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Sunday 13 November 2016

Block / The unwanted guest

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11/8/2016 | by shadowplay

11/8/2016: photo by Hans Proppe, 9 November 2016

If I were as old as you
I'd just hurry up and die
said the young drunk guy on
the day of the elect
He meant because of the USA
turning out to be the USA
but hey as the smart old guy
said to me forty years ago
I'm sorry to be in your way
but I've only got one speed
Slow

        [...some hours...]

I thought I heard crickets sing
through the screen door
on summer nights
        but no,
Anacreon, no


The unwanted guest | by efo

The unwanted guest. You may think of this as a reaction to this week's news. (Alabama, United States): photo by efo, 12 November 2016

6 comments:

STEPHEN RATCLIFFE said...

Tom, "Block" / "The unwanted guest" -- two great photos here on the occasion of this week's "elect," in response also to which this . . .

I thought I heard crickets sing
through the screen door
on summer nights
but no,
Anacreon, no

tpw said...

This is an eerie and powerful post, Tom. (I'd have to say, though, that your brain seems to be running at top speed.)

TC said...

Many thanks, Steve and Terry.

Aye, eerie it was indeed, amid the pulverized neurons of the wee wee hours before the crushing blow of yet another unforgiving murican dawn, to find that the faint horizon line I believed I had detected in the Hans Proppe photo, both is and isn't there. I don't know if I simply wished it into being there. Stranger things have happened.

I've gone blind, so must squint to see anything. I've now cleaned my magnifying glass.

No, it's not there, again. But maybe later...

The photo was taken, I surmise, in the high desert of LA county, Santa Clarita area, SW of Palmdale. Agua Dulce.

What's in a name.

efo's picture was taken not in Alabama but, dare I crawl out on yet another frail speculative limb, in the humble murican burg of el cerrito del norte, just up the reeking refinery corridor from here.

As for the USA, what is there to say, any more.

Anacreon, however, is surely to blame for nothing.

It wasn't him who was sobbing uncontrollably in wave after wave of self pity all this past week, after all.

Why does everybody who's not quite grown up think the pain and insult of it all is reserved exclusively for them?

He has few hairs, only about the ears
And those are grey, and fewer remaining years
And those are sad. He has said goodbye
To the last youth. Nobody
Beckons him now but death, the one
Lover from whom there is no moving on.

Fragment 95, tr. David Constantine 1983

STEPHEN RATCLIFFE said...

Lovely to see this one Tom this morning, on a grey gray fogged in day . . .

He has few hairs, only about the ears
And those are grey, and fewer remaining years
And those are sad. He has said goodbye
To the last youth. Nobody
Beckons him now but death, the one
Lover from whom there is no moving on.

manik sharma said...

Tom,

We should be worried.Very very worried

TC said...

Manik,

One fears those clear, structured arguments of which the writer speaks may have gone the way of the unicorn.