(no subject)

It's safer to go from closet to closet
From corner to corner along the walls
Treating rooms as narrow rims around treacherous pits
Painted up by some cruel genius of holographic trompe de l'oeil
Safer to eat from the back of the fridge from what's expired
Use small words with tiny people for only a little
Have all your mail flutter in from a duct in the ceiling

Better to use just one arm
Walk on one side of your feet
Just think nouns

Or so your demon says
The one who stole your social security number
And it takes a meadow to shut him up
A meadow that's so much meadow that you
In the middle must know it's you there in the middle
That the wind spelling meadow in grasses
Is using you as explanation point
A wind spilling grass seed in your breath
A breath that it stuffs down your face
And a sunbeam embarrasses the inside of your leg
And is pooled there beneath on the meadow
How did you get to this meadow
Where did you leave it
Where do meadows even end
To be in a meadow at all is to be in the middle

The birds all know you're in meadow
You see they're slightly scared

(no subject)

From Krugman, best short version of the real political news of my lifetime:

Clearly, it’s all mutually reinforcing: the closing of the Chicago [Economic School] mind both reinforces and is reinforced by the patronage of the mega-wealthy. And the end result is a completely hermetic system, into which contrary evidence cannot penetrate.

I used to think the other mutually reinforcing phenomena of (widely differential) American prosperity and the exporting of exploitation to other countries was the real story, but I think the lathe of ideas Kr. describes is the bigger problem. And definitely the longer term one, the one that will have to be fought even when everyone in Africa has an iPad.

(no subject)

What's strangest when you have it is how talked up it doesn't need to be. All the poems exaggerate absurdly, a tactic excusable only for warning lost travelers. It was a simple thing we needed all along, a temporary one. Out here, sitting on earth weighing less than an ounce per pound, in a great flying air. She, when you find her, weighing even less. Until you have to pick one up there's nothing as light as a woman.