Category: Photo

  • your books

    The books you sent

    lie on the shelf

    I don’t read them

    Austen and Maugham

    books on old films

    Nazi biographies

    furry with dust

    purposefully neglected

    lies, all of it

    histories of French kings

    by church-going luminaries

    not to be gifted or donated

    sentenced to a life unread

    books about

    dandies and rich bitches

    dogs in human form

    Agatha Christie

    biographies of propagandists

    revered by some but

    not me

    books not worth the flame

    not worth time

    lying books to lie decoratively

    (like all lies)

    as long as I control

  • coronavirus blues

    Daydreaming in aisle five

    toothpaste and shampoo

    silent sparkling commerce

    air conditioned

    red arrows on scuffed white tile

    a guide in the labyrinth

    whole aisles are wastelands

    handwritten signs: OUT OF STOCK

    no one looks at me

    not masked employees

    shuffling

    ignoring everyone

    afraid

    not shoppers

    some unmasked

    aggressive

    center-of-the-universe

    others kind, warm

    smiling behind masks

    at the absurdity

    a blackbird loops above the bakery

    scouting crumbs

    I’ve been here too long

    they don’t have what I need

     

    back in the car I

    sanitize

    mask down

    never dreamed I’d need

    masks for my family

     

    through deserted streets

    atomic sunlight

    paranoid and guilty

    for what I might now carry

     

  • Galeano on Marx

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    14 March : CAPITAL — In 1883 a crowd gathered for Karl Marx’s funeral in a London cemetery — a crowd of eleven, counting the undertaker.

    The most famous of his sayings became his epitaph: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.’

    The prophet of global change spent his life fleeing the police and his creditors.

    Regarding his masterwork, he said: ‘No one ever wrote so much about money while having so little.’ Capital will not even pay for the cigars I smoked while writing it.’

     

    From Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History, trans. by Fried, Mark. Penguin Group, New York, 2013: 85.