A Reading Liste

Here is a list of worthwhile books I read (or re-read) in 2009 that I think are worth reading and considering together.

Fiction
- The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
- Baudolino, Umberto Eco
- A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
- The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac
While I have not yet read Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, I anticipate it also fitting on this list.

Political
- Marx’s Ecology, John Bellamy Foster
- History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky
- Teamster Rebellion, Farrell Dobbs
- A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn

These two lists can be inclusive or exclusive as you please. I like to think that the fiction illustrates (Baudolino) or deviates (Leibowitz) from the theory of dialectical materialism in interesting and instructive ways.

Good luck in the New Year.

untitled

It’s too bad these skyscraper
glass beams frames light lunchtime
cubicles countless, computers,
myriad particulars detailed at the stars
orbit, illumination
of advertisements, false but hot
with the promise of life

breed these same young mortals
male female other
dusty heads buzzed flower hymen
so thin
lips gums spittle teeth
that the beads poking
against clothes remind you of bones,
remind you of you still living.

They Sure Have a Way With Your World

If there’s class warfare we are losing.
We have no class, the TV tells me,
chewing, elbows halfway in my plates.
The TV tells me it’s a snow day,
a whiteout, a win
for freedom via the electronic vote.
It’s a black day indeed for Loui-
siana, where Harlem meets Compton
down South. It’s not Wall Street gone
south or bad apples sour. On bailout
take two we feel bitter in the morning.
Critical, sure, but cringing. It still smarts -
like dad’s belt. What smart-mouth
gets for getting between the master
of the house and momma terra.
The classy classless confused, caught
in the middle, all elbows and assholes
waiting for a turn
to swing that nice fine whip.

two “Twin Cities” haiku

Pure autumn clear crisp
parades austere peace canyon
shimmering snipers

—–

Autumn leaves dead
heaped at the barricade
foreclosed Rosemary’s house

Why I Will Not Teach Your Child

I cannot instruct the young.
Despite my hours of patiently listening
to my own thoughts as I watch the walls age,
despite the careful touch I lend my friends
as they paint their own limitations red
with the blood of their fingers, I fear
I do not have the patience
for your children. They are loud
and restless, ceaselessly trembling like a litter of puppies
suckled on sugar and trained
with epileptic lights,
and you, I have no clue
what kind of rotten job you’ve done
in raising them
but
this is not the reason for my fear.
In that tangle of thoughts and hormones
lies a confusion about the tangle greater yet:
the world. And they’ve been misled
already by instructors more insidious than I
not to believe or trust or even know
a goddamn thing. And even if they happen to find
one thing to hold more often than not it is
a poison but

I am not afraid, either, of demon tutors or chalkboards
or the opiates kids gobble like Halloween treats.
With my arms crossed over a saturnine sigh
the only true refute rings and echoes leadenly.
Because I would have the truth out at last:
it is in all the secret books and speakers
half-hidden, buried in public vaults, dammed up
behind a circus of distractions and I
would give their bright and salivating eyes
this advice:

To steal. Steal
everything you can get your hands upon,
every book and movie
anyone dares dismiss:
the making of a criminal knowing,
an outlaw canon, is the highest passion
you can encourage in yourself.

So because you’ve so recklessly amused them
and because you will make them hate
every pulsing light and whizz-bang sound someday,
patiently I will let them teach themselves
to break you.

It’s funnier that way.

Walking X

Maybe now I’m drinking,
and pretending
the waitress
is flirting
with me

but six hours ago, man,
I was pacing Hennepin
Avenue north to south,
freezing my fingers off
and ruling the world with
my stride.

Walking IX

The concrete shows right through
the bad ice.
It is smooth words from winter’s
flattering icicle jaws.
It is the lust for curved
surfaces, the compulsion
to worry at it with your feet
like a stress-stone
(though you know its caress
is gravity’s laugh,
the gutter’s catcall).
If only the good ice
which is all around you
was all before you, if only
the bad ice wasn’t
a path of shimmering pearl.
It spreads out like a dais
from the snow-crusted sidewalks
into the gritty streets
promenading our majestic little bodies
into traffic.

Walking VIII

The concrete shows right through
the bad ice.
It is smooth words from winter’s
flattering icicle jaws.
It is the lust for curved
surfaces, the compulsion
to worry at it with your feet
like a stress-stone
(though you know its caress
is gravity’s laugh,
the gutter’s catcall).
If only the good ice
which is all around you
was all before you, if only
the bad ice wasn’t
a path of shimmering pearl.
It spreads out like a dais
from the snow-crusted sidewalks
into the gritty streets
promenading our majestic little bodies
into traffic.

Walking VIII

A Response to Henry Moore’s Warrior With Shield

I enter the room and there you sit
on your unthronely block
squinting through a scar.

You do not flinch as I walk around you to examine your stumps and bronze bruises.

Who abandoned you here,
friend, who are you
still raising your misshapen
disk

to defend?

Precursor to Whiskey

So I hear you’re seceding
from the country, I want
to joke
to the guy in the Chevy van
with the Texas
plates. I’ve been standing in the parking
lot shared
by the Motel Six and Mielke Electric,
contemplating potholes
in Duluth. Smoking cigarettes

that taste, somehow, like the alcohol
unopened in my room.
There’s a gull I think will land on the wires,
but no, it dodges them once
and again. I think
it might be smarter than that. It goes
and I listen a second
to the heave and sigh
of some truck on a nearby freeway.

Yeah, alright, I think this town of industry
and shipping is gritty
but I know that’s college talking through
me – to the people living here, like Peggy
behind the motel desk, it’s just real.
The guy never comes out for his van.
Figure he’d just indulge me with a shrug,
anyway. I flick the ember and drop the butt
in my pocket like loose change.