The Burning, the Loving, the Speaking, the Opening

• My second favorite radio three hours of the week is Jeffrey Davidson's Saturday sunrise show. It's quite astonishing how deeply some of songs he plays slay me. All songs today taken from yesterday's show.
• Was gonna remake/remodel last night's United kit post for today's post - I couldn't wait to post it - but since Charlie commented it's a stand-alone and today you get bleggalgazing.
• 31% more meaningless!
• Futile Sunday in the Middle of a Three Day Weekend Bleggalgazing: The threatened updating of the blogrolls has happened. All blogs that hadn't updated in at least three months have been moved to Moribund. All blogs that killed themselves and no longer provide a feed have been removed. I think the latter are the ones that contribute to this blog's slow-loading, it's loading much faster now. There are a few new sites for your eyes. As always, if you are Kinding me and me not you please let me know. If you've migrated to a new address in the past six months please let me know. If there's someone you think I should be/would enjoy reading, please let me know.

• Angel Olsen is playing Rock & Roll Hotel May 15th. Not sure when we're picking up Planet from college, but if I'm in town May 15th I'm going.
• Why twitter elites can't speak for minorities. (h/t Giovanni via twitter)
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• The gentrification of the imagination.
• Anne Carson, for those of you who do.
• Crooked Rain turns twenty.  Wasn't love, was some good nights of drunken mutual groping.
• More on next Swans.
• Prunella's lastest playlist.
• People have liked the Rukeyser poems posted lately. Have another below.
• I have always been a fool for female singer-songwriters.

AKIBA

Muriel Rukeyser

The night is covered with signs. The body and face of man,

with signs, and his journeys.     Where the rock is split

and speaks to the water;     the flame speaks to the cloud;

the red splatter, abstraction, on the door

speaks to the angel and the constellations.

The grains of sand on the sea-floor speak at last to the noon.

And the loud hammering of the land behind

speaks ringing up the bones of our thighs, the hoofs,

we hear the hoofs over the seethe of the sea.

All night down the centuries, have heard, music of passage.

Music of one child carried into the desert;

firstborn forbidden by law of the pyramid.

Drawn through the water with the water-drawn people

led by the water-drawn man to the smoke mountain.

The voice of the world speaking, the world covered by signs,

the burning, the loving, the speaking, the opening.

Strong throat of sound from the smoking mountain.

Still flame, the spoken singing of a young child.

The meaning beginning to move, which is the song.

Music of those who have walked out of slavery.

Into that journey where all things speak to all things

refusing to accept the curse, and taking

for signs the signs of all things, the world, the body

which is part of the soul, and speaks to the world,

all creation being created in one image, creation.

This is not the past walking into the future,

the walk is painful, into the present, the dance

not visible as dance until much later.

These dancers are discoverers of God.

We knew we had all crossed over when we heard the song.

Out of a life of building lack on lack:

the slaves refusing slavery, escaping into faith:

an army who came to the ocean: the walkers

who walked through the opposites, from I to opened Thou,

city and cleave of the sea. Those at flaming Nauvoo,

the ice on the great river: the escaping Negroes,

swamp and wild city: the shivering children of Paris

and the glass black hearses; those on the Long March:

all those who together are the frontier, forehead of man.

Where the wilderness enters, the world, the song of the world.

Akiba rescued, secretly, in the clothes of death

by his disciples carried from Jerusalem

in blackness journeying to find his journey

to whatever he was loving with his life.

The wilderness journey through which we move

under the whirlwind truth into the new,

the only accurate. A cluster of lights at night:

faces before the pillar of fire. A child watching

while the sea breaks open. This night. The way in.

Barbarian music, a new song.

Acknowledging opened water, possibility:

open like a woman to this meaning.

In a time of building statues of the stars,

valuing certain partial ferocious skills

while past us the chill and immense wilderness

spreads its one-color wings until we know

rock, water, flame, cloud, or the floor of the sea,

the world is a sign, a way of speaking. To find.

What shall we find? Energies, rhythms, journey.

Ways to discover. The song of the way in.

Sixty-Seven Today

Bowie is sixty-seven today and that is easily the Bowie song I've air-guitared most and I've air-guitared plenty of Bowie songs (TVC-15 is second) and Red Sails is probably one of the five and certainly one of my dozen most air-guitared songs ever. The Hinterland, the Hinterland, we're gonna sail to the Hinterland, it's so far far far-far far far-far-far away it's so far far da-da-da-da-DA-da dadada. Three-four. People can vouch. I twoot-solicited Bowie requests but only friend and Potters fan Jamie responded. Let me know if you want to add a song.






Via Landru:





Via L:





Ethan offers the below and a full concert here.





Via N the N




Via Jim

My Valve Leaks an Amniotic Canopy Over the Bar I'm Fragging

Julia Holter is playing Rock and Roll Hotel September 26. Anyone? I can keep tabs on sales, it can be a game day decision - has to be for me right now. I do want to give you some reads. I saw the headline that Obama is going to nominate exactly whom everyone knew he was going to nominate to head the Fed. We are currently housing - this is true, and more interesting since Serendipity and its sidekick Fine Metaphors Abounding are involved - a recent college graduate, a daughter of a friend of a friend of my late mother-in-law (who died a year ago this week), the daughter of a friend of a friend of my late mother-in-law a Chicago School of Economics graduate who started a job at the Fed a week ago today. Earthgirl can vouch. We trusted her with our cats when we went to Ohio, all seven are accounted for and apparently untraumatized by her shock doctrine and insistence on austerity. What? Summers' withdrew his name? Nonetheless, that's today's clusterfuck summary gag in lieu of clusterfuck links to stretch the clusterfuck linklessness hit streak to TEN DAYS!  nine days, see below, and PINTS! next Thursday Night Pints, whenever that will be, might be October, fucking semester.

• Linguistic anxiety and and the deconstruction of the self in the realm of the ridiculous.
• Zombie social democracy? I can post theory, I said last Thursday night to L, related to the clusterfuck but not link directly to topical clusterfuckery. You're hedging your bet, she said, so I waited until today since the bet was the weekend and I don't need the grief over the free pints.
• Neurosis and terror as national policy. Silber's latest, if I'm going to break the clusterfuck-free band it might as well be with Silber. 
• Send Arthur the coins in your pocket. 
• The banality of systemic evil.
• The one and the many.
• Reparative compulsions.
• Commercial art is no longer a crime.
• Maggie's weekend links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly link.
• The New Inquiry's Sunday links.
• Allegory.
• The secret life of punctuation.
• Three photos from this past weekend's slideshows likely to be canvases of Earthgirl. Yes, that part is gone there too.
• Jonathan Letham - I have not made it past a hundred pages of multiple tries at his novels, they don't sing for me, I assume the fault is mine - sorta lovingly asssnarks the new Pynchon.
• Fooled me for years with wrong pronouns.
• Ashbery's Flow Chart.
• New Leonard Cohen song.

THE JOY OF SOLIPSISM

Nick Twemlow

Bring the oncoming train into focus.

Tell me your theory of the market.

Pupils dilate, trees fall,

I practice transference in my downtime.

Think of my mother watering

plants. Is

everybody really watching?

Blog me. Add to my Wiki entry.

Date me. Reply to my electronic flirt.

My mother told me she’d nominate

me for that award, if she could bear

the proxy. Show me your tits.

I shaved my balls. I took out

a second mortgage. Motherhood

frightens the elms, carves its sorry

initials into the sky’s prolapsed anus.

Each sadness passes through

me like a gallstone. My valve leaks

an amniotic canopy over the

bar I’m fragging. I’m a fragment,

a tender button. I saw my first

beetle in the periphery. Lake Shore

Drive against the ruins, the stain

of lake-effect snow a special effect,

the only weather

exhibiting any real affect.

Cradles in the Milkiest Arms of the Universe

  
Yes, it's sure to disappoint, these comebacks are never fully satisfying (though the two songs from 2011 are pretty effing good, one of them below), but still, blessed news, the chance to post Mazzy Star. Have I ever mentioned I love Mazzy Star? There, that's one of the rhetorical tics I referenced earlier today. The song below the Goldbarth poem has to be one of this shitty blogs five most posted songs ever. Two more tics in that sentence. Thanks to Hamster for the heads-up (he also sends news of a capella versions of Bowie's *Starman* and *Five Years* - I'm glad he reads Slate because I always forget too until I remember William Salatin and Matthew Yglesias write there and deliberately don't read it - though I do like Dahlia Lithwick). Anyway, bad mood gone for me but not for thee. I've never been called an *ipecac wretcher.* And the Goldbarth is claimed.





...one of whom had apparently died in childbirth; we found the skeleton of an infant within her remains

Albert Goldbarth

- it was, in it's way,
a pietà.

And the pictures in the planetarium gallery
of a star in all the stages of its last progression,
dying - first a "white dwarf," then a "black dwarf,"
then a "black hole," that the composition
cradles in the milkiest arms of the universe. 

I Would Open a Book and Could Decipher Nothing for Letters Faded and Disappeared from the Pages

Today is not an Egoslavian Holy Day, Lordy, what the fuck to blog about, everyone and everything still sucks and/or is same meh and/or is still unKind and/or Kind and/or terrible and/or wondrous. The three of us are seeing Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 tonight, I hadn't heard of it (I'd heard of him though I couldn't name a movie this moment beside 8 1/2 which I hadn't heard of until yesterday), I'm told it's a classic. I don't see movies. This is not a moral stance, this - once, still - is about I've enough obsessions already. This blog, thanks to the many Egoslavian Holy Days, thanks to my dwindling interest in or ability to re-sausage the daily duh, is what I do, read poetry, listen to music (solo piano, yo, whenever I'm Hey, Sailored,  Lordy, love), scribble in tablets. If I gave in to movies (and I want to give in to movies, it would be easy) I couldn't remain ram to the dam of poetry and music, I've only two ears, two eyes, one hard drive, so many hours. This is why I dress in black and STAND for ninety minutes for a stupidass soccer team, why until this past election I only voted straight Democratic tickets. This is why I write a sentence like the second one before this one. Anyway,

• I'll not review the movie. You're welcome.
• I have no idea why blogger doesn't embiggen on this site, and you probably don't want to anyway, but to see above poem to read it, go here, and click mosaic, yo, then click it again.
• Our post-racial society.
• James Comey ain't your homey.
• Federici's Feminist Critique of Marx.
• I know the owner of this blog.
• Serendipitously, this morning, after writing the monologue last night re: movies, I got an email from David Vaipan, a Kind reader out of Fresno California who asked me if I'd bump his Kickstarter for his new project You (Plural), a film adaptation of both Joyce's Ulysses and Shakespeare's Hamlet. Check it out.
• The killing of Wheaton.
• If USMNT gets to Brazil, it'll be via play-in game, and probably not even then. Psst. I don't care.
• I've kept up the the Newest Gag project over on blogroll left, a new site every day through May. I'm undecided whether it will run into June and if it does whether it will be the same blogroll or a new blogroll. Check out the new places.
• Auster and Coetzee, for those of you who do.
• The Milosz is in the mail.
• The weirdest album to ever go platinum?
• New Diamond Terrifier.
• Aereogramme was requested:

WOE!

Czeslaw Milosz

It is true, our tribe is similar to the bees.
It gathers honey of wisdom, carries it, stores it in honeycombs.
I am able to roam for hours
Through the labyrinth of the main library, floor to floor.
But yesterday, looking for words of masters and prophets
I wandered into high regions
That are visited by practically no one.
I would open a book and could decipher nothing
For letters faded and disappeared from the pages.
Woe! I exclaimed - so it comes to this?
Where are you, venerable one, with your beards and wigs,
Your nights spend by a candle, griefs of your wives?
So a message saving the world is silenced forever?

At your home it was the day of making preserves.
And your dog, sleeping by the fire, would wake up,
Yawn and look at you - as if knowing.

And the Next Day and the Next and Another Day

There's One Regular Who Lapses In and Out of Consciousness and He's the Real Reason She Stays

If Bonnie Prince Billy in red beret and pink scarf isn't proof I love and trust you, what is? bullshit social climber faux anti-racism. (UPDATE: Freddie's follow-up to the previous.) My passive aggressive tool of maintaining privilege is Kindness. I give money to save cats, give apples and oranges to beggars on Rockville Pike. I was told last Thursday, I don't got no teeth, I don't want your fucking apple, she was standing at the corner of Nicholson and Rockville (NOT NORTH BETHESDA) Pike. I had a dentist appt yesterday to temp-crown the root canal of a month ago, dentist in building across from Dietles IN ROCKVILLE, NOT NORTH BETHESDA, THERE IS NO NORTH BETHESDA, IT'S ROCKVILLE. Dentist said, eat soup today, I drove to Whole Foods (which could exist in a hypothetical North Bethesda if such a place were possible) a block away, see woman who told me she doesn't want my fucking apple, buy her a small container of Chicken Noodle soup, walk it out to her, she didn't remember me or my apple, she took the soup, said Bless you. VICTORY FOR ME! Kindness, bitches. The killing of Callion Hamblin. The shocking savagery of America's Early History. Shocking only if one never stopped to consider America. Rewards in capitalism. Postmodern irony and the appreciation of tits. Whenever I think Obama is failing, I try to remember whose metrics I'm using. The Notebooks of Obama. The long death of the middle brow. Symbols. Why we can't have nice things. Whatever House of Cards is (I know it's a TV show, no idea what about), Jake Backpack ruins it for you! Though I know enough that if your agent comes to you and says I've got a lead role in a made-for-cable series that's perfect for you, I know my leading man Hollywood days are over. Atheist. If an atheist is someone who never believes my leading man Hollywood days are over, no matter how many tickets are sold, that's me. More retro and cities. Gula. This is true: I wish I was a born linguist. Ten of the most divisive authors? A short riff on Moby Dick. My newest theory on my reading block is that whatever I'm reading I feel like I should be rereading Moby Dick. Lord Garth. Silliman's always generous litlinks. Blanchot, for those of you who do. Stream the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs' single. I heard the Yeah Yeah Yeahs bed music a Cadillac commercial this past weekend, remember (this is an old gag, forgive me) the outrage at Clapton "selling-out" for his Michelob commercial 30+ years ago? I tweeted about the YYYs' Cadillac commercial yesterday to resounding disinterest except from a Cadillac bot who is now following me. Penderecki. Jim's Stereolab playlist. Wanna hear the second single from Bowie's new album?






THE OBJECTIFIED MERMAID

Matthea Harvey

The photographer has been treating her like a spork all morning. “Wistful mouth, excited tail! Work it, work it!” He has no idea that even fake smiling spreads to her eyes and her tail and there’s nothing she can do about it short of severing her spine. Without asking, the assistant re-sprays her with glycerine. It’s gonna be hell getting all that grease off her scales tonight but she can’t scum up her tank at the bar—its weekly cleanings seem more like monthly these days, and fewer and fewer patrons have been inviting (read: paying) her for a Tankside Mertini and quick feel of her tail. There’s one regular who lapses in and out of consciousness and he’s the real reason she stays. Every once in a while he seems to have forgotten where he is and he looks at her with the kind of wonder she imagines her grandmother inspired when she first risked coming ashore. After an hour under the studio spotlights, she’s starting to smell pretty fishy. Can’t blame it (as she has before) on her standard seaweed bra because this fool of a photographer has her holding two clear fishbowls in front of her breasts so it looks like goldfish are swimming past her nipples. She’s supposed to pretend it tickles. She wants to ask if he’s heard the phrase "gilding the lily" which she recently learned at Land Berlitz. When asked if she’s tired, she lies. A downward spiral means the opposite up here.

Gagging to Spit Them Out

Robert Wyatt is sixty-eight today. Thanks to Bleeding Edge (Pynchon allusion) for the above, Greyhoos for the last link in this paragraph and the video below. No slideshow of yesterday's Bamgier to Zanesville to Wheeling to Washington to Morgantown to Cumberland to Hancock to Hagerstown to Frederick to Kensington. After we abandoned Planet in Ohio in the morning Earthgirl took out her camera, sighed, put it away, sketched or knit the rest of the way, her call, I'm happy. Thought about the email re: episodic v serial blogging starting roughly from Martinsburg Ohio to the first pissstop in Cabela West Virginia (the first West Virginia west to east, the second West Virginia east to west). I'm pleased to find (and old-timers will be pleased too) that while I've lots to write about, I'm not going to write about it here - or at least not yet - and I promise not to explain another gag (five embedded in this post, including two in this sentence) until the next time. Reminder: Villagers. The placebo effect of law.  The Handmaiden of Capitalism versus The Swamp Denizen of Detroit. Bashing the walrus. Srsly? David Harvey, anarchism, tightly-couple systems. Federici interview. Fracking. Wait, I thought frat boys were, in the majority, conservatives. Blogging as performance. Fumigation tents. Fire St Benny! Laugh at Juve! For my Western Pennsylvanian buds: Pittsburgh 1956. International Pynchon Week. I confess I've never got Seamus Heaney, I assume the fault is mine. Lip-synching the poetry of empire. Bowie and re-writing one's past. Nilsson cascade. Quartets ahoy. Dondestan.





ARS POETICA (COCOONS)

Dana Levin

Six monarch butterfly cocoons
          clinging to the back of your throat -

          you could feel their gold wings trembling

You were alarmed. You felt infested.
In the downstairs bathroom of the family home,
          gagging to spit them out -
                    and a voice saying Don't, don't -

She Call's Me Johnny Rocket. I Don't Know Why: Take Two, Now w/Links, or: Bright Power, Dark Peace

Holyfuck, just released. So good (I posted the blue last night in a fit of unsuppressible exaltation). Ten bucks at iPlace, buy it. Be complicit like me. Third time through, it's beyond cubing, quadrupling, beyond whatever that creepy backwards calculus E-thingee that square roots live in does. Holyfuck, indulging my rube, I haven't since...  holyfuck, I needed this. HEY! Mr Alarum found it this morning on Spotify! HEY! Look at the first three comments I've received at the reformatted one of two other places!

 

• It's fascinating to me to watch me set up a format-free place and fear posting for fear of setting a format, though the main reason for the relocated other place is MOTHERFUCKING BLOOGER, which now won't let me change link colors, so bulletpoints return.
• Origins of neo-liberalism, part two.  
• Totalitarian undercurrents. 
• Is Occupy dead?  
• Groping the truth.  
• Idle no more?  
• Why he's an atheist.  
• How to talk about the weather.  
• Things you might have missed. 
• Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?
• On adapting Pynchon's Inherent Vice into a movie.  
• Death of a literary magazine. 
• New volume of Frank Bidart poetry in 2013! 
• Robinson Jeffers was born 126 years ago today.  
• Frank O'Hara. 
• Ashbery.
• Part of last night's soundtrack.
• Nine fuck noes, one please no.
• Here's the new Bowie for the three of you who haven't seen it. I've upgraded my opinion from ugh to meh, and I accept my share of the blame for the mehhing - I don't much like ballads.

    
ROCK AND HAWK

Robinson Jeffers

Here is a symbol in which
Many high tragic thoughts
Watch their own eyes.

This gray rock, standing tall
On the headland, where the seawind
Lets no trees grow,

Earthquake-proved, and signatured
By ages of storms: on its peak
A falcon has perched.

I think, here is you emblem
To hang in the future sky;
Not the cross, not the hive,

But this; bright power, dark peace;
Fierce consciousness joined with final
Disinterestedness;

Life with calm death; the falcon's
Realist eyes and act
Married to the massive

Mysticism of stone,
Which failure cannot cast down
Nor success make proud.

I Saw a Juxtaposition, It Happened Between an Acrobat and a Sense of Obligation

  
Dinner last night with Planet and Hamster and Ilsa and Landru and SeatSix (Earthgirl obliged to be elsewhere), then fell asleep with Proust, only quick links today plus Bowie covers. Crow falls down. People rebooting or opening alternative joints is trending. See a blegrell on left. For me it's more fuck blooger than reformatting bleggalgazing. Taking it personally. Obama's rabbit holes. Not what you think but what you are. The origins of neo-liberalism, part one. New dependency theory. Capitalism. Three things. The imminent death of blogging predicted, except not. Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team? Conjuring Weldon Kees. Kafka, for those of you who do. Krasznahorkai, for those of you who do. I like, a lot, but fuck, it's work. Letter already broadcast into space. How to be a critic. Yes, I know the new Ubu out today, thanks to all who've emailed and DMed and texted. Gonna get my ears on it before saying much more. The cover at bottom reminds me I haven't cascaded Superchuck here lately. I love Superchunk. Reactions to the new Bowie song. I didn't realize it was his first song in ten years, something for me to think about.





[I SAW A JUXTAPOSITION]

Lyn Hejinian

I saw a juxtaposition
It happened to be between an acrobat and a sense of obligation
Pure poetry
Of course there is a greater difference between and egg and a
     napping man

With Each Epithet Create New Reasons to Believe or Doubt You

Forgive me, I love that song. Bowie is sixty-six today. All other songs via buds, thank you very much. It's probably apocryphal, but I once read Bowie said, at accusations he stole ideas, it's not who does it first, it's who does is second. I've a friend who wonders if the sting of those accusations made Bowie make the choices of his late career. Anyway, Bowie was on my daily soundtrack during the formative years of my lifetime's soundtrack. I want to give 1990 - present another listen. I'm hopeful there are songs I'll feel stupid for missing when they were released years ago.






Meditations on Obama's second term. Rewarding torturers. Drone godfather. Obama's Cheney. I overheard two int'l affairs/govt professors talking yesterday, one said, so the fight over Hagel is to distract from Brennan's nomination, the other said, no, the Hagel nomination is solely a fuck you to Bibi. What Obama's nominations mean. The deadly serious part. State of fear. Image of the enemy. Imagination bodies forth. It's the political economy, stupid. Crisis theory and the current conjecture. Shill. Najar to Netherlands. Meillassoux, for those of you who do. Lisa Robertson. 95th Street. Szymborska. Szymborska. One playlist from Cleveland, another playlist from Cleveland. Mining the audio motherlode. I didn't know of Seu Jorge, a friend requests his cover of Space Oddity. Holyfuck, find a bunch here. Thank you, anne. Absolute beginners. Bowie on Dick Cavett Show. What, a new Bowie song? Um, ugh. Quick, below, sorry, video cuts out, great song:






UNHOLY SONNET 1

Mark Jarman

Dear God, Our Heavenly Father, Gracious Lord
Mother Love and Maker, Light Divine,
Atomic Fingertip, Cosmic Design,
First Letter of the Alphabet, Last Word,
Mutual Satisfaction, Cash Award,
Auditor Who Approves Our Bottom Line,
Examiner Who Says That We Are Fine,
Oasis That All Sands Are Running Toward.

I can say almost anything about you,
O Big Idea, and with each epithet,
Create new reasons to believe or doubt you,
Black Hole, White Hole, Presidential Jet.
But what's the anything I must leave out? You
Solve nothing but the problems that I set.

And Wow He Died as Wow He Lived, Going Whop to the Office and Blooie Home to Sleep and Biff Got Married and Bam Had Children and Oof Got Fired, Zowie Did He Live and Zowie Did He Die

Laziest-ass post ever. I cede to Fleabus reruns. No, can't let it go there. Had discussion over coffee yesterday afternoon with He Who Does Not Want to Be Named (though he owns that pseudonym), the obamaphile professor of a Discipline He Doesn't Want Me to Name at the University We Both Work at He Doesn't Want Me to Name. He is proud of Obama for the deal to avoid the Fiscal Cliff, proud that Obama supposedly intends to spend major political capital over the nomination of Chuck Hagel for War. I asked, Why do you think Obama chose the fight of nominating a Republican senator to run the Drone Corporation as rallying cause to energize the American Left? I'm too cynical, I'm told. I said, I have tried being less of a scold, not saying it's working. Shirking responsibility. Understanding Obama's strategies. Motherfucking New York Times. On that fucking NYT article. Obama versus physics. Magical surpluses. Happy 8th Blegday! I finished my Week One Proust assignment - it can be laugh-out loud funny. Bristol Road, Birmingham. Pynchon and decadence. Dutilleux Cello Concerto. Albums that are now 20 years old. Bowie's birthday is Tuesday, if you give a fuck-enough and want to hear a song, let me know.





  
DIRGE

Kenneth Fearing

1-2-3 was the number he played but today the number came 3-2-1;

   bought his Carbide at 30 and it went to 29; had the favorite at Bowie but the track was slow—

O, executive type, would you like to drive a floating power, knee-action, silk-upholstered six? Wed a Hollywood star? Shoot the course in 58? Draw to the ace, king, jack?

   O, fellow with a will who won't take no, watch out for three cigarettes on the same, single match; O democratic voter born in August under Mars, beware of liquidated rails—

Denouement to denouement, he took a personal pride in the certain, certain way he lived his own, private life,

   but nevertheless, they shut off his gas; nevertheless, the bank foreclosed; nevertheless, the landlord called; nevertheless, the radio broke,

And twelve o'clock arrived just once too often,

   just the same he wore one gray tweed suit, bought one straw hat, drank one straight Scotch, walked one short step, took one long look, drew one deep breath,

   just one too many,

And wow he died as wow he lived,

   going whop to the office and blooie home to sleep and biff got married and bam had children and oof got fired,

   zowie did he live and zowie did he die,

With who the hell are you at the corner of his casket, and where the hell we going on the right-hand silver knob, and who

the hell cares walking second from the end with an American Beauty wreath from why the hell not,

Very much missed by the circulation staff of the New York Evening Post; deeply, deeply mourned by the B.M.T.,

Wham, Mr. Roosevelt; pow, Sears Roebuck; awk, big dipper; bop, summer rain;

   Bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong.