gladiator in a natty do-

rag fuck a forum-screamer’s wife. He passes

a hand across his lap and wipes his glasses.

Aroused, confused, he hates and loves these few

pornographic pleasures and the voyeurs who

provided them; the fortune he amasses

endlessly cannot touch him, cannot keep

his bed warm or the plebs beyond the walls

from peering through the keyhole at the sad rich wreck

who can’t decide to masturbate or weep

when the show ends and the grim shadow falls:

death’s debit, unpayable by cash or check.

Vagina . . . Without Previous Approval

District officials sent WWMT a quote from a school handbook that says teachers are required to get approval before discussing any topic related to reproductive health.

–The Washington Post

The word itself makes some men uncomfortable.

-Maude Lebowski

Imagine the spring. Imagine the tulip trees

in the garden—still a chance of morning frost,

the gold-black baby spiders, the first bees

betting on dew instead by instincts that we’ve lost.

Consult the Farmer’s almanac; consult

the weather on the internet; we are obsessed

with warnings, dire predictions; with results

whose precursors embarrass us. Confess:

you too, sex-positive and libertine,

are slightly squeamish at the ordinary bits

a flower represents: fecund, gene-

wet, vaginal. Marble tits?

Appropriate. But a flower is a stealth

lesson in the forbidden: “reproductive health.”

Fired Like a Dog

I tell my dog that she is fired. She

regards me, head cocked and floppy ears

each lifted slightly; whatever it is she hears

and apprehends, she snorts, and squats, and pees

on the hardwood floor; this appears to please

her to no end; she pirouettes and yowls,

beagle-body pitching, feet to jowls,

fully engaged, unlike a human: we

are idiomatic, every sound reflects

an abstracted actuality; we mean,

even when we’re speaking gibberish; we try

to fold the world into sequenced sound. Our pets,

the wild animals, the wind-shook green

leaves mean nothing, don’t know that they will die.

Eternal Recurring Meeting

The Pentagon said Friday that it had killed ISIS’ finance minister, Abd al-Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli, whom many analysts consider the group’s No. 2 leader.

–CNN

The inbox full. The voicemail light is blinking.

Who leaves voicemail anymore? he asks

himself. There are too many red-flagged tasks

today. The boss called off. Sick? He’s drinking

again, for sure, and the worksheet isn’t linking

to the right data set. Each day, he masks

the long-dawned sense: his office is a cask-

et; he is dead already; Death is winking

at his glass door; his new assistant waits

in the wings for the whirring warning. Success? Success-

ion. Years ago he had a home, a wife.

Now he has a list of meeting dates.

When he explodes at last they’ll slap on some fresh

paint and give the next in line his life.

Decency, Modesty, Integrity, Even-handedness, and Excellence

for Merrick Garland, nominee to the Supreme Court

As a boy he made it through one Cub Scout meeting.

All the other kids had names like Derrick,

Toby, James; their dads had names like Merrick,

Russel, Palmer. Jewy Jacob’s fleeting

and failed efforts at befriending, then competing

with these flaxen youth? Loss. At best, a pyrrhic

win: to later tell real friends satiric

versions in which he quits; he’s not retreating

into buck-toothed shyness. Years after, tall

now, orthondtized, fit, and proudly queer,

still he feels a twinge when some vampiric

preppy is proposed as someone all

right-thinking people must support, mere

acceptability as panegyric.

Baron Scalia

Tony always believed in a certain sort

of intercessory prayer; ironically

each sainted martyr was a pharisee;

the letter was the spirit, he’d retort,

to the grace-besotted pleaders at his court;

was it wit? he was as chronically

mean as a country-club drunk, comically

self-indulgent as he’d wink and snort

that José, the barman, was a fag; he doesn’t

mean to be mean, his foursome buddies say;

that’s just Tony! He’d give you the shirt off his back,

well, anyway, he helped my kid out; he wasn’t

a ballbreaker; he made the problem go away;

good to his friends until his heart attack.

A Parliament of Fowls

So sore, ywis, that whan I on him thinke,

Nat woot I wel wher that I flete or sinke.

During the Middle Ages, people thought

that Valentine’s, or thereabouts, would mark

the date when birds paired off, each lark to lark,

each life-pair-bonded waterfowl not

quite sure their spouse would like the card they’ve bought;

should they’ve considered jewelery? trips? The spark

of a single season’s mating faded to the dark

mornings in winter; they woke together, fought

for the first shower and who would walk the dog,

who would make the bed and do the dishes

from the dinner that they’d thrown the night before,

while all the years became a catalog

of various compromises; yet one wishes

for this forever. The swans are never bored.