Jacob Bacharach's Blog, page 4

The Gordian Not

Can Wall Street billionaires deliver on
Trump’s blue-collar promise? Can Kublai Kahn
wear blue jeans? Can peasants dine on ortolan?
Can you fucking kids get off my lawn?
Are those your rosy fingers, or is dawn
lifting my skirt? What new phenomenon
will psalm itself a novel antiphon
where freedom follows from panopticon
and the princess, plucked and cooked, remains a swan?
When Alexander died in Babylon
Companions wept but swiftly set upon
each other, encircling sea to Parthenon
they rent an empire from its noumenon.
Can the wolf befriend a just-foaled fawn?

Behold, we go up to Jerusalem

Can Democrats win back podcasting? We asked
6 popular show hosts to weigh in.
How would this cultural revolution begin?
Which former-going first would leap to last,
which last to first on iTunes? Which working-classed
once-college boy unbales the straw to spin
to gold? Will modern drivetime’s saccharine
sort sound a little less symposiast,
a little more willing to muse upon the kind
of animating questions that the top
ranks of the medium obsess about:
Do rhino ginseng pills unlock the mind?
Are owls real? If not, a deep-state op?
Macaw v. Man? Who’d win it in a rout?

Beauty Is the Infant of Terror

Nothing is real until Trump announces it.
The sky is not the blue you think you see.
The autumn wind? The frost? The barren tree
rattling against the eaves? You must admit
they are not there; their being’s counterfeit,
formless as the void before reality
breasted the darkness with one Let-There-Be.
Well, LMFAO. It don’t mean shit.
Who, if I cried out, would hear me now
among the anonymous orders of his court
already telling tales and casting blame,
each self-serving Morningstar-to-middlebrow
media interlocutor: in short:
nothing changes; everything’s the same.

Works and Daze

Will there be a needle? A quick thread.
Every angel asked; here’s what I said:
Though multitudes may dance upon its head
tech colleagues are on strike, as you have read:
the needle’s left as liminal: not dead
but not alive; dry creekbed into watershed;
outcomes stood predictions in their stately stead;
from clay the dying gods with breath have bred
new beings—angel-formed but monkey-brained,
uneasily ruled but easily entertained,
fired-up, although those gods had chained
their firebringer—from that bloodstained
liver-leaking rock the needle rose and trained
its trembling tip: foresaw, descried, ordained.

Pleas

There is. Sperm suppressant in processed baked
goods including pizzas and calzones
served in middle schools. Unhealthy bones
have turned us into one enormous faked
orgasm—even our ephebes slowed and slaked
their heightened hormones elsewhere, pheromones
are falling, vaccines turn little girls to crones
too quick: limber to sleep; at dawn, she ached
as if arthritic—every 5G tower,
every pill, each shot, your microwave,
will shrink your balls and tits; we once rewarded
teendom with deflowering in a brookside bower,
arcadian, grass-stained; now? we give the grave
to childhood’s future children. Death recorded.

A Moveable Beast

Tucker Carlson has gone public with the news
that he was physically attacked by a demon. This
is true. It burned like fire and smelled like piss.
It scared the kids and ate the cockapoos.
Seduced my wife to sin and drank the booze.
Singed Satan’s sign and sealed it with a kiss
upon my blackened brow, and from the abyss
I heard that fallen angel laugh, “You’ll lose
your show, your job, and you’ll end up on X,
the everything app, where you will spend your days
aggrieving to a parlor of sex-bot AI,
unjoyed with life, uninterested in sex,
stuck sucking oysters on Parisian quays
with your last believer, this weird Dreher guy.

Women In This Humour

Dad is pissed, and when dad gets home, you know
what he says? “You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been
a bad little girl.” She says, “Dad, I’m fin-
domming a former Fox News host, so no,
I haven’t got the time right now to go
get stuck in the dryer.” Noah’s daughter-sin
beglooms the turbid dreams of certain men,
Freudful, untalked, uncured, and just as slow
as nightfall in the Arctic in July:
thawed, mosquitoed, muddy, half-divorced
and dreading the dream’s end: you bolt awake
and realize: I am just afraid to die.
Each Richard’s kingdom sinks and ends unhorsed
brittle-boned and burned as well-done steak.

No Biotic

Here’s what my gut says about the election.
But don’t trust anyone’s gut, even mine.
Here’s several predigested sibylline
pronouncements covering every projection,
possibility, cross section,
standard deviation, storyline:
broad as Russia, small as Liechtenstein,
unspoken but precise as stage direction,
accurate as a biathlon, and as weird
and cold—a shot could go wide right or left
or bullseye, backfire, blank or just misfire:
here’s every outcome, dreamed and volunteered,
woven into one fabric, warp and weft
crosshatching prophylaxis for a liar.

Latrobe

When he took showers with the other pros, they came
out of there, they said, “Oh my God,
that’s unbelievable.” Each lantern-jawed
scratch handicapper felt the fucking same:
a rod-spared child rod-spoiling for a game
and gamine tumble through the tiled defilade,
flesh, ceramic, spurting firing squad,
relief released and thus released from shame.
This guy, this guy, this is a guy that was
all man. This guy was strong. This guy was tough.
Half lemonade and half iced tea, he could
push even teetotal duffers to a buzz,
and each plaid-panted putterer to stuff
his irons in their covers, drive with wood.

Cool, Clear Water

I want you to picture this — Bernie Sanders
& Dick Cheney together holding a sign
that says brat fall. Lord God, your grand design
makes miracles, although, Boss, it meanders,
mudbound and slippery as a nest of salamanders,
dual-breathing mixture, son of Frankenstein:
stitch, meld, mold, combine and recombine—
proofed against presidents-past slanders
by September’s now-exhausted yard-sign green—
enfeebled avatars of two exhausted dreams
play on as their Titanic submarines,
the fogfall like a curtain: blackout, scene;
museums barred, all art replaced with memes,
and seafilled conchs now whisper yassing queens.