jonberger

The question is raised every now and then:
Who is better than Elvis Costello?

Now the question can be answered:
(At fighting the British Empire in India)
Mahatma Gandhi
(At dancing the frug in black and white)
Patty Duke
(At winning the Nobel Literature Prize)
Bob Dylan
(At winning the Welterweight Championship)
Sugar Ray Leonard
(At starting a crackpot religion)
L. Ron Hubbard
(At starting a bigger crackpot religion)
Jesus H. Christ
(At collaborating with Elvis Costello)
Paul McCartney.

See?
Elvis Costello is great in many ways,
but in many other ways
he can be bettered.

Let that be a lesson to him
and his admirers.

Climate Change is a motherfucker – and not in a good way.
Eighteen sixteen was the Year Without a Summer,
which featured Europe’s coldest summer on record
for a two hundred and thirty four year period.
It was rough.
It was not man-made climate change, though
– unless humans somehow developed volcanoes,
which we’ve so far failed to claim credit for.

Evidence suggests that Mount Tambora’s eruption
in Indonesia was the likeliest culprit in causing the coldness,
generating the environmental change.
There were many likely rollout effects:
The US Midwest was probably settled
because the Northeast settlements suffered so much
in the Year Without a Summer.
The Church of Latter Day Saints was likely developed as it was
thanks to the cold snap.
A dearth of oats to feed horses probably produced an interest
in creating new forms of transportation,
such as the draisine and the velocipede.
Being forced to stay in darker days led to the writing of
Frankenstein, The Vampyre, and the poem “Darkness.”

Do we thank Climate Change for all this?
Of course not.
But maybe we hope that human ingenuity continues
to roll out effects from traumatic Climate Change
as we experience it going forward.
Something to hope for, at least.

It’s not easy being dreams,
or so I would imagine.

They wisp away so easily,
it would be hard to cohere,
maintaining resonance
from one moment to the next.

If you wanted to hold your identity
for longer than a few instants,
lasting from a dream to another,
that seems hard as fuck.
And, of course, that would raise the question of
"Why is there a hearse riding on this
17th Century pirate ship?

Is this dream a sequel?"

I guess that kind of questioning
could really help with lucid dreaming.
Opens up the weird illogic of the imagination.
Maybe that’s what a dream is there for,
whether they choose to be or not.

Thanks, dreams!

Leon Trotsky got the short end of the stick
in battling Josef Stalin.

He wasn’t the only one.

Trotsky bought it in Mexico City in August, ’40,
after an attack
at the hands of a deep cover agent
who was released in ’60 for his part
in the murder.

Trotsky was exiled to Kazakhstan in ’28
then kicked out the USSR entirely in ’29.
He found asylum in Mexico in ’36
but was found guilty by Stalin’s kangaroo court
the same year and was sentenced to death.
Not a great time for Leon.

After his killer, Frank Jacson,
who was really Jacques Mornard,
who was really Ramon Mercader,
pickaxed Trotsky’s skull
and the exile slipped off to a final sleep
the next day, Trotsky was cremated
and laid to rest under a hammer and sickle
in his final home in Mexico City.

Go ahead. Do it.
Complete my thought for me.
What was I going to say?
You interrupted me. What was I saying?
You might as well say it for me,
since you cut me off there
like you always do.

What was my thought?
Since you cut me off at the knees again
I’ve got no idea
so you might as well run through my mind
and pull my thoughts
as you take everything else
from me anyway already.

What was I going on about?

It’s about time you take over the last crevices of my identity
so nothing about me is left extant and unique.
Why should my thoughts be mine alone anymore, anyway?
Take ’em!

Tell us: what was I saying?
I’d really like to know:
what?

On Fifth Avenue,
just up the block from our old place,
there’s a club with pretty cool bands playing.
I don’t know how long it’s been there,
since it’s the first time
I’ve been in the neighborhood for years
and years and years (and years!)
but it seems well entrenched.

Just imagine:
If we had stuck around for another score
there might have been a place worth visiting.
It would have been a bar,
so maybe not exactly worth it,
but still.

I don’t know how you’re doing
and I don’t know how you’ll get this
but I’m pretty sure you’re out there somewhere
and you always were intuitive, Krista.
I hope you’re well,
and maybe there’s a club on your block now, too.
No such luck on mine,
but I’ll keep trying!

More places allow doctors to help you die
if you will ever choose to try
and if you want an extra city,
you can always try DC.

The freedom to select your fate
at the end of life’s first rate
so support that New England state,
Vermont, the first one out the gate,
along with others, New Jersey,
and beauteous Hawaii.
Oregon and Montana,
Maine and California,
Colorado, New Mexico,
and Washington, don’t you know
are all the states that help you pass
until some others join en masse.

Until that time, I’m glad to say:
"Thanks for letting me die my way."

The weeks where your potential
lays resting in a brackish pool
at the bottom of a reservoir

that you visited last season
while you’re thinking about being responsible now
but know that you still need to sit up and just do something
are frustrating weeks indeed.

You could try to excavate that reservoir,
but even getting back to it
requires more resolve
than you currently have
and finding the right spot
might be a bigger hassle

than you’re up to.

And what if your potential had been limited to begin with?

Probably better to simply purchase some new potential
and start over.

Oh, it’s too much to consider, anyway.
Getting wet is overrated.

Who’s up for drinks?

There’s talk of investigating the monopoly
created when LiveNation bought TicketMaster fourteen years ago.
The Department of Justice,
who approved the purchase,
thinks there might be inappropriate practices generated
by the purchase that they approved.
Imagine.

TicketMaster had already been monopolistic
all on its own
and then coupled with a company in a parallel company.
What did the law expect?
Geniuses, all.

The results, surely, will be illuminating indeed.

They came across the water
in all their finest
from all the seas that could be seen
and many others.
They have come to us
for only a short time
and we welcome these mighty invaders
of our shores.

We offer our dwindled supply of virgins
and our plethora of other resources.
They may ravage as necessary.

All that is available is theirs for the asking.
We are a simple people,
here in the town of Later York,
but we do what we can
to make our possible conquerors comfortable
so they come again
for returning invasion opportunities.