a sweet spot, a warm, quiet evening,
of a too-soft winter here,
on & of the good Earth,
that tempts the comfortable one
to flirt with forgetting
the hard totality
of this hot and cold, man-made,
loud and brutal World.
Author: ©️K.T. 2026
Zone of Interest, North American Continent
on Christmas eve
i traveled a river of concrete in a machine,
you traveled an ocean of air in a machine,
babies crying, inconsolably, you said
i said, eustachean tubes aren’t meant for 30,000 feet.
i am not meant for this,
neither are you,
neither are they.
not the opposite of joy
on Christmas eve
but the false pursuit of it
whatever is actually contrary to it
even if we don’t know it when we see it.
even if we refuse to know it when we see it.
if i allow myself to cry, he will see it on my face.
Continue reading “on Christmas eve”
the war on anti-terror
The US & Israel Joint Venture Capital Empire of Terror & Genocide ™️
hath no clothes.
Luigi Mangione: I was going to use a bomb to kill the CEO but I didn’t want to harm anyone else
US Government:
This is terrorism
Netanyahu: We are using unguided 2000 pound bombs in a densely populated civilian area to level entire apartment blocks
US Government:
This is self-defence
Replicating anti anti-fascist and anti anti-zionist propaganda and gaslighting tactics, the political marketing class and sworn officials of the U.S. and New York State Governments cosplay as integrity police and justice arbiters, and attempt to manipulate both the rule of their false law and their false order to condemn, litigate and abolish the law of the streets and resistance movements for liberation and justice.
They will fail.
Continue reading “the war on anti-terror”“What do you do? You wack the C.E.O. at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention. It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t risk innocents,”
passage written in a notebook attributed to alleged Anti-Terrorist, Luigi Mangione
Dickensian Dollar Store Christmas
a version of this essay was first published December 8, 2015
“Christmas is coming,
the goose is getting fat,
please put a penny in the old man's hat,
if you haven't got a penny,
then, a half-penny will do,
if you haven't got a half-penny,
then God bless you.”
I went to the nearest Dollar Store to buy old-fashioned, stringy, silver tinsel for our christmas tree.
All that glitters is not silver or gold, is never ever golden, whether you buy your pretty ornaments or wrapping paper for a buck – or two at Dollar Tree, Walmart, Target, Macy’s or Saks for $5, $10, $30 or $50. The only difference is the retailer’s profit margin — very rarely is there a difference in quality when it comes to seasonal items, disposable items and sundries.
The season of peace and beauty feels very false once you know and remember to never forget that all those beautiful ornaments and decorations adorning almost every American home, restaurant or holiday venue are made by women, children, or men in sweatshops who are breathing in lead dust, paint fumes, plastic glitter, chemicals and pigments often for less than $30 per 12-hour shift; all that beautiful crap then warehoused, shipped, stocked and sold by non-living-wage, multi-job workers in the U.S.
Yet, while I’m there roaming the aisles or in the long line to check-out, I feel an overwhelming sense of community with my fellow city dwellers — the shoppers, the store’s workers and with all the workers of the World — particularly those in Yiwu, Zhezhang, China who are mass-producing a vast majority of all of this shit.
ironically & hilariously,
still made in the USA!
I also feel an overwhelming revulsion of the systems of ‘growth’ and development: capitalism, consumerism, and human and natural resource “management” which are uniquely undeniable in the fluorescent, depressive uniformity of the minimally staffed chaos found in a busy, urban dollar store,
Continue reading “Dickensian Dollar Store Christmas”the Anti-Übermensch
if there was a Mother God,
if God was a Mother,
not “were”
this wouldn’t be
our reality
a dying planet
a deadened polity
mass extinction by chainsaw, net,
bolt-gun or bomb
they said, “96% of children in Gaza feel that death is imminent”
in Sudan, the famine is massive,
oh, this reaper, he is very discriminate
in Congo, there’s mass enslavement for minerals,
see the phone in her hand?! her hypocrisy?! she can’t claim to be innocent!
the Pacific’s so hot,
that it’s killed 4 million murres
while the Indigenous still invoke
“cultural rights” to baby seal furs
therefore,
God is either male — or, truer,
the God who created everything,
was the very first one extincted,
as Nietzsche,
and the german thinkers before him,
all, belatedly said,
La Virgen de Guadalupe
illuminated at night
(embellished canvas, dollar store)
waiting for the bough to break
i am waiting for the bough to break — or, to be severed by proxy at my behest.
earlier this week on my daily walk-about, i noticed that a primary limb, the major artery, on a nearly 80’ tall and likely nearing 100 years-old, elm tree on the land i occupy, had cleaved and that the fracture was migrating down into the trunk — and dangerously so.
i don’t know the cause: if it was the abrupt shift in temperature to freezing here in southwest Michigan — or, if the tree was stressed from a standing-water-wet spring followed by a very dry summer, or if “it” is simply at the end of their life — all the elms here had unusually held onto an abundance of their prolific leaves until the fourth week of November.
no matter.
the matters:
the massive limb of the elm stretches high and precariously over the old barn, and depending on the wind direction, there’s a chance if it falls, it could clip the back of my house or take the whole tree down with it.
i await the tree surgery & removal crew. i am at their and the northerly and westerly gusts’ mercy.
in the meantime, i have also been wrestling with the possible choice of whether to have the crew amputate just the cleaved limbs — if the tree is in fact salvageable — or, to remove the entire tree at once instead of forestalling the inevitable.
Continue reading “waiting for the bough to break”view from a winter bath
slouching toward bethlehem
i resist stirring, opening my eyes, or thinking
as the dog wakes, and waits
i am in the center of another dawn-dream,
on the precipice of
experiencing some thing, of understanding some thing
but it cannot hold,
evaporating
with every
slouch toward consciousness
i open my eyes to
the grey of the room, to the dark white gyre of the sky through these generous windows
i open my ears
to the beat
of crystals pummeling these generous windows,
once and again, realizing
i possess slow thighs,
heavy lungs, a heavier heart,
an entire weighted mass,
and a mind — less than half-known / half-known
i want to re-bury myself in the warm sands of sleep, the enveloping weightless numb
and drift back to
the liminal/
this must be the
feeling
of the fully-gestated
unborn fetus, warm,
quiet, still
waiting to be born
yet resisting being known, moving on
Self-possessed: Mona Frida Warhol
There’s a simple term for the look in Frida Kahlo’s eyes: self-possession.
The gaze is not that of the (putatively male, white) viewer looking inwards. It is her own. She’s the one who does the looking. Her preternaturally long neck holds her head completely still and completely erect so that the eyes are front and centre.
But it’s important to remember that Kahlo didn’t become iconic. She created herself, quite literally, as an icon. The process is one she controlled. Though it’s not a comparison I’ve encountered in art history, Kahlo seems to me to be, among other things, a precursor of Warhol. Her images seem to be made for mass reproduction.
contemplating intent, consent, kill lists and ceasefire: deer hunting season, regular firearm, November 15 – 30, 2024 Michigan, U.S.
“The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.”
which was presumed to be of exclusive use of songbirds — especially, eastern bluebirds,
on the land the author occupies
Halloween 2024
“all treatery, no trickery”
Regular firearm, deer hunting season began yesterday in Michigan, United States of America, and the crack of rifles and the blast of shotguns destroy both peace and life.
There is some version of a legalized, defined kill list or belated, legalized “protection list” for nearly every non-human animal being population on Earth. And, for human animal being populations on Earth too.
What defines murder for human beings, of the human animal body?
INTENT.
All Hunting is INTENT – intent to kill.
All animal “livestock” agriculture is INTENT — intent to kill for profit.
Genocide is INTENT.
Continue reading “contemplating intent, consent, kill lists and ceasefire: deer hunting season, regular firearm, November 15 – 30, 2024 Michigan, U.S.”birth, the morning eve of november ides, northern hemisphere
the sky is divided crisply into
white and blue in the East
but in the far Southeast,
rather, the far Eastsouth
a golden slit opens
from aural gradations of pink
a cosmic vulva, one, among millions, billions?
birthing an ordinary, extraordinary morning
no pushing, no bearing down, no pain
that’s how easy
birthing once was
parthogenetiXally,
Continue reading “birth, the morning eve of november ides, northern hemisphere”
the limineen | earthling, poet & crone 