As for the Farmers, They Are, for the Most Part, Indistinguishable

I've been cleaning closets, burning, shredding, smashing, erasing evidence. That I'm deliberately loud while insisting on my invisibility is why I'm stupidly angry at being ignored.

Yodel, I get cleaning jags so infrequently, I've done some blegrell pruning; long-abandoned blegs, blegs always tertiary (and never reciprocal), a couple whose advertising freezes my Dell Dinosaur 1999 at home, one guy who reads me daily, doesn't reciprocate links or rells or Kind, rips me off. It was like watching Fleabus watch the raccoons eat the ferals' food.

Just kidding! I only purged that one guy. I needed to write this so I'd stop thinking about writing it. There are some new pingworthies over to the left under New New, though.

Cleaning out my closets I rediscovered different theories and models of tablets, including the Moleskin journalist model with 5x5 quad, excellent for prose-poems, sluts that they are, excellent for the long lines I've been experimenting with, kinda successfully, actually,

but I'm in love again with this tablet for no greater reason than I've no mechanism for publishing content to eyes beyond mine. Let me drink this candle.

That's this month's bleggalgazing - I allow myself twelve per year; otherwise it'd be everyday. Thanks everyone for the Kind. As always, if you're Kinding me and I'm not Kinding you back, drop me a email. And click Fleabus up top, yo.

• Terminus of delightful nihilism.
• UPDATE! On the new Zizek: Slavoj Zizek has identified the four horsemen of this coming apocalypse: the worldwide ecological crisis; imbalances within the economic system; the biogenetic revolution; and exploding social divisions and ruptures. Good thing I have access to a university library.
• If things were going well.
• UPDATE! Leading by example.
• The hunters.
• The more you repress it, the more you do it.
• UPDATE! Bokonanism.
• Paulson, Geithner, and Summers walk into a bar....
• Brought on themselves.
• He's trying to scare the base, asswipe.
• UPDATE! The case for Obama.
• I hate me motherfucking christers.
• Teabaggers are morons.

 

• UPDATE! They're also pussies. I said they're morons; I didn't say they should have to take the billboard down.
• How bullshit works.
• No, you're not Spartacus. (But Spasticus? Yes!)
• UPDATE! No, not that Spartacus.
• Kensington! Doesn't impact me, but Kensington used to pride itself on being a dry town. Once that crappy sports bar got a liquor license, I suppose carry-out was inevitable.
• Metro sucks.
• Worm girl!
• German national team? Gay! Michael Ballack is a pussy.
• UPDATE! Worse kits of 10/11 (with blasts from past!).
• What next for the 4-4-2?
• Silliman's always generous linkages.
• Two old Ashbery poems.
• I want Planet's piano teacher to give her Schumann.
• But I really want her to assign Planet some Poulenc.
• UPDATE! Heartbeat.
• McCartney sucks, but not as much as PBS.
• UPDATE! Let's Active.
• Swoon.
• UPDATE! Memory box.
• This week's new releases w/MP3.
• UPDATE! Kite.

THE PROSE POEM

Campbell McGrath

On the map it is precise and rectilinear as a chessboard, though driving past you would hardly notice it, this boundary line or ragged margin, a shallow swale that cups a simple trickle of water, less rill than rivulet, more gully than dell, a tangled ditch grown up throughout with a fearsome assortment of wildflowers and bracken. There is no fence, though here and there a weathered post asserts a former claim, strands of fallen wire taken by the dust. To the left a cornfield carries into the distance, dips and rises to the blue sky, a rolling plain of green and healthy plants aligned in close order, row upon row upon row. To the right, a field of wheat, a field of hay, young grasses breaking the soil, filling their allotted land with the rich, slow-waving spectacle of their grain. As for the farmers, they are, for the most part, indistinguishable: here the tractor is red, there yellow; here a pair of dirty hands, there a pair of dirty hands. They are cultivators of the soil. They grow crops by pattern, by acre, by foresight, by habit. What corn is to one, wheat is to the other, and though to some eyes the similarities outweigh the differences it would be as unthinkable for the second to commence planting corn as for the first to switch over to wheat. What happens in the gully between them is no concern of theirs, they say, so long as the plough stays out, the weeds stay in the ditch where they belong, though anyone would notice the wind-sewn cornstalks poking up their shaggy ears like young lovers run off into the bushes, and the kinship of these wild grasses with those the farmer cultivates is too obvious to mention, sage and dun-colored stalks hanging their noble heads, hoarding exotic burrs and seeds, and yet it is neither corn nor wheat that truly flourishes there, nor some jackalopian hybrid of the two. What grows in that place is possessed of a beauty all its own, ramshackle and unexpected, even in winter, when the wind hangs icicles from the skeletons of briars and small tracks cross the snow in search of forgotten grain; in the spring the little trickle of water swells to welcome frogs and minnows, a muskrat, a family of turtles, nesting doves in the verdant grass; in summer it is a thoroughfare for raccoons and opossums, field mice, swallows and black birds, migrating egrets, a passing fox; in autumn the geese avoid its abundance, seeking out windrows of toppled stalks, fatter grain more quickly discerned, more easily digested. Of those that travel the local road, few pay that fertile hollow any mind, even those with an eye for what blossoms, vetch and timothy, early forsythia, the fatted calf in the fallow field, the rabbit running for cover, the hawk's descent from the lightning-struck tree. You've passed this way yourself many times, and can tell me, if you would, do the formal fields end where the valley begins, or does everything that surrounds us emerge from its embrace?

Dr Leo reminds me of this plus a personal theme song: