1
Only time will tell if changes in US trade policy
are able to halt or reverse some of these trends. That is
if US trade policy is real, and not some collective hallucination. At present the US is in debt to China for a
considerable sum, and also lacks any foreseeable means of addressing this
imbalance through exports to other nations.
Aside from prostitution, he
thinks. President Obama’s recent
attempts to correct this imbalance have been less than successful, and more
strenuous measures on his part will be met by serious opposition from
Republicans eager to preserve the low cost of Chinese imports. So they
say so they say so they say.
2
Wherever I go I see another man’s face. The face over the skull is the skull placed
over my thoughts. I am oppressed and in
need of liberation. Someone said that
there was a long-ago cave-time out of mind, and in that cave-time we were all
free to worship whatever idols that we chose.
There were no lovers then, nor an upper and lower class. We were all gloriously free, and enjoyed the
fruits of our labors. This is with the
exception of slaves and the lovesick, who are identical, and who have never
been free from the beginning.
They were only strips
of flesh painted over their own skulls.
Their days were marked, and they tried to love one another. But they failed.
But you
said the Revolution was coming. Or if
not that, then you said it had already come: the end of days. Or if not that, then in some far off time,
when conditions were right or wrong, and men were more like the men you see in
movies who stand up and say I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it
anymore. Even if they are not men, but
rather aliens, rather in Iceland, rather Icelandic, and not American. And then they get shot in the head, but just
before the credits, and just after the Revolution has already started. You told me this, you did, but I wasn’t
listening. There is a face upon another
man’s shoulders and that face is plastered upon his skull. The skull only says sad things, and a hammer
comes down like the manic shouting of a thunder god, an icon, a cult.
They
built empires in the north where the snow lies, and on the margins of the
deserts, and on tropical islands malarial.
A nation of thinkers, one of them was, a nation unto himself. But he was forever stunted by the mistakes of
history. Another a nation of workers,
with a thing for pussy. Almost as much
as he had a thing for power. One reaps
grain, but the hammered thunder god pounds down the unstraightened nail. A dream dreamt by a bearded man, but she
wasn’t listening. She was thinking of
that handsome boy on the other side of the lecture hall, she wasn’t taking any
notes. Halfway through the lecture the
professor had a seizure, just like in a movie.
They carried him into the parking lot where he died.
Sitting
at a blackjack table in Reno. A
straight-faced flush man deals a deck.
Upon the cards are seven suits.
Upon the cards are numbers from one to 50 million years. From the beginning of it all, from Theia, he
deals upward, but there are always only seven choices for seven suits. You can dwell with the Lord in a New
Israel. You can reside beside the
Merciful. You can go with Christ, you
can pass into another endless age, begin the Long Count, drive out the Thetans,
or else you can go to that place reserved for present-time gamblers, that
fearful reality called the future.
An old woman sitting
next whispers into your ear. An old woman
next. An old woman next two. Hit me.
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