Jacob Bacharach's Blog, page 3

The Staff of Life

The American government runs on Celsius:
a Goop-ified version of Red Bull, with a “Make
America Healthy Again” vibe. Milkshake
Duck in power: he drinks and loves to cuss,
more Triumph of the Will than This Is Us,
a year from frat-frottage at Kansas State,
hungovercaffeinated and often late,
eager to purge the woke, shitlibs, the sus—
his faith is mostly modern alchemy,
powders, proteins, brain pills, beer and weed;
meat-based diet: hasn’t shit in days;
lives in fungal squalor with his three-
to-five feral roommates, avoiding seed
oils—fed on anger, starved of praise.

Come, Oddity

Having a dense cube communicates
status to women and business relationships;
investors swoon and women wet their lips;
fellas five-at-best bed solid eights;
the Sharks say yes, and QVC awaits;
while other assets have both booms and dips—
one day auto stocks, the next it’s microchips—
a tungsten cube? It just appreciates
you in a way she never understood,
the girl whose dormroom was just down the hall
who football-fanned instead of Call of Duty,
wanted the perfect instead of the perfectly good
you offered. Now she works a kiosk at the mall,
you heard, and you’ve a cube, and she’s a beauty.

The Sanity Clause

Getting into Christianity
because it’s the only way I can quit vaping,
choom mystified like Holy Ghost escaping,
Word made flesh and Dad, humanity.
Quoheleth Jamesified as vanity
had this or that to say about men aping
God instead of meek and modest shaping
of their small lives, thought it was inanity
to pray for pecadilloes lifted by
the hosts of heaven with their hearing aids
turned down; awful angels and the dead
saints and martyrs don’t care, and the Biggest Guy
abscondited already, drew the shades,
and napped. A zealous faith? Try weed instead.

Home Improvement

A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,”
or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,
is washed, broke past fixing, and going to hell.
What kind of culture leaves the nerd un-girled,
his adolescent admirations pearled
into a prom-less sock while all the demoiselles
step out with jocks under the sway and spell
of the electric hearth within the heavy burled
wooden nineties TV cabinet?
What Bel-Air princes left their Carltons,
made virtues out of being cool and “fresh?”
America, your ruined children yet
call out for toys and tech and custom guns!
You need more H1-Bs from Bangladesh.

Dismayed in Manhattan

My friends won’t take the subway, and the strong,
young maintenance man in my building finds
himself among those whom the law, well, it binds
but does not protect—he wakes and worries on the wrong
side of the wall the watchman waits upon,
eyeing the watcher through the parted blinds,
imagining richer men and greater minds
are planning more than this panopticon,
its tower crumbling as the land subsides
into the empty aquifers that cooled
the language engines that concatenated
dull prose that duller dimwits used as guides
out of perplexity, and bought and ruled
a country full of people that they hated.

Read Scared

The only people who think I’m “contrarian”
are leftists on Twitter. Everyone else agrees
with me. The holidays from which my family flees
the festive table; not my fault; the Aryan
opinions of my new authoritarian
friends are normal. I am normal. Please
clap. Or don’t. On you. I am at ease
with me as my insistent lapidarian-
lite inscriptions on these lintels of
our online times attest. I’m ordinary.
Many people like me. It is only
Marxists who suggest I cannot love,
myself and that I am a cautionary
tale. I’m fine. I’m fun. I am not lonely.

Can the Record Be Unbroken

Luigi Mangione, Sam Bankman-Fried and Diddy
are all in the same Brooklyn jail, per People
Magazine. The glitzed, obsessed, and giddy
press all kneel like pilgrims at the whitewashed steeple
of a new New England church, greatly awakened
to new wondrous sins with which they’ve not
self-sinned before, cold gruel now epic-baconed
to Inferno: pedophile, thief, and THOT.
What angry God had hands enough to sow
such seeds into this dark-soiled furrow?
What mind-surpassing mind could see and know
the crop he’d bear into the singular borough
within whose barb-wired bosom they would come
on the dumbest day, until the following one?

Serbs and Albanians

…in the fractious area still call the lake
by different names, neither of which is Trump;
dead Tito’s dream that the mad remaining rump
statelets will reconcile will not take—
utopian dreams are those from which we wake
fastest; Marine One’s dull whump-whump
sounds on the South Lawn; some other schlump
waves once and flies away; the news was fake
but we, like Stendhal stepping out in Florence
stared every day in awe, and felt our hearts
exceed themselves; we sweated bullets and
felt faint, mistook enrapture for abhorrence
and vice versa; and woke to grasp in fits and starts
that every empire is an ampersand.

Banks Sell

bonds backed by revenues from chicken wings,
music catalogues and oil wells,
barometric changes and unusual smells,
shriven souls, earthworms and cello strings,
the beers that daddy drinks, the songs mom sings,
unpeopled forest where no woodman fells
a single tree, but one tree, falling, sells
its unheard sound in sections and at auction brings
a pretty penny—the word for world is bourse
and we are made of trading in it, an
exchange of figures representing cash
the way that glue is representing horse;
Hegel said it: in all affairs of man:
first time as farce and second time as crash.

Terminator, Too

The nature of the vehicle was a Cybertruck
and the heat was just too intense. It burned
as if the sun itself fell down and turned
from star to car, a local god who struck
down and cursed the prayerless: bad luck
and broiling—what they briefly bought, they earned;
what they only thought they knew, they learned
right quick. Each IQ dandy is a schmuck
parading in his fancy test until
his full self-driving jumps a curb and makes
a pyre that’s a punchline; then a cop
watches helpless as a cat on a windowsill
while a little bird alights outside and takes
a gritty bath, sings, sings, and will not stop.