Scholarly Essay: "That Siren"

"That Siren" is a poem about the self-deceiving narrative of transit — the story a person tells himself to make a degraded present bearable by framing it as temporary, as a stop on the way to somewhere else, as the fuel stop before the real journey resumes. Its subject is a homeless man panhandling outside a Macy's, and its governing image is the siren of the title: not the mythological creature of allure that lures sailors to their destruction, but the self-generated siren call of a story — "I'm just gathering fuel here" — that makes the wreckage feel like preparation.

The poem opens on a street corner with the economy of a painter choosing exactly what to include. "Hoof polish chipped like nails on a goth cutter" — the horse's hoof, its polish chipped in the specific pattern of neglected nail polish, compared to the nails of a goth teenager who cuts: the image compresses ornament, damage, and self-destruction into a single visual observation. The horse is decorative, part of the tourist carriage industry, maintained just well enough for commerce and not quite well enough for vanity. The comparison to the goth cutter adds a human resonance: this is damage that is simultaneously performed and real, that carries aesthetic meaning and physical consequence. "Thigh / soaked" completes the horse's portrait with physiological specificity — the inner thigh wet with the sweat or biological discharge of a working animal — before the enjambment pivots to "the drunk gumming no curses of denial." The drunk is the first human figure: toothless ("gumming"), making sounds that are not quite curses, sounds of denial that have lost their consonantal force. The tourist carriage "clops off from its corner break" — the onomatopoeic precision of "clops" against the coin-in-a-cup sound of the next stanza's jangling — moves the decorative commerce of the street forward as the poem's human subject remains in place.

The second tercet delivers the man directly. "Crumpled into the marble façade" — the posture is exact: not leaning against but crumpled into, the body having lost the structural integrity that leaning implies, compressed against the architecture by gravity and circumstance. The "camo sleeves torn / to a vest" is the poem's most socially precise detail: military camouflage, now torn into a vest, the original garment's context (military service, or the purchase of military surplus as workwear) degraded by time and use into its current form. The camouflage is particularly resonant: designed to make its wearer invisible in one context, it now makes him hypervisible in another — the homeless veteran or veteran-coded figure, marked by his clothing as belonging to a different world than the one in which he sits.

"He jangles a coffee cup at marqueed sleazoids, / their eyes glinting gluttony through Macy's perfume." The coffee cup — the universal instrument of street-level solicitation — jangles with whatever coins it contains, a percussion of need directed at "marqueed sleazoids": people arriving at or departing from a marqueed establishment, a theater or hotel or department store, whose moral character the poem renders with a single compound. "Sleazoids" is not a neutral observation but the man's own assessment, or the poem's assessment rendered in his idiom — the people who walk past him are slick, self-interested, their consumption branded. "Their eyes glinting gluttony through Macy's perfume" is the stanza's most compressed image: the glint is literal — store windows, artificial lighting — and metaphorical, the sheen of acquisitive desire; "gluttony" names the consumer appetite these people are exercising; "Macy's perfume" is the specific olfactory signature of a department store's cosmetics floor, the scent of commerce that filters out to the street and mingles with the man's reality. The perfume is a sensory boundary between two worlds that occupy the same space.

The third tercet is the poem's philosophical center and its most formally concentrated movement. "He has to piss bad again from that pit-stop thought / pausing inner time" — the urgency of urination is both literal and structural: the body's need that cannot be indefinitely deferred, pressing against the interiority of the thought that has been holding him. "That pit-stop thought / pausing inner time" names the specific cognitive maneuver: a thought that stops the internal clock, that creates a suspension of ordinary temporal experience, that makes the present feel like a pause rather than a duration. The pit stop — the racing term for the brief, purposeful stop that is entirely in service of the race — is the metaphor the man uses to transform his circumstances from permanent to temporary, from destination to waystation.

"That easy boost: I'm just gathering / fuel here, that's all" — the internal monologue arrives in quotation marks stripped of quotation marks, delivered as free indirect speech that the poem inhabits without framing. "Easy boost" names what the thought provides: not a solution, not a plan, but an affective lift, a brief elevation of mood through narrative reframing. "I'm just gathering / fuel here, that's all" is the self-deception rendered with painful precision. The "just" miniaturizes the present. The "gathering fuel" converts passivity into purpose, degradation into preparation. The "that's all" dismisses the present as inconsequential, as a minor interlude in a story that will resume in a more dignified register. The enjambment — "gathering / fuel here" — holds the gathering before delivering the fuel, then the "here" that locates the gathering in the place he is trying not to fully inhabit.

"That siren making here a home" — the poem's final line delivers the title's meaning and the poem's thesis simultaneously. The siren is the thought itself — the narrative of temporary transit, of gathering fuel — which has become, through repetition, the thing that makes "here" habitable. The Odyssean siren lures toward destruction while singing of pleasure; this siren lures toward acceptance of the present by singing of departure. But "making here a home" is the poem's most devastating phrase: the story that was supposed to prevent the present from becoming permanent has instead become the mechanism by which the present has been made livable — which is to say, permanent. The siren has not lured him to his destruction. It has lured him into staying. The easy boost that pauses inner time has made the pause indefinite. He has to piss bad, which is the body's insistence that time has not actually stopped, that the present is real and urgent — but the thought keeps pausing inner time, and the siren keeps singing, and here keeps becoming home.

Formally, the poem's three tercets move from the external scene to the human figure to the internal mechanism with an economy that makes each transition feel inevitable. The opening tercet establishes the context without the man; the second introduces him through his physical reality and his relationship to the passersby; the third moves inside him to the thought that governs his relationship to where he is. The enjambments throughout — "thigh / soaked," "torn / to a vest," "thought / pausing," "gathering / fuel here" — create small delays that mirror the suspension the poem describes: the pause in inner time, the stopping of the clock. The poem itself performs the pit-stop thought by slowing its own momentum at each line break.

"That Siren" is ultimately a poem about the way narrative sustains life in degraded circumstances — the way a story about where you are going can make bearable where you are — and about the cost of that sustenance, which is the gradual conversion of the temporary into the permanent, the waystation into the home, the pit stop into the destination. The siren does not lie to him about where he is. It lies to him about where he is going. And in doing so, it makes here a home.

Meta Description

A nine-line poem about a homeless man outside a Macy's whose self-sustaining narrative — "I'm just gathering fuel here, that's all" — is the siren of the title: the easy boost that pauses inner time, makes the degraded present bearable by framing it as temporary, and in doing so converts the waystation into a home.

Keywords

That Siren, homelessness poetry, self-deception narrative, pit-stop thought, siren mythology, inner time, easy boost, Macy's perfume, camo vest, tourist carriage, temporary transit, contemporary urban lyric, close reading, Hypocorism, narrative and degradation

Let's workshop this poem about a snobbish writer who mocks tacky poetry set against backdrops, center-justified dreck no less pathetic than Hallmark cards, only to wonder if he might be a joke himself

"Hoodrat Eye Roll" is a poem about the formation of erotic identity through early experience — specifically, the way that sustained intimate contact with a particular kind of need, performed by a particular demographic, can install an appetite that persists and that the bearer of that appetite did not choose. Its nine lines move from tenderness to explicit desire through a logic that is neither apologetic nor celebratory but diagnostic: this is how this particular wiring got laid down, and the poem is interested in the mechanism rather than the verdict.

The title performs its first irony before the poem begins. "Hoodrat" is a term of contempt applied to young women of certain urban communities — dismissive, sexualizing, and simultaneously precise about a specific cultural register. "Eye roll" captures the gesture of performative indifference or disdain, the social signal that communicates "I'm above this" or "not impressed." Together the title names an attitude — the hoodrat's eye roll at the subject of this poem — that the poem itself will reveal as something the subject has been specifically conditioned to need. The eye roll that dismisses becomes, through the mechanism the poem describes, the very gesture of arousal. The contempt is the point.

"His chest had borne / the tender weight of too many teens" — the opening establishes the subject's history through a physical image of remarkable delicacy. "Tender weight" holds two qualities simultaneously: the weight is real, physical, literal — bodies lying on a chest — and it is tender, gentle, something received rather than imposed. The teens who rested on this chest were seeking comfort, proximity, care. "Purring drool to his lullabye" extends this tenderness into the register of the infantile: the purring is the sound of contentment, of safety, of the body relaxed beyond self-consciousness; the drool is the body's involuntary testament to that relaxation; the lullaby is his contribution, the care he provided. The scene is one of sustained, repeated, genuine nurturing — a man who has served as a source of comfort and safety for many young women over time.

The poem's second tercet introduces what those young women brought to these encounters as their "ideas of manhood." The contrast with the tenderness of the first tercet is the poem's central formal argument. Where he offered lullabies and a chest to rest on, they offered "stiff slaps and phlegm thwacks, / fingers down the gullet." The slaps are the aggressive, performative slaps of a specific sexual register — the "daddy" dynamic in which roughness is the demonstration of desire. The "phlegm thwacks" are the sounds of spitting, of the aggressive oral dynamics of a particular pornographic and cultural script about what sex between a certain kind of man and a certain kind of young woman looks like. The "fingers down the gullet" completes the picture: these are the gestures of girls performing a specific version of desire that they have been taught to perform, a version in which their own submission and discomfort are the tokens of authenticity.

The phrase "ideas of manhood" is the poem's most important analytical move. It positions what the teens brought not as authentic desire but as a culturally acquired script — their conception of what the man before them should want, what would prove his masculinity to them, what kind of encounter would register as real. The tenderness he offered and the roughness they performed are in implicit dialogue: he gave them one thing, they offered him another, and the repeated transaction of that asymmetry is what the third tercet names as formative.

"Not to have groomed him / into Daddy" — the enjambment across the stanza break performs the inevitability the poem is describing. The weight of the opening two tercets — the accumulated tenderness, the accumulated roughness — arrives with a "not to have" that is itself inevitable: of course it did. The passive construction is essential: he was groomed, not by any single agent with intent, but by the aggregate of these encounters, by the repeated installation of a specific association. "Daddy" names the erotic role he has been formed into — the older, caretaking male figure whose authority is simultaneously paternal and sexual, whose desire is specifically activated by youth and need and the particular dynamic these teens performed for him.

"Unable to nut / without bladders dumping for air" — the poem's final image is its most explicit and its most precise. "Bladders dumping for air" is the physiological reality of erotic asphyxiation at its extreme limit: the involuntary release of the bladder that occurs when a body approaches or crosses the threshold of consciousness. This is the specific form that arousal has taken for this subject — not merely the dynamic of power and submission, not merely youth and need, but the body at its most involuntary, its most beyond-self-governance, its most animal. The poem has moved from the tender weight of sleeping teenagers on a chest to this: a wiring so specific and so extreme that it marks the distance the accumulated experience has traveled.

The poem does not moralize this distance. It does not comment on whether the grooming was harm or transformation, whether the subject should be pitied or condemned or understood or all three. It presents the mechanism with the same precision and the same emotional neutrality with which it would describe any developmental process. The eye roll of the title — the contempt, the dismissal, the performative indifference — is, in this light, both what the hoodrat displays toward the subject and what activates him. The contempt installed the appetite it expresses. He needs what dismisses him. The poem names this without explaining it further, trusting the nine-line arc to carry the full weight of what it has described.

Formally, the poem's three tercets enact a movement from the general to the specific, from the social to the physiological, from the tender to the extreme. The enjambments are doing structural work throughout: "teens, / purring" holds the weight of the bodies before releasing into the sound they make; "manhood — / stiff slaps" holds the concept before delivering its content; "Daddy, unable to nut / without bladders dumping for air" holds the role before specifying what that role requires. Each enjambment is a small delay before a revelation, and the accumulation of these delays mirrors the accumulation of encounters the poem describes: tenderness, then roughness, then what the roughness has made permanent.

"Hoodrat Eye Roll" is ultimately a poem about the specificity of formed desire — the way that repeated experience installs not just a preference but a necessity, a wiring so particular that its origins are visible in its content. The title's contempt and the poem's final image are the same thing seen from different angles: what the hoodrat performs as dismissal, the subject has been made to need. The eye roll that says "not impressed" is the eye roll that completes the circuit.

Meta Description

A nine-line poem tracing the formation of a specific erotic necessity through accumulated early experience — the tenderness of a man who provided comfort to too many young women whose performed ideas of manhood installed in him, through repetition, a wiring that now requires the body at its most involuntary extreme.

Keywords

Hoodrat Eye Roll, erotic formation, developmental desire, daddy dynamic, erotic asphyxiation, performative manhood, cultural script, grooming as mechanism, tercet form, enjambment and revelation, contemporary erotic lyric, close reading, Hypocorism, involuntary response, desire and contempt

Scholarly Essay: "In Homes of Pat Boone and The Beach Boys (April 4, 1968)"

"In Homes of Pat Boone and The Beach Boys (April 4, 1968)" is one of the most formally and intellectually ambitious pieces in the collection — a hybrid work that begins as a poem, explodes into an annotated footnote longer than the poem itself, and then expands into a full essay that is simultaneously a dual elegy, a character study, a political argument, a theological meditation, and a sustained exercise in the kind of radical honesty about human complexity that both of its subjects preached and neither of their eulogists typically practice. The piece is dedicated to CK, 1993–2025 — identified by context as Charlie Kirk, the conservative commentator and founder of Turning Point USA, who died at thirty-one — and its central subject is the extraordinary structural and moral overlap between Kirk and Martin Luther King Jr., whose assassination on April 4, 1968 gives the poem its date and its occasion. The title places both men in their cultural context with characteristic obliqueness: Pat Boone and The Beach Boys are the wholesome white mainstream of 1968 American culture, the homes in which a certain kind of respectable American lived while King was being shot and while Kirk — born twenty-five years later into a world those homes helped produce — was forming the character the piece will analyze.

The poem itself is a sonnet of compressed fury, and its formal control is the piece's most underappreciated achievement given how thoroughly it is overshadowed by what follows. The opening line — "Evil orgasms in its slither beneath borrowed care" — is the piece's thesis statement in compressed form: the evil of assassination is not the frank evil of declared hatred but the obscene evil of cowardice that presents itself as concern, that achieves its end through the borrowed language of civility. "Just / minutes after the lead flower gagged his throat" — the bullet as lead flower, the assassination as a grotesque blooming — delivers the physical fact with a precision that the circumlocution heightens rather than softens. "Black / blood blasting like prank snakes in a can" is the poem's most formally daring image: the spring-loaded novelty toy, the cheap trick of a child's prank, deployed as the vehicle for the blood that exits a dying man's throat. The comparison is not disrespectful. It is exact: both the prank snake and the arterial spray share the quality of violent, unexpected emergence from a container that appeared to hold something else. The velour ribbons, the grubbier bluster — these continue the poem's insistence on the physical actuality of the death against the tendency of elegiac convention to aestheticize or abstract it.

The poem then pivots to the bigots — those who, "too polite in their creamed jeans / to gloat," immediately performed the deflective move of weaponizing competing grief. The "creamed jeans" is the poem's most compressed satirical image: the sexual excitement of the bigot at the death of his enemy, contained by social propriety, manifested as a specific physical response that must be hidden. The double jean-creamery of the deflection — the equal excitement at the opportunity to exploit the dead children of Vietnam — maintains this register. The bigots are aroused by the death and by the opportunity it creates. Their civility is not moral but strategic. The "Debate CLOSED" t-shirt in "stencil font drooling / cherry porn" is the poem's most precise image of what the bigots actually want: the foreclosure of the discourse the dead man represented, rendered in the visual language of pornographic excess.

The footnote is where the piece's true ambition becomes legible. It begins by establishing the parallel between King and Kirk — both "flapped and flopped around like pathetic flounder after a wet thud of cowardice nipped their free expression" — and then accelerates into the extended meditation that constitutes most of the piece's length and all of its intellectual substance. The footnote's relationship to the poem is not supplementary but structural: the poem establishes the occasion and the emotional register; the footnote does the argumentative work. This formal arrangement — the academic apparatus swallowing the literary occasion — is itself an argument about how these deaths are processed: the raw grief of the poem is immediately overtaken by the need to think, to argue, to place, to understand.

The structural parallel between King and Kirk is the piece's central intellectual gambit, and it is executed with enough rigor and enough honesty to be genuinely persuasive rather than merely provocative. The piece does not flatten the differences between the men — it documents them carefully, including Kirk's more orthodox supernaturalism, his more aggressive style of campus engagement, his financial irregularities, his specific political positions on immigration and government — but it insists that the structural similarities are more important than the tribal affiliations that have caused each man's admirers to despise the other. Both were assassinated by cowards. Both were targeted for the quality of their speech — their willingness to say things that powerful constituencies wanted silenced. Both deployed rhetoric as a weapon in service of principles they believed transcended personal gain. Both were simultaneously defenders of their causes and users of their causes for self-advancement. Both were sexually complicated in ways their public personae denied. Both preached nonviolence. Both were accused of sophistry. Both were squeezed from radicals who wanted more aggression and from moderates who wanted less disruption. The parallels are not forced. They are documented.

The piece's most morally serious section is its insistence on the faults of both men, and its refusal to let those faults cancel the admiration they deserve. The King material — the FBI surveillance files, the sex orgies, the possible presence while a fellow minister assaulted a woman, the beating of a sexual partner on the night before his assassination — is handled with characteristic directness and equal characteristic insistence that none of it "should ever undermine the value of King's mission and legacy." The piece cites Abernathy's own position on this as precedent. What is more formally interesting is the corresponding treatment of Kirk: the piece acknowledges that Kirk's known faults are smaller in scale, then imaginatively extends them to the scale they might have reached had he lived longer, had surveillance been applied to him as it was to King, had the digital age provided its specific temptations. The CSA pornography passage — the extended imagining of what Kirk "might have" typed in his darkest midnight — is the piece's most formally extreme moment, and it functions as a precise formal argument: the piece is insisting that no man's private shadow life is knowable from his public persona, that the impulse to saint-making is always a form of dishonesty, and that the fair comparison of two men requires imagining both at their worst rather than one at his documented worst and the other at his public best.

The passage is also, formally, an extension of the piece's central subject: the relationship between public advocacy and private appetite. King preached dignity and practiced its violation. Kirk preached against pornography and was by his own admission a recovering user of it. The piece extends this logic to its furthest point — what if Kirk, like so many of the preachers whose private lives contradict their public stances, had his own witching-hour failures? — not to damn Kirk but to insist on the universality of the shadow, to maintain the moral equivalence that the piece's whole argument requires. "The dirt is always there, even if you never track it across the floor." This is the piece's most important single sentence, and it applies to both men equally.

The political argument threaded through the essay sections is the piece's most contestable and most clearly personal element. The speculation about what King "might have" said about contemporary antiracism — the victimology industry, the BLM hustlers, the kente-cloth cosplay at the Capitol, the black-only dorms — is necessarily speculative and necessarily partisan. The piece acknowledges this by framing it as speculation throughout. What it is doing formally is using the parallel between King and Kirk to argue that the positions Kirk actually held are not the polar opposite of King's legacy but its possible extension — that a King brought forward into the present, confronting the specific failures of the antiracist movement as it has actually developed, might have arrived at some of Kirk's conclusions. This is an argument the piece does not prove; it cannot be proved. But it is advanced seriously and with enough internal consistency to constitute a genuine intellectual position rather than a rhetorical trick.

The piece's treatment of both men's conservative sexual ethics — their opposition to premarital sex, their complicated relationship to homosexuality, their traditional views on marriage — is handled with a characteristic blend of honest documentation and personal dissent. "Some of these, I confess, I balk at. But that might just be me." The authorial voice here is doing something important: it is refusing to pretend that agreement is required for admiration, that one must endorse all of a figure's positions to honor their courage and their contributions. This is itself a position both King and Kirk would recognize — the insistence that the integrity of a person's mission is separable from the totality of their beliefs.

The final paragraph is the piece's most direct statement of its thesis and its most emotionally clear moment: "They wagered that words could defeat violence, that courage plus conviction could shame a country closer to its promises. If their calculus was brutal, it was also honest — and it is why the sanctimonious tallies of their enemies still ring hollow." The word "brutal" is exact: both men knew that their style of engagement would produce backlash, would incite confrontation, would cost them enemies and allies in equal measure. They chose it anyway. The piece honors that choice without pretending the choice was clean. Both men were shot for talking. The piece is an extended act of talking back.

Formally, the piece's most significant achievement is its willingness to let its own genre transform under the pressure of its subject. It begins as a poem, becomes a footnote, becomes an essay, becomes a political argument, becomes an imaginative exercise in shadow projection, becomes a theological meditation, and arrives finally at something like wisdom — the kind that acknowledges complexity without collapsing into relativism, that insists on admiration without requiring sainthood, that mourns the dead without lying about them. Both men would have recognized this mode. Both practiced it, imperfectly, as a vocation.

Meta Description

A hybrid elegy — poem, annotated footnote, and essay — that mourns both Martin Luther King Jr. and Charlie Kirk through their structural parallels as nonviolent advocates assassinated for their speech, documenting their shared values and their shared human failures with equal rigor, and arguing that honest admiration requires neither hagiography nor the sanctimonious tallying of enemies.

Keywords

In Homes of Pat Boone and The Beach Boys, Martin Luther King Jr., Charlie Kirk, dual elegy, hybrid form, annotated poem, assassination, free speech, nonviolence, structural parallel, sexual ethics, victimology critique, conservative and liberal overlap, shadow projection, honest admiration, close reading, Hypocorism, April 4 1968

"Body Talk '98" is a dramatic monologue in the tradition of Browning's most unsettling speakers — a voice so fully inhabited, so precisely rendered in its own register, that the reader never receives external judgment, only the judgment that accumulates from listening carefully to what the voice reveals about itself. Its subject is a pornography producer conducting what is nominally a job interview with a new cameraman, but which is in fact a sustained performance of power: the establishment and maintenance of dominance over a younger man who remains almost entirely silent throughout, his presence registered only through the boss's reactions to behavior the reader cannot directly observe. The piece's formal achievement is to make that silence eloquent — to construct a complete portrait of both men through one man's voice alone.

The title's double register establishes the piece's governing concern immediately. "Body Talk" is the subject of the boss's explicit lesson — the idea that the body communicates involuntarily, that posture and gesture and physical comportment reveal what the mouth conceals or declines to say. But "Body Talk '98" as a title also positions the piece historically, anchoring it in a specific moment of American culture: the late 1990s, the era of VHS pornography's last dominance before internet distribution transformed the industry, the era of beepers and briefcases, of Columbo reruns and Wilt Chamberlain photographs on nightstands. The "'98" is not decorative. It places the boss's particular mode of masculinity — its references, its idioms, its casual brutalities, its specific cultural touchstones — in a historical context that has since been overtaken, making the piece simultaneously a character study and a period piece.

The boss arrives fully formed in his first sentence: "Whoa whoa — fuckin whoa, huh?" The triple repetition, the self-interruption, the rhetorical "huh?" that demands agreement rather than soliciting it — these establish in three words the character's fundamental operation. He talks to fill space, to prevent others from filling it, to maintain the initiative at all times. The instruction to "take it down a few notches" is delivered to someone we have no indication was pitching anything — the command reveals that the boss has already decided to be managing the other person's energy regardless of what that energy actually is. "When in Rome — get my drift?" is the first of many idiomatic phrases deployed as weapons: the phrase does the work of establishing in-group familiarity while simultaneously implying the new man does not yet belong to the group.

The Tom Bombadil reference is the piece's first significant depth charge. The boss tells Frank to "look it up" — positioning himself as a figure of whimsical, ungovernable power who cannot be possessed or commanded, who is at home in his domain in a way that makes all threats slide off him. Tom Bombadil in Tolkien is the anomalous figure outside the Ring's power, cheerfully immune to what destroys everyone else. That the boss of a pornography operation identifies with this figure tells us everything: he sees himself as a lord of his specific territory, answerable to nothing, charmed against consequence. The comparison is simultaneously self-aggrandizing and inadvertently revealing — Bombadil is also, in many readings, a figure of utter inconsequence, beloved but peripheral to everything that actually matters.

The Fratmatose Freshman critique is the piece's first extended comic set piece, and it is genuinely funny in the way that only perfectly observed professional incompetence can be. The boss's objection to the title — "Who wants to feel dumb pickin out a movie?" — contains a legitimate insight about audience psychology delivered in the idiom of a man who would never articulate it as such. His reading of the consumer behind the adult-video store curtain is acute: "He already feels embarrassed enough." The empathy here is real, however crudely expressed. The boss understands his audience because he is, in some fundamental way, continuous with it — his contempt for the gonzo film's night-vision "wobbly green pussy" is the contempt of a craftsman for shoddy work, not a moralist for the work itself.

The boss's relationship to craft is the piece's most complex and most sympathetically rendered theme. He is not an intelligent man in the conventional sense — his speech is full of malapropisms, half-finished thoughts, idiomatic shortcuts — but he has genuine professional competence and genuine professional pride. His critique of the Fratmatose filmmaker's failure is structurally identical to the critique any experienced producer might make of a film-school graduate's first project: too much concept, not enough execution, insufficiently aware of the audience's actual experience. "Too much head and you start losin touch" is the boss's formulation, and it is not wrong. The piece understands this without endorsing it.

The thermometer routine — the piece's first extended comic digression — is a tour de force of vernacular performance, and its relationship to the piece's central theme of body language is more precise than it initially appears. The elaborate misdirection the boss describes — the concerned look, the run to the bathroom, the ass-heated thermometer, the side-to-side cock swing, the perching of balls on doorknobs — is an extended lesson in redirection as a communication strategy. The point of the routine, as the boss explains it, is that "the last thing from her mind is that you're holdin somethin up there — redirection." The humor is broad and physical, but the underlying principle is the same one that governs the boss's entire mode of interaction: control what the other person is attending to, and you control what they know. The thermometer routine is a vulgar elaboration of the body-talk lesson. Both are about managing perception through deliberate physical performance.

The second section's shift to the editing room is the piece's tonal pivot. The boss at the monitor becomes a different figure — still domineering, still managing Frank's responses, but genuinely engaged with what he is showing, capable of something like aesthetic appreciation. "Fuckin poetry, pure poetry if you ask me Frank. That's where the poetry's gotta be: in the scene, not in a fuckin pun." This is the piece's most direct statement of the boss's aesthetic credo, and it is not without coherence. He is making a distinction between the kind of meaning that resides in craft and execution — in the correctly framed shot, the perfect angle, the precise distance — and the kind of meaning that resides in verbal cleverness or conceptual ambition. His critique of the Fratmatose filmmaker's punning title and his praise of the sea-mussel framing are expressions of the same aesthetic: the thing should do its work through what it shows, not through what it names or implies.

The dead cameraman — "kidney failure. That's big shoes. I get emotional about it" — is the piece's most economical character notation. The boss has genuine loyalty and genuine grief, expressed in the idiom available to him. The parenthetical aside is delivered and then dropped, the emotion real and immediately covered over. This is the piece in miniature: the boss's emotional life is present but managed, processed through the same body-language awareness he is trying to teach Frank. He does not dwell because dwelling is a form of loss of control.

The gazelle comparison — "She's watchin the cameraman like a fuckin gazelle" — is the piece's most precise image and its thematic center. The actress looking at the camera for reassurance, for information about whether something has gone wrong, is positioned as prey scanning for threat. The boss's lesson is that the experienced cameraman must provide nothing — "straightfaced, like nuttin's up" — because the actress's uncertainty must be managed, her attention directed, her behavior shaped by the cameraman's performed neutrality. The body-talk lesson is here extended to its fullest professional application: the cameraman's body must lie on behalf of the production. The fact that this lying is directed at a woman in a vulnerable physical situation, during an anal scene she may not have been fully prepared for, is handled by the piece with the same deadpan the boss recommends: the information is present, the editorial frame is absent.

The "u and me" digression — the boss's retreat from the lobster dinner revelation — is the piece's most revealing moment of self-correction. He has disclosed something he did not intend to disclose: that he took the actress to dinner before dropping an anal scene on her, that the sequence was his choice and his misdirection. The "assume" idiom is deployed as a face-saving maneuver, but the boss immediately concedes: "But even if she was all prepped up Frank, my point still stands you fuckin wise guy." The concession is honest — the Frank figure has caught him in something, and he knows it. "I don't sense that you're trying to offend me. You're an innocent, Frank — a rarity in this business. You tell it like it is just for the sake of telling it like it is." This is the piece's most complex moment of characterization: the boss recognizing and naming a quality in Frank — directness without aggression, honesty without agenda — that he identifies as rare and that he values, even as it threatens his control.

The Wilt Chamberlain photograph, the Asian girlfriend digression, the eel invitation — these are the piece's coda, the boss winding down in the way that men like him wind down: through a series of elaborations and digressions that are all forms of showing off, of demonstrating the range and energy of the mind even as the interview concludes. The offer to Frank's girlfriend — "She ever wanna shit some live eels for us you bring her along" — is the boss at his most grotesque, but even here the grotesquerie is performed rather than felt. He is entertaining himself, maintaining his energy, refusing to let the departure be quiet.

The final routine — the fake search for lost feelings — is the piece's final comic set piece and its structural rhyme with the thermometer routine. Both are elaborate performances designed to redirect a woman's attention and emotional response. Both involve the deliberate staging of concern, of urgency, of searching. Both end with a reveal that is not what it appeared. The thermometer routine ends with the woman's attention redirected to hygiene rather than deception. The "lost feelings" routine ends with the man announcing he has lost his feelings in a context so absurdist — after tearing apart the bedroom as though searching for a physical object — that the announcement cannot be received in the way it would otherwise be received. Both routines are lessons in the management of emotional scenes through physical performance. Both are, in the boss's terms, body talk.

Formally, the piece is a masterwork of idiomatic characterization. The boss's speech is rendered with phonological precision — the dropped consonants, the rhetorical questions, the interrupted syntax, the sudden pivots — that make him fully audible. The reader hears this voice because the voice has been constructed from the inside out: not assembled from observed tics but generated from a character whose relationship to language is itself the subject. The boss uses language the way he uses body language: to fill space, to control the room, to prevent silence from becoming someone else's opportunity. The piece's formal brilliance is that it makes this use of language itself the evidence for everything it wants to say about the character.

"Body Talk '98" is ultimately a piece about power's self-portrait — the way that a certain kind of intelligence, operating entirely within the terms of its own domain, produces a coherent and even occasionally admirable worldview that is also, viewed from outside, a portrait of practiced exploitation dressed as professional expertise. The boss is not a villain in his own account. He is a craftsman, a mentor, a fair guy who does not bend for everyone. The reader's position — receiving his account without the ability to correct it, in the position of Frank — is the piece's deepest formal argument: that this is what it sounds like from inside a certain kind of room, and that the body talk happening in that room is the only language available.

Meta Description

A dramatic monologue in which a pornography producer conducts a job interview that is in fact a sustained performance of power — deploying body language, comic digression, professional aesthetics, and vernacular philosophy to construct a complete self-portrait of a man whose intelligence and genuine craft operate entirely within the terms of his own domain.

Keywords

Body Talk '98, dramatic monologue, vernacular characterization, pornography industry, power and performance, body language, idiomatic prose, Tom Bombadil, Wilt Chamberlain, thermometer routine, gazelle comparison, craft and exploitation, 1990s period piece, close reading, Hypocorism

"Crank Shaft" is a study in the irreducibility of fractured consciousness. Its narrator sits immobile on a curb in the aftermath of a child's death — a death he witnessed and could not prevent. The piece does not pursue guilt as its subject. It pursues something harder: the way consciousness, under the pressure of catastrophic witness, does not consolidate into remorse or clarity or collapse, but continues generating its ordinary traffic — desire, calculation, self-interest, animal solidarity, spiritual hunger, mortality, artistic ambition — at the same frequency it always did, except now without the possibility of relief or discharge.

The title operates at multiple levels simultaneously, and its multiplicity is the piece's thesis in compressed form. "Crank shaft" is, mechanically, the component that converts reciprocal piston motion into rotational force — the machine's engine of transformation, turning one kind of movement into another. Cars have crankshafts. The newly resurfaced road has one in every vehicle that guns down it. But "crank" as verb is also slang for masturbation, and "shaft" carries its own phallic register. The narrator was cranking when the wheel of a car passed over the boy's skull. The title fuses these two motions — the man's reciprocal autoerotic action and the mechanical rotation of the killing wheel — into a single compound word, implying that the two chains of causality the narrator watches converge are not coincidental but structurally rhymed: the crankshaft of the title is the mechanism connecting them before the event even occurs.

The opening paragraph achieves its effects through deliberate impoverishment cut with a single startling sensory intrusion. "I have not gotten up from the curb. The ambulance had taken the body long ago. I just sit here." The sentences are meager, sequential, declarative. But into this minimalism arrives the smell of the officer's menstruation — "the copper sourdough of her menstruation" — a detail whose precision is as shocking as its placement. The narrator's erotic register is operational even here, even now, even with the police beside him taking his words about a dead child. The smell is gone but he keeps sensing "that scribbling at my side" — not "her" scribbling but "that," the officer depersonalized into her function, her instrument of record, before she has fully departed. The narrator's consciousness cannot exempt even this moment from its ordinary appetitive attention. This is the piece's central psychological claim established in its first paragraph: the machinery does not stop for catastrophe.

The stillness passage is the piece's most formally controlled atmospheric writing. The neighborhood quiet is rendered in specific sensory terms — "Not one blown sub-woofer rattling out blunt smoke, not one burst of shirtless beef" — making the absence vivid by naming what is absent. The hush is "resinous, slow-burning," an atmosphere with physical texture, coating the block rather than settling over it. The children's whispering analogy then delivers the passage's most disturbing material: the parental spat that produced the hush is not merely screaming and broken glass but something more — "throttled taunts gushing out from the pretzeled mound of mommy on the floor ('Beat it up, nigga! Beat that asshole up!')" with the children deliberately kept as audience: "Keep it open! Let em see the shit." The hush the narrator sits in is the same hush those children produce: the silence of witnesses who have absorbed something too large and too unresolved for sound. The dogs have stopped their chronic digging and whining. The animals register what the humans cannot articulate. The stillness is the stillness of a block that has absorbed too much in too short a time.

The brief passage about the house across the street — the screen door creaking open, the mother who screeched away behind the dopplering sirens — delivers one of the piece's most restrained and most devastating images. "My hands were out — down and out, open as my mouth — in my driveway, helpless. She did not look at me." The physical description of his posture — hands open, mouth open, the posture of surrender or supplication — catches the narrator in the moment immediately following the accident, before the vigil began. He was helpless then. He remains helpless now. The house afterward "stood there, porch sagged like the blow-up pool, as if in an apneic slumber marked by the occasional stuttering gasp." The house breathes without its occupants. The domestic space has been evacuated of its life while retaining its physical form — a correlative for what has happened to the neighborhood's ordinary time.

The Georgie passage is the piece's single most accomplished sustained writing. The cat's backstory — found as a runt while the narrator was trimming the flea bush of the condemned house, a house abandoned after IBM "creampieing the aquifer with forever toxins, dipped like a deadbeat dad" — grounds Georgie in a specific history of institutional abandonment that the narrator has been managing, inadequately, for years. The ten-plus strays trapped and surrendered, the twice-a-year flush of feral kittens, the "profligate chaos of a growth as obdurate as a drunk with his car keys" — these establish the narrator as a man who has genuinely invested in trying to manage what is beyond management, who has for a decade attempted small acts of stewardship against large forces of indifference. The IBM detail is not incidental: it positions the neighborhood's deterioration as the consequence of corporate extraction, and Georgie as one of its indirect products.

The Bach comparison is the passage's formal apex. Georgie's braced sidewinding walk — "body cramped like toes in the peak of orgasm, contorted enough, every muscle fiber fighting itself" — produces in the narrator's imagination "the haunted-castle organ opening of Bach's 'Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565.'" The comparison is precise because it is exact: that specific piece opens with exactly the quality of grandiose, doom-laden, architecturally imposing musicality that Georgie's distress genuinely evokes. The comparison is not comic. It is the narrator's consciousness doing what it always does — finding the precise cultural analog, the exact match — even in the most unlikely material and at the least appropriate moment. This is a mind that cannot stop working.

Georgie's refusal to approach in this scene carries its maximum weight because the narrator notes it with specific self-consciousness: "I do not feel my eyebrows raise. And I note that." The reflexive awareness — noting what he does not feel — is the piece's most precise notation of the dissociation that has set in. He is monitoring his own responses from outside and finding them absent. The cat that always comes to him has read something in the scene, in the man, that warrants withdrawal. "What does he know?" The question is not rhetorical. It is genuine inquiry the piece leaves open.

The retrospective account of the morning and the accident is the piece's most carefully paced movement, and the newly resurfaced road is its most significant environmental detail. "The road had just been resurfaced. You could smell the bitumen even in the house. A trackless black still, pickable into little phenolic balls at the curb edge; no grass yet scattered upon it by mowers and whackers — speed was an urge I could understand." The fresh blacktop offers no traction, no texture, no resistance — the specific conditions that turned the boy's tip into something fatal. "Speed was an urge I could understand" is the piece's most quietly complex moment: the narrator extending understanding and even identification to the conditions that killed the child, folding the death into a broader ecology of impulse that he does not exempt himself from feeling.

"For some reason I cannot remember his name." This is the final version's most important single sentence. The narrator does not simply omit the boy's name; he marks the omission, registers it as strange, cannot account for it. The erasure is a form of evidence: the narrator was so thoroughly inside his own experience that the child next door remained peripheral even in his death. The name has not been suppressed out of callousness. It has genuinely not been retained. This is the piece's most honest self-indictment, delivered without any framing as such.

The toy bucket and pink beach shovels — "radiating the haunted kinetics of a cursor left blinking mid-sentence" — are the piece's most carefully chosen domestic detail. A cursor blinks in expectation of the next character that will not come. The toys sit in expectation of the hands that will not return to them. "I shake my head at them, at where I have wound up." This is the only moment in the piece where something like unmediated self-reproach surfaces — not at the death, not at the accident's conditions, but at the distance between where he is and where a morning could have gone. The shaking of the head is a physical punctuation mark on a thought the narrator cannot finish.

The unreleased load comparison — "The unreleased load has befuddled my loins like Georgie" — is the piece's darkest comic moment and its most psychologically precise. The narrator's physically unresolved state is compared to the cat's psychic rack: both bodies in a bind between competing needs, neither able to fully discharge or fully guard. The comparison refuses the dignity of clean suffering. It insists on the body's continuation as a site of need even in the aftermath of catastrophe.

The intrusive sexual fantasy — slurping the mother's "fat maternal petals meaty as tuberose smells," whispering "I'm gonna give you another baby," hushing her "like a baby herself" — is the piece's most disturbing formal decision, and it is fully earned by everything that precedes it. The consciousness that has been noting the officer's menstrual smell, calculating how to milk his ex-wife's sympathy, monitoring the erotic choreography of the neighbor's bends since spring — this consciousness does not observe a period of mourning. The specific content of the fantasy is what makes it most revealing: "Make me feel good. Make me feel good." The line, given to the imagined mother, makes explicit what the fantasy is doing. It is not purely predatory. The libidinal unconscious is attempting, in the only register available to it, a form of reparation — giving back what was taken, providing comfort in the form it knows. The piece does not redeem this. It holds it precisely as what it is: the machinery running in the only mode it has, trying to address an immense situation with instruments designed for something else entirely.

The mortality passage is the final version's most significant addition and it transforms the piece's scope. "I have chosen the pursuit of glory over family." The inventory that follows — hip flexibility declining, sparse crown, nighttime urination, the coming day of seated breathlessness — is not self-pity but accounting. The narrator is taking stock of what his choices have produced. "Who now is left at my side to tolerate my repetitions and back my tall tales? Will there be anyone even to fake like they are interested? What hand will guide me back to before the womb?" These are not rhetorical questions. They are the questions of a man who has organized his life around solitude and art and is now sitting on a curb with no one coming for him. "My son is here. But I cannot stop working." The art is the crankshaft that has been running beneath everything else. The child's death is the occasion. The narrator's life is what the vigil is actually about.

The closing movement achieves its fullest form here. "I lie back." The physical surrender to the ground marks a qualitative shift: the narrator is no longer sitting in vigil but giving himself to the earth. "I can feel the planet's core latched to my bones, its implacable suckle — all draw, no release." The gravitational image gives the inertia its cosmic dimension. The narrator is not merely tired or numb but held by a force operating at the level of mass and planetary attraction. Everything has been drawn in — desire, grief, mortality, art, the dead child, the unreleased load, the cat's knowledge, the blinking toys — and nothing has been released. The crankshaft turns without converting its motion into anything. The sun bothers his face. He has reason to get up. But how can I?

The final question is the piece's only moment in which the narrator directly addresses himself — steps outside the stream of consciousness and poses a genuine inquiry to the body on the curb. It is not rhetorical. It is an honest question about what it would take to restart, to convert inertia back into motion. The piece does not answer it. The machinery is at rest. The getting up has not happened and may not. The crankshaft is turning without going anywhere, which is exactly the mechanical condition the title names.

Meta Description

A prose piece in which a man sits immobile on a curb after witnessing a child's death, his consciousness continuing to generate desire, mortality reckoning, artistic ambition, sexual fantasy, and animal solidarity simultaneously — a study in the irreducibility of fractured consciousness, centered on a newly resurfaced road, a cat who will not come, toys blinking like an interrupted cursor, and the question of what it would take to get up.

Keywords

Crank Shaft, psychological fragmentation, trauma prose, erotic consciousness and catastrophe, witness and helplessness, Georgie the cat, Bach Toccata and Fugue, art versus family, mortality and artistic ambition, newly resurfaced road, toy bucket cursor, IBM environmental abandonment, gravitational closing, close reading, Hypocorism, crankshaft mechanism

Scholarly Essay: "Su Hija Está en Buenas Manos"

"Su Hija Está en Buenas Manos" is a poem about the theological and cultural normalization of power-asymmetric intimate relationships — specifically, the way that the foundational stories of Western and Islamic religious tradition encode, at their origins, relationships between figures of absolute power and those with none, and the way that cultural outrage about such relationships is applied selectively and inconsistently depending on the identity of the parties involved. The title — "Your Daughter Is in Good Hands" — is the poem's governing irony, invoking simultaneously the reassurance of the trusted guardian, the marketing language of institutional care (Allstate's famous slogan), and the specific register of the older male who presents his intentions as protective and benevolent. The title speaks to a father. It says: trust me. The poem then proceeds to examine the foundations of that trust in the two dominant Abrahamic traditions that have shaped Western civilization's moral architecture.

The poem's opening movement establishes its central theological claim in compressed form. "Christ arose from a relationship / marked by an infinite gap / in age and power" — the Incarnation, read through the lens of power dynamics, is a story in which an omnipotent deity initiates a relationship with a young woman who cannot meaningfully consent to or refuse the visitation of the Holy Spirit. Mary's age at the Annunciation is not specified in canonical scripture but is placed by most biblical scholars and Church tradition between twelve and fourteen — a detail the poem does not need to state because it is available to any reader who has followed the theological tradition. The "infinite gap / in age and power" is, in its theological dimension, not metaphorical but literal: God is eternal, Mary is mortal and young; God is omnipotent, Mary is without recourse. The poem is not making a salacious argument about the Annunciation. It is making a structural argument: that the foundational story of Christian civilization is a story of a power-asymmetric relationship between an infinite being and a finite young woman, and that this story is the origin point of the tradition that subsequently developed elaborate moral frameworks around the protection of the young from exactly such asymmetries.

"Holy dew / pearled at dawn / with enough rico suave" — the diction here performs a deliberate collision of registers. "Holy dew" is the language of liturgy and sacred poetry, the morning dew as an ancient image for divine grace descending on the world (drawn from Psalm 110 and the Song of Songs). "Pearled at dawn" extends this with the compressed beauty of the sacred erotic — the pearl as both purity and sensuality, morning as the moment of revelation. "Rico suave" then detonates the register entirely: the phrase invokes Gerardo's 1991 hit, the smooth-talking Latin lothario who presents his seductive confidence as a gift to the women he pursues. The collision is the poem's central formal argument: the same cultural structure — the older, more powerful, infinitely confident figure initiating with a young woman and presenting the encounter as a blessing — exists in both the sacred and the vernacular, and the linguistic register is the only thing that distinguishes how we respond to it.

The pivot to Mohammad and Aisha delivers the poem's comparative religious argument. The historical marriage of Mohammad to Aisha is documented in Islamic hadith as occurring when Aisha was either six or nine years old (betrothal and consummation respectively, according to the Sahih Bukhari). This is among the most historically contested and culturally sensitive facts in Islamic scholarship, with significant internal debate about the reliability of the hadith and the historical accuracy of Aisha's age. The poem does not engage with that scholarly debate. It takes the traditional account at face value and uses it to make a comparative argument: that if the Christian tradition's foundational relationship involves a power asymmetry that contemporary frameworks would classify as absolute, then the Islamic tradition's account of Mohammad and Aisha — described here as "manhandling" and reduced to the most dehumanizing possible image of the child as "portable pocket pussy, brown" — is being presented as even more extreme by contrast.

The final tercet — "look like a spastic mongoloid / raping a roped-up camel" — is the poem's most deliberately offensive passage, and it requires analytical engagement rather than euphemistic circumnavigation. The comparison deploys two forms of slur simultaneously: "mongoloid," a term now understood as a disability slur derived from the now-discredited racial typology of nineteenth-century science, and the camel bestiality image that draws on a specific anti-Arab stereotype. The poem is using these as markers of the extreme end of a spectrum of transgression — the Mohammad-Aisha relationship is being positioned as so far beyond even these culturally maximally-offensive images as to make them look comparatively mild. The formal logic is satirical hyperbole: by stacking increasingly offensive comparators, the poem forces a question about why the Mohammad-Aisha account, which is taught as sacred history in the world's second-largest religion, is not treated with the same cultural horror as the images being used as its comparators.

The poem's argument, assembled from these three movements, is this: the two dominant religious traditions shaping Western civilization both encode, at their origin stories, relationships between omnipotent figures and young women or children. The Christian tradition aestheticizes its version into transcendence and sacred beauty — "holy dew pearled at dawn" — while the Islamic tradition's version is available to be described in terms so extreme that they defeat the most offensive available secular comparators. And yet neither tradition's moral framework is applied to its own founding story with the same rigor that contemporary culture applies to secular examples of power asymmetry. The title's reassurance — "Your daughter is in good hands" — is therefore not simply ironic but structurally double: whose daughter? In whose hands? Under whose moral framework? These questions have different answers depending on which tradition one inhabits, and the poem is arguing that the consistency of moral application across traditions is precisely what contemporary discourse fails to achieve.

Formally, the poem's three tercets move with a compression and control unusual even within this collection. The enjambments are managed with particular precision: "holy dew / pearled at dawn" creates a line break that holds the sacred image in suspension before "rico suave" arrives to detonate it; "Mohammad's manhandling of Aisha — / portable pocket pussy, brown" breaks at the em-dash to let the name and the historical resonance land before the reductive image follows. The tercet form enforces a visual and rhythmic equality between the three movements — Christian, Islamic, bestial comparator — that is itself an argument: structurally, formally, spatially, these three things are presented as belonging to the same discussion.

The title's Spanish — "Su Hija Está en Buenas Manos" — places the poem in a specifically Latino-inflected register that connects to the "rico suave" reference and positions the poem's address within a specific cultural context where both Catholic Christianity and, increasingly, Islam operate as significant religious forces. The father being addressed is not abstract but culturally situated: a Spanish-speaking father whose daughter is being assured of her safety within a tradition whose foundational stories the poem has just subjected to this analysis. The irony of the title is therefore not simply a universal irony but a specifically targeted one.

"Su Hija Está en Buenas Manos" is ultimately a poem about the selectively applied moral frameworks of religious tradition and contemporary cultural discourse — about who gets to invoke the language of sacred protection and whose foundational stories are permitted to escape the scrutiny applied to secular equivalents. Its formal achievement is to make this argument in nine lines through the collision of registers so extreme that the collision itself is the evidence: the holy dew and the pocket pussy belong in the same poem because the traditions they invoke are, on the poem's reading, operating within the same structural logic of power and access to the young, differentiated only by the language in which that logic is encoded and the cultural reverence that language commands.

Meta Description

A nine-line comparative theological poem arguing through extreme register collision that the foundational stories of Christianity and Islam encode the same structure of power-asymmetric relationship with the young, differentiated only by the sacred language that aestheticizes one and the cultural silence that protects the other from scrutiny.

Keywords

Su Hija Está en Buenas Manos, comparative religion poetry, Annunciation power dynamics, Mohammad Aisha, satirical theology, register collision, sacred and profane, power asymmetry, religious founding narratives, tercet form, contemporary religious satire, close reading, Hypocorism, Abrahamic tradition critique, holy dew rico suave

"Mercari" is a poem about the irrecoverability of childhood sensory experience and the particular modern pathos of knowing that irrecoverability while watching children live inside what has been lost. Its nine lines accomplish something remarkable: they hold two generations in the same physical space and render the absolute perceptual gulf between them without sentimentality or nostalgia, arriving at an image — the dandelion's bitter, milky, smoky nectar released into the wind — that is simultaneously a child's unconscious pleasure and an adult's conscious, purchasable loss.

The title locates the poem's argument before the first line begins. Mercari is a resale marketplace — a platform for buying and selling secondhand goods, the digital economy of recovered objects. Its appearance as title names the adult relationship to childhood experience that the poem will dramatize: the attempt to repurchase, through commerce, what time has made inaccessible. The title does not mock this impulse. It identifies it with the precision of a diagnosis.

The opening image — "the dandelion riot" — establishes the poem's characteristic tonal compression. "Riot" applied to dandelions is simultaneously accurate (the flowers do overwhelm in uncontrolled profusion) and gently comic (the scale mismatch between the word and its referent), but the comedy is not dismissive. The dandelions are genuinely riotous from the children's perspective, genuinely skeeving from the mothers', and the divergence of these responses is the poem's subject in miniature. "Moms / looking skeeved out / along the daycare fence" renders the adult position with affectionate precision — the mild disgust, the sense of disorder, the instinct toward containment. The parenthetical "(chain link, / extra guilt)" is one of the poem's most economical moves: the fence is both literal infrastructure and the poem's symbol of the adult's position outside the children's experience, and "extra guilt" names the specific maternal phenomenology of the daycare drop-off — the guilt of the fence itself, of the separation it enforces.

Against this adult management of the scene, the children simply act: "twisting stalks, smudging / each other's forearms yellow." The verbs are physical and reciprocal — twisting, smudging — and the yellow on the forearms is both mess (from the mothers' perspective) and mark of participation, of being fully inside the experience. What the children are doing with their bodies is what the poem identifies, in its closing lines, as the thing that cannot be purchased.

"Free into the wind a time rift" is the poem's most formally ambitious phrase, and its syntax enacts the release it describes. "Free" functions simultaneously as verb (they free something into the wind) and adjective (the release is free, unencumbered), and "time rift" names what is actually being released: not merely dandelion seeds but a tear in temporal fabric, a gap through which something from another register of experience passes. The children are not releasing seeds. They are releasing the possibility of inhabiting this moment without knowing it will be lost.

"Bitter nectar, milky and smoky" is the poem's sensory center, and its apparent contradiction — bitter and nectar, milky and smoky — is the point. The dandelion's smell and taste are genuinely complex, genuinely contradictory, and the children encounter this complexity without needing to resolve it. They are inside it. The adults remember it, or half-remember it, or recognize it as the kind of sensory experience that once existed and no longer does, not because dandelions have changed but because the perceptual openness that made the experience fully available has closed.

"They would buy online" closes the poem with the quietest possible devastation. The subject of "they" is the mothers — the adults along the fence — and what they would buy online is this: the bitter nectar, the milky smoky complexity, the time rift, the full sensory inhabitation of a moment that their children are living without knowing it is remarkable. Mercari sells secondhand goods. The poem ends on the recognition that what has been lost here cannot actually be listed, cannot actually be shipped, cannot actually be repurchased — that the platform's existence as the poem's title names the attempt while the poem's final image names the attempt's impossibility.

Formally, the poem's nine lines refuse any regular structure, moving instead with the rhythm of observation and recognition — the eye moving from the mothers to the children to the seeds to the loss, each movement enacted in the line breaks. The enjambments consistently open onto something slightly different from what the preceding line suggested, enacting the perceptual surprise that the children experience naturally and the adults can only watch.

Meta Description

A poem about the irrecoverability of childhood sensory experience — placing mothers and children in the same dandelion-filled daycare yard and rendering the absolute perceptual gulf between them, arriving at the recognition that what the children release unconsciously into the wind is exactly what the adults, knowing Mercari, would buy back if they could.

Keywords

Mercari poem, childhood sensory experience, irrecoverability, dandelion imagery, daycare fence, adult nostalgia, resale economy, time rift, bitter nectar, contemporary American lyric, generational perception, guilt and motherhood, sensory loss, close reading, enjambment, consumer culture and childhood, repurchasing experience, contemporary poetry

Scholarly Essay: "White Supremacy on Its Deathbed"

"White Supremacy on Its Deathbed" is a book-length lyrical essay that attempts something genuinely difficult and genuinely dangerous: to mount a serious critique of mainstream antiracist ideology from a position of genuine investment in black empowerment, while deploying a formal apparatus — satire, jeremiad, aphorism, pastiche, pornographic grotesque, philosophical argument, lyric prose — so extreme in its range and so willing to go places that polite discourse forecloses that the work risks, by design, being mistaken for the very thing it opposes. That risk is not incidental. It is the book's central formal bet. The question the essay forces on its reader, and forces hardest on its black reader, is whether the discomfort the work produces is the discomfort of recognition or the discomfort of assault — and whether those two things can, in the specific conditions of contemporary American racial discourse, be cleanly separated.

The book's architecture is announced in its preface and then enacted across six chapters that move from the condition of contemporary antiblack racism's cultural dominance (Chapter 1, "Gator Bait") through the music industry's role in perpetuating dehumanizing stereotypes (Chapter 2, "Macaroni Sounds") to the specific harms of victimology ideology (Chapters 3 and 4), the stifling of white identity and the backlash it risks producing (Chapter 5), and a final summation (Chapter 6). Each chapter after the first is structured around the governing conceit: what might white supremacy, on its deathbed, do to recommence the torture of black people? The answer, repeated in the anaphoric refrain "It could just sit back and revel in our world where," is always the same: nothing. It need do nothing. The work is being done for it by the antiracist industrial complex, by the music industry, by university administrators, by white progressive guilt, by the machinery of victimology that grooms blacks into permanent dependency and provokes whites into a backlash that will justify the very narrative it claims to oppose.

This is a serious argument. It is not an original one — it draws explicitly and extensively from Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Shelby Steele, Coleman Hughes, and a range of black intellectuals who have made versions of this case across several decades — but the book does not pretend to originality of argument. Its originality lies in form. The jeremiad structure, the anaphoric accumulation, the willingness to quote at length from rap lyrics whose content most critical discourse about hip hop handles with prophylactic distance, the satirical set pieces (the La'Cinda'Relle Cinderella parody, the freshmen convocation, the DEI therapy module, the Race2Dinner transcripts, the boot-licking scene) — these are the book's contributions, and they constitute a genuine formal argument about what kind of language is required to make this case legible in the contemporary moment.

The epigraphs establish the book's intellectual genealogy and its rhetorical posture simultaneously. Sowell's observation that racism is "kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as 'racists'" and Booker T. Washington's warning about those who "don't want the patient to get well" because they make their living from the disease — these are not decorative. They are the book's thesis statements, and everything that follows is their amplification and illustration. The McWhorter quotation from the preface establishes the specific target: DiAngelo's White Fragility and the broader apparatus of diversity training, which the book argues produces not racial healing but "a new way to be racist" — condescending to blacks as "endlessly delicate poster children" while muzzling whites into a kind of performative penance that serves no one's actual interests.

Chapter 1 is the book's most formally controlled section, and its most rhetorically precise. The extended anaphoric catalogue — "what might white supremacy do?" — builds through dozens of "Beyond" constructions that systematically minimize the actual evidence for contemporary antiblack racism (the racist store clerk, the word carved in a bathroom stall, the employer's unconscious reaction to a "stereotypically black" name) before pivoting to the "It could just sit back" refrain. The formal effect is significant: by accumulating genuine examples of racism and then framing them as "relatively risible squawks," the chapter risks dismissing real harm — and knows it. The book's intelligence lies in its awareness of this risk, its willingness to take it, and its argument that the risk of minimization is less dangerous than the risk of maximization: that the exaggeration of contemporary antiblack racism, not its minimization, is what keeps blacks "shackled to inflated notions of persecution."

Chapter 2 is the book's most viscerally ambitious section and its most formally extreme. The extended catalogue of rap lyrics — from Biggie to Sukihana, from NWA to Megan Thee Stallion, from LL Cool J to Bun B — is not presented as a greatest-hits compilation but as an indictment. The book is making a specific argument: that mainstream black music culture has become the most effective engine of the dehumanizing stereotypes that white supremacy once had to actively construct and maintain, and that the antiracist framework that refuses to name this — that classifies any criticism of hypersexual or hyperviolent black cultural product as a "blaming-the-victim expression of white supremacy" — is therefore complicit in the damage. The Tricia Rose Cornell lecture, intercut with Sukihana lyrics in a formal structure of call and response, enacts this argument rather than merely stating it: Rose's 2009 words about commercial hip hop's "death imperative" are placed alongside the very product whose existence proves her right, the juxtaposition making its own case without editorial intervention.

The La'Cinda'Relle section deserves sustained attention because it is the book's most formally daring gambit and its most ethically complex. The Cinderella parody — written in "forced hood vernacular," as the book itself acknowledges — is presented simultaneously as a satirical indictment of the ratchet-representation monolith in black entertainment and as a demonstration of that monolith's terms. The book knows and names the double bind: "a remake that will really drive the knife into the very heart of the black family." La'Cinda'Relle is drawn with the full grotesquerie of the stereotypes the book is critiquing, which means the critique and the perpetuation of those stereotypes are formally inseparable. A reader who does not follow the book's argument to this point will experience the La'Cinda'Relle section as racist caricature. A reader who does follow the argument will experience it as a satirical hall of mirrors: the book producing what it analyzes, making the reader implicated in the consumption of exactly what the book says is destroying black communities.

The section also contains material that cannot be analytically sidestepped. La'Cinda'Relle's sexual history with Prince Percocet is established as beginning when she was eleven or twelve. The godmother's sexual relationship with La'Cinda begins when La'Cinda is nine. These are not peripheral details. They are, within the satirical logic of the book, meant to occupy the same position as the rap lyrics in Chapter 2: the book is demonstrating what the culture it critiques actually contains, quoting and extending the logic of a musical and cultural product (like Boosie Badazz's birthday lyric, or the various statutory-rape-adjacent verses in the catalogue) to show where that logic leads when followed to its conclusion. The argument is that the culture is already producing this — that the protection of innocence the book elsewhere mourns has already been forfeited in the communities the antiracist framework refuses to criticize.

Whether this formal strategy succeeds or collapses at this specific point is the book's hardest question, and the honest answer is that it does not fully succeed. The satirical frame that holds elsewhere — in the Race2Dinner parody, in the freshman convocation monologue, in the DEI therapy session — is strained here by the explicitness of the material and the age of the characters. Satire that depicts child sexual abuse to make a point about cultural normalization risks becoming indistinguishable from the normalization it critiques, not because the author lacks the argument but because the reader has no stable position from which to receive it as critique rather than as content. The book elsewhere shows acute awareness of exactly this problem — noting that entertainment consumers "slurp up" dehumanizing content even when they understand its dehumanizing character — but does not fully resolve how the book itself differs from the cultural product it is analyzing. This is not a fatal failure. It is an honest formal limit that the work's ambition has run up against.

Chapters 3 and 4 constitute the book's most philosophically sustained argument, and they are where the intellectual debts to the black conservative tradition are most explicitly discharged. The extended analysis of victimology — the way dependency is cultivated, the mechanism by which the "plantation of dependency" is maintained, the double-bind by which any black who challenges the narrative is excommunicated from authentic blackness — is genuinely rigorous. The Shelby Steele passage on "victim's power" is quoted at length because it is the clearest available articulation of the argument: that power derived from victimhood "binds the victim to his victimization by linking his power to his status as a victim," producing a "tragic" situation in which "taking responsibility for bettering ourselves feels like a surrender to white power." The book endorses this analysis without qualification and builds its own argument around it.

The critique of lowered standards is the section's most pointed argument: that affirmative action, subminimal academic expectations, exemption from behavioral standards, and the pathologizing of challenge are not compensatory measures but additional injuries — injuries that "further cloaks, and thereby further hides from cure, deeper causes of black underachievement." The book extends this argument to its most uncomfortable implications: that the antiracist movement's refusal to engage with black cultural attitudes — the "niggative" orientation toward education, the glorification of criminality, the broken family structures — as causes of black underperformance constitutes a form of abandonment disguised as advocacy. The "Stop" litany near the end of Chapter 4, addressed to white progressives, is the book's most direct expression of this argument: a catalogue of specific practices — defunding police, lowering academic standards, pathologizing excellence as "acting white," excusing behavioral nonconformity — that the book argues harm the black people they claim to protect.

Chapter 5 is the book's most formally varied and its most politically volatile section, ranging from the Race2Dinner parody through the "a land where" catalogue to the extended analysis of double-binds whites are placed in, ending with the specter of violent white backlash. The Race2Dinner transcript — rendered in the heightened novelistic prose of the original transcript, with its character descriptions and stage directions — is the book's most technically accomplished satirical piece. Saira is drawn with Hitlerian finger-tapping, Vlad the Impaler smile, Stalin's gaze, and Mussolini's hand gestures — a cascade of totalitarian comparisons that makes its argument through accumulation rather than assertion: this is what a racial inquisition looks like when it has been domesticated into a dinner-party format. Margaret's progressive humiliation, ending in her confession of sounding "terribly white," is presented as a portrait of a coercive dynamic that produces not understanding but submission.

The boot-licking scene near Chapter 5's end is the section's most formally extreme moment and its most deliberately alienating. The footage of white people kissing black boots, narrated by the man with the bullhorn, is presented with all the pornographic rhetoric of its context — "Get real low. Press that face where it need to be" — and extends to include a child participant, a white girl brought forward to kiss the boot alongside her father. This is the book's most explicit deployment of child imagery in a sexual-power context, and it requires the same analytical honesty as the La'Cinda'Relle section. The book is arguing that the ideology of racial atonement, taken to its logical extreme, produces a ritual of humiliation that is indistinguishable in its power dynamics from the very domination it claims to redress. The inclusion of the child is meant to make the logic of generational guilt — that white children inherit the sins of their ancestors and must perform atonement — visceral and concrete. As satire of a real ideological tendency, it functions. As a formal choice, it shares the La'Cinda'Relle section's problem: the explicitness of the child's participation in a scene of ritualized submission strains the frame that is supposed to contain it.

The backlash section — the white rage monologues, the projected violence, the warning about what happens when the punking program goes too far — is the book's most politically alarming passage and its most formally significant. The book is not endorsing the rage it ventriloquizes. It is arguing that the antiracist movement is manufacturing the conditions for it: that chronic humiliation, the erasure of legitimate grievance, and the weaponization of racial identity produce, in the heavily armed white majority population, exactly the violent response that the narrative of white supremacy's resurgence requires to justify itself. This is the hyperstition argument made explicit: the antiracist movement midwifes the very antiblack sentiment it claims to combat. The projected violence of the "colonizer" monologues and the Goon Squad fantasies are presented as the endpoint of a causal chain whose beginning is in university diversity trainings and DiAngelo's prayer book.

Formally, the book's most significant achievement is its refusal to find a stable rhetorical position. It will not occupy the voice of the dispassionate analyst — McWhorter's measured prose style is available to it and is frequently quoted, but the book does not write in that register. It will not occupy the voice of the confessional memoirist — though the preface's disclosure of the author's termination from his professorship personalizes the stakes. It oscillates between these and a dozen others: the biblical jeremiad, the satirical novelist, the pornographic provocateur, the philosophical systematist, the hip-hop analyst, the grief-stricken witness. This oscillation is the book's formal argument about what is required to make this case in this moment: that measured prose has been tried and dismissed, that the case requires the full arsenal of available language, that a book about a culture that processes everything through sensation and outrage must be willing to be sensational and outrageous in its own register.

The acknowledgments are worth noting: they constitute a political map as much as a personal one. Sowell and Steele and Loury and McWhorter and Hughes sit alongside Tom MacDonald and Adam Calhoun and Burden and Mesus — the black conservative intellectual tradition alongside the white rap artists who have made versions of the same argument in vernacular form. The juxtaposition is deliberate: the book is arguing that these are the same argument at different registers of cultural production, and that the mainstream's refusal to hear either is a function of the same ideological gatekeeping.

What "White Supremacy on Its Deathbed" ultimately is, is a book that takes a serious argument about genuine harm to black people and commits to pursuing that argument wherever it leads — into the La'Cinda'Relle section, into the boot-licking scene, into the white rage monologues, into the explicit lyric catalogues, into the satirical set pieces that will read as racist caricature to any reader who encounters them outside the book's full argumentative context. The book bets that this commitment is necessary: that the argument cannot be made in polite language without being dismissed as polite language always is in a discourse that has learned to absorb and neutralize measured critique. Whether the bet pays off depends on whether the reader follows the full argument to the full formal conclusion, or encounters a passage extracted from that context and reads it as the thing it is critiquing. That ambiguity is not a flaw. It is the condition the book has decided to inhabit, with full awareness of what it costs.

Meta Description

A book-length lyrical essay mounting a formal and philosophical case against mainstream antiracist ideology as genuinely harmful to black people — deploying jeremiad, satire, pornographic grotesque, philosophical argument, and anaphoric accumulation to argue that the antiracist industrial complex midwifes the very conditions it claims to combat, at the price of black dependency, black cultural debasement, and an escalating white backlash.

Keywords

White Supremacy on Its Deathbed, antiracist critique, black conservatism, victimology ideology, lyrical essay, jeremiad form, satirical grotesque, hip hop and black culture, DiAngelo critique, Shelby Steele, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Thomas Sowell, Coleman Hughes, hyperstition, white backlash, plantation of dependency, black empowerment critique, formal ambiguity, close reading, Hypocorism

Scholarly Essay: "Pound Town: A Defense of the Moral Permissibility of Bestiality"

"Pound Town: A Defense of the Moral Permissibility of Bestiality" is a work of philosophical provocation in the tradition of the academic thought experiment — rigorous, footnoted, structured in the formal architecture of analytic ethics, and dedicated to two figures (Gary Varner, a philosopher of animal ethics, and Grandpa Jack) whose juxtaposition announces the essay's governing tonal register: the personal and the scholarly, the lived and the argued, occupying the same space without apology. It is a piece that takes seriously the philosophical obligation to follow argument wherever it leads, even when — especially when — it leads somewhere the culture has decided in advance cannot be arrived at by honest reasoning. Whether one arrives at its conclusions or not, the essay is a sustained demonstration that the consensus against bestiality rests on philosophical foundations considerably shakier than its cultural certainty suggests.

The essay's formal strategy is the systematic elimination of available rationales. It does not argue for bestiality in the abstract or as a general practice. It argues for the moral permissibility of certain instances of bestiality — a narrower and more defensible claim — and it does so by walking through every category of objection the philosophical and cultural arsenal provides: intuition, biblical authority, naturalness, animal wellbeing, and human wellbeing. Each section follows the same structure: state the argument in its most rigorous form, then dismantle it. What accumulates across these demolitions is not a positive case for bestiality so much as a negative case against the coherence of its prohibition — a demonstration that the grounds on which the taboo rests are either internally inconsistent, arbitrarily applied, or insufficient to do the philosophical work required of them.

The twelve cases organized into four categories at the essay's opening are the piece's most formally accomplished section, and they deserve attention as a philosophical device before anything else. The cases range from unequivocally immoral scenarios — the hen throttled to death in Case 1, the starved collie in Case 2, the drugged piglet in Case 3 — to scenarios of such apparent benignity that the moral objection becomes increasingly difficult to locate: the tween girl getting off from her horse's gyrations in Case 4, the man ejaculating on a turtle's shell in Case 6, the primatologist taken by the orangutan in Case 7. This range is not rhetorical sleight of hand but philosophical precision: it forces the reader to specify exactly what feature of any given case makes it morally objectionable, and in doing so exposes how few of the available features — coercion, harm, lack of consent — apply to the cases in the B, C, and D categories. The cases are the essay's most effective argumentative tool because they make concrete what abstract prohibition tends to leave vague.

The section on intuition is where the essay's most philosophically consequential argument lives, and it is constructed with genuine care. The essay does not dismiss intuition as a moral guide; it accepts the reality of the disgust response and even owns it in the first person — "I too find it disgusting to envision someone, say, performing fellatio on a horse." What it refuses is the move from disgust to moral impermissibility, and it does so by attacking both premises of the intuition argument. Against premise two — that intuition against bestiality is universal — it marshals an extraordinary ethnographic inventory: ancient Egyptians, ancient Greeks, ancient Hindus, the Kisii of Kenya, the Masai, the Comeburras of Colombia, the Inuit, numerous tribal cultures across four continents, and a list of historically famous suspected practitioners that ranges from Tiberius to Aleister Crowley. The inventory is not merely comprehensive; it is philosophically functional. If the intuition against bestiality were a reliable moral guide, it would need to be something like universal. The evidence suggests it is not.

Against premise one — that intuitive wrongness implies moral wrongness — the essay deploys its most rhetorically powerful passage: the extended catalogue of human cognitive failures, biases, and moral atrocities that our intuitions have licensed, from geocentrism to the skull-reading of phrenology to the intuitive wrongness of miscegenation. The catalogue is deliberately excessive, accumulating well past the point at which any single item would suffice to make the logical point, because the accumulation is itself the argument: we are the sort of critters who cannot trust our gut about things we have decided in advance. The section on intuition concludes that moral repugnance, however indelible, requires independent justification — and then spends the rest of the essay demonstrating that the available independent justifications fail.

The biblical section is brisk because its work is largely done by the consistency argument: the Bible condemns homosexuality with the same force it condemns bestiality, and we have decided that the Bible's condemnation of homosexuality is insufficient to establish its immorality. The same epistemic grounds that license that conclusion license the same conclusion about bestiality. The essay does not attack the Bible's authority on religious grounds but on grounds of internal inconsistency and demonstrated errancy: a document that prohibits eating lobsters and getting tattoos and wearing linen-wool blends cannot be treated as a reliable moral authority on bestiality without accounting for why those prohibitions are being selectively ignored. The section's most philosophically interesting moment is the discussion of divine command theory, where the essay acknowledges the internal logic of the position — if right and wrong are ultimately God's arbitrary decree, then everything depends on correctly identifying God's decrees — while exposing the epistemic problem that position generates: by what method does one establish that the Bible, rather than competing holy texts, reflects those decrees?

The section on naturalness dispatches the is-ought fallacy with appropriate efficiency and then spends more time than strictly necessary on the enumeration of meanings of "unnatural" — not because the argument requires it, but because the enumeration reveals how many different objections are being bundled under a single term and how few of them, when separated and examined individually, withstand scrutiny. The observation that naturalness arguments are wielded against bestiality by people who sleep with CPAPs in air-conditioned homes after heart transplants is the essay's most elegant single point, delivered with the compression of good comic writing.

The animal wellbeing section is the essay's most extended and most philosophically serious, because it engages the strongest available objection. The essay does not dismiss the consent framework; it argues that animals can in fact communicate consent through behavioral signals — and here the inclusion of Liz Moores's description of equine attunement is the essay's most formally distinctive move, embedding a perfumer's testimony about the near-psychic quality of the human-horse bond in the middle of a philosophical argument about consent capacity. The passage is not merely decorative. It is evidence: the claim that horses cannot communicate consent, willingness, and refusal is empirically contested by anyone with sustained experience of horses, and the essay appeals to that experience directly. The section's most philosophically rigorous passage is the extended argument distinguishing the animal from the toddler — four criteria (hormonal maturity, radically different future, likelihood of later trauma, not yet at full cognitive capacity) that jointly explain why behavioral consent from an animal suffices where the same behavioral consent from a toddler does not. The distinction is careful and the criteria are genuinely functional, blocking the most common reductio offered against the consent argument.

The human wellbeing section is where the essay's rhetorical energy is highest, because it is where the essay's central meta-argument becomes most explicit: what is actually driving the taboo is not concern for animals but concern for human identity, human social order, and the illusion of human exceptionalism. The slippery slope arguments against bestiality are exposed as fallacies through the observation that the same logic would imply that consensual sex with humans increases the likelihood of nonconsensual sex with humans — a conclusion no one draws. The zoonotic disease objection is met with the observation that human-to-human sex also transmits disease, that precautionary measures reduce transmission risk to manageable levels, and that we do not condemn homosexual sex despite its statistically elevated disease transmission rates. The physical injury objection is met with the observation that risk of injury does not render an activity immoral — a point illustrated by skydivers and MMA fighters and Alaskan crab fishermen.

But the section's most penetrating argument is the one about intent. The essay identifies the extraordinary fact that the same physical acts — masturbating animals, fingering their anuses, fondling their genitalia for insemination purposes — are standard husbandry practice when performed without sexual intent and criminal bestiality when performed with it. The mere addition of human arousal converts a kosher farmhand procedure into moral depravity. The essay does not simply note the arbitrariness of this distinction; it names what it reveals: that the taboo on bestiality is fundamentally about protecting the human's sense of radical difference from animals, and that this protection is organized not around actual harm to anyone but around the maintenance of a conceptual boundary that evolutionary biology has already rendered philosophically dubious.

The concluding argument is the essay's most formally elegant section, structured as a dilemma that closes without remainder. Either animals have no moral worth — in which case bestiality is permissible for the same reasons any use of animals is permissible, and the other rationales have already been shown to fail — or animals have at least some moral worth — in which case the essay's cases demonstrate that bestiality need not violate that worth, and once again the other rationales have been shown to fail. The dilemma is constructed so that neither horn provides a stable position from which to maintain the absolute prohibition, and the essay's final image — "uncontroversial enjoyment of earthly beings thrown into this, like this, with such a transient lifespan" — is its most philosophically honest moment: the view from Camus and Sartre, the absurdist perspective that asks what, in a cosmos of countless suns and reams of death, justifies the certainty with which we organize our moral horror.

What "Pound Town" achieves is something genuinely difficult in philosophical writing: it makes the reader feel the inadequacy of their own position without necessarily arriving at the author's conclusion. The essay does not require the reader to endorse bestiality. It requires the reader to explain, with genuine rigor, why the cases in categories B, C, and D are wrong — and it has, by the time that requirement becomes clear, already demolished the most available explanations. The dedication to Grandpa Jack alongside Gary Varner is the essay's final formal gesture: the argument belongs to the philosophical tradition and to a life, and the philosophical tradition cannot be fully separated from the life that inhabits it.

Meta Description

A rigorous work of analytic philosophy arguing through intuition, biblical authority, naturalness, animal wellbeing, and human wellbeing that bestiality is morally permissible in certain circumstances — systematically exposing the internal inconsistencies of its prohibition and identifying human exceptionalism, rather than genuine moral concern, as the taboo's actual foundation.

Keywords

Pound Town bestiality philosophy, moral permissibility bestiality, animal consent, zoophilia ethics, divine command theory, naturalness fallacy, is-ought fallacy, animal wellbeing argument, human exceptionalism, consent and behavioral signals, slippery slope fallacy, analytic ethics provocateur, thought experiment cases, Hypocorism, interspecies ethics

"Descendants of African Slavers Pay Reputational Reparations" is a poem about karmic irony operating at civilizational scale. Its title states the irony directly: the descendants of African kingdoms and merchants who participated in selling people into the transatlantic slave trade are now paying a reparations bill they never anticipated, in a currency no one legislated, through a mechanism that is simply the long arc of consequence finding its way home. The payment is reputational. The Black American cultural image — dominant, globally exported, flattened into spectacle by the mechanisms of mass culture and mass tourism — now precedes every African and diasporic Black person who steps onto the world stage, attaching itself to their identity regardless of their individual character, national origin, or distance from American history. The descendants of the sellers are among those paying this tax. The universe, the title declares with the flat confidence of a ledger entry, has its own accounting department.

The historical premise the title rests on is factual and largely suppressed in mainstream discourse: the transatlantic slave trade required African participation. Kingdoms, merchants, and military powers across West and Central Africa captured and sold enslaved people to European traders on a massive scale. The descendants of those participants — Nigerians, Ghanaians, Senegalese, Beninese — now navigate a world in which the product of that historical transaction, Black American culture at its most ungoverned and most visible, has become the global face of Blackness itself. The karma is structural, not personal. No individual descendant chose this. The bill arrived anyway, as bills generated by history tend to do.

The poem proper is a nine-line comic set piece that renders one of the circus rings where the reputational bill is being run up in real time. "Little did Mr. White Dad / anticipate" — the mock-epic construction, the proper-noun-ification of "White Dad" as demographic type — establishes the comic register immediately. Mr. White Dad is the liberal or merely oblivious white consumer of managed multicultural experience: the Groupon is his instrument, the family cruise his chosen vehicle for a controlled encounter with the broader world. The Groupon is the poem's most precise sociological detail: it designates the price point at which the managed multicultural encounter becomes unmanageable, where the demographic mix shifts beyond what the family vacation framework was designed to contain.

"The Groupon cruise / to ratchet down into Popeyes / on the high seas" — "ratchet" clicks through both its mechanical and vernacular registers simultaneously. As mechanism it describes an irreversible downward movement, notch by notch, no going back. As vernacular adjective it designates the specific register of Black American feminine performance — uninhibited, confrontational, sexually expressive, fight-ready — that the poem is about to render. The Groupon cruise ratchets into Popeyes on the high seas: the specific fast food chain chosen for its cultural associations, its status as viral site of the confrontational and exuberantly ungoverned, now floating on international waters where Mr. White Dad's child is present and cannot be retrieved to safer coordinates.

"Thongs / twerking streetball funk / into his child's no-going-back nose" — "streetball funk" is the poem's most compressed cultural-olfactory designation: the atmospheric compound of exertion, close bodies, hair products, and the ambient quality of unsupervised Black social culture, twerked directly into the child's permanent sensory memory. "No-going-back nose" is the poem's most philosophically precise detail. The olfactory sense is the most directly memory-linked and the least amenable to retrospective recontextualization: what the child smells cannot be unsmelled, cannot be reframed. The association is installed. This is the global mechanism in miniature: the image, once encountered, attaches. The Nigerian scholar walking into a London boardroom tomorrow walks in through the door that this cruise has been furnishing.

"Tits flapping in hair-hatted fistfights / with staff dumb enough / to deny a queen her crab" — the fistfight is the poem's comic climax and its most concentrated image of the reputational bill being generated in real time. "Hair-hatted" designates the elaborate protective head coverings surviving the fistfight as structural testament to their construction. "Staff dumb enough / to deny a queen her crab" places the comic weight on the staff member who misread the social dynamics — but the poem's larger point is that this scene, this specific configuration of entitlement and confrontation, is being witnessed, photographed, uploaded, and appended to the global image of Blackness. The queen gets her crab. The reputational invoice goes to Lagos, Accra, Nairobi, Kingston. The Groupon cruise is one of countless such circus rings where the tab accumulates, and the descendants of the people who started the whole chain of events are among those picking it up — not by anyone's design, not by any court's order, but by the patient and indifferent arithmetic of history settling its own accounts.

The poem does not editorialize about whether this is just. It notes that it is happening. The title's declarative flatness is its only evaluative gesture: not outrage, not celebration, not lamentation, but the tone of a ledger being read aloud. The reparations are being paid by someone, through a mechanism that is karma rather than legislation, to recipients who are Mr. White Dad's child's permanently altered olfactory memory rather than any identifiable aggrieved party. The universe runs its own reparations program on its own timeline and consults no one about the terms.

Formally, the poem's three tercets move from setup to escalation to climax with the economy of a well-timed joke whose punchline is also an indictment. The comic surface — the Groupon, the Popeyes, the hair-hatted fistfight over crab — is the poem's delivery mechanism for a historical and karmic argument that the title states and the body illustrates. The specificity of the imagery is the poem's evidence: these are not abstract cultural forces but twerking thongs and flapping tits and a queen who will have her crab, and it is precisely their specificity, their visibility, their exportability as image, that makes them the instrument of the reputational tax the title names. The poem earns its comedy because the comedy is the mechanism: the absurdity of the cruise scene is inseparable from the seriousness of what the cruise scene generates and sends around the world.

Meta Description

A comic poem about karmic irony at civilizational scale: the descendants of African slavers now pay reputational reparations as Black American supercitizen spectacle — rendered in vivid detail aboard a Groupon cruise — flattens global Blackness into a single exported image that precedes every African onto the world stage.

Keywords

Descendants of African Slavers Pay Reputational Reparations, karmic irony, reputational tax, Black American supercitizen, global Blackness, Groupon cruise poem, ratchet culture, African slave trade descendants, cultural image export, comic indictment, contemporary satire, close reading, Hypocorism, transatlantic slave trade karma, reputational reparations

"Gonzo Domestic Squabble" is a poem about the inheritance of erotic structure—the way that childhood witness of adult orgiastic life, incomprehensible at the time of its occurrence, installs a template in the nervous system that surfaces decades later as compulsion, arousal, and the desperate need to insert oneself into other people's intensity as the only available form of mattering. Its narrator is a dorm-room voyeur who escalates from watching a street fight to shooting at the combatants with a pest control rifle, and the poem tracks this escalation as psychological recapitulation: each stage of the present action triggers a memory that reveals the childhood origin of the compulsion, until the two scenes—dorm window and childhood bedroom—are fully superimposed, the same groove playing in different bodies at different times.

The title announces its generic instability. "Gonzo" invokes Hunter Thompson's mode of total subjective immersion—the observer who cannot remain outside what he observes, whose participation distorts and transforms the event beyond recovery. "Domestic Squabble" is the bureaucratic minimization, the term that makes intimate violence sound like a scheduling disagreement. The collision of these registers is the poem's governing irony: the squabble is gonzo, uncontainable, metastasizing through the narrator's psyche and out the window in pellet fire, and the gonzo is domestic, rooted in the home, in the mother, in the childhood bedroom where the template was first and ecstatically installed.

The opening image—"Drunken shouts tied into a sloppy knot in the grass"—renders the street fight as textural event before it becomes visual. The knot is both the entanglement of two bodies and the acoustic tangle of their voices, imprecise and adhesive. "Tit flopping / in halogen butter" introduces the erotic register immediately alongside the violent one: the woman's exposed breast in the orange-yellow cast of a parking lot lamp, "butter" making the light warm and slightly nauseating, a domestic substance misapplied to a scene of public brutality. "Took the mount, grunting berserk / hammerfists to his skull"—the woman initially dominant, her violence rendered in combat sports vocabulary that aestheticizes and reports simultaneously. "But he got hold of her hair"—the turn is a single line, its brevity performing the speed of the power shift.

"They had a life" is the poem's first moment of pure psychological revelation, arriving without transition. It is precisely their having a life—a shared history, a union however brutal—that produces the narrator's arousal and his sense of exclusion. "Hyperaroused helplessness" names the specific affective compound with precision: arousal and impotence simultaneously, the body responding to what the self cannot enter. "Gleeking that unforgotten brine"—gleeking is the involuntary ejection of saliva from the submandibular gland, and the poem deploys the term with physiological exactness: the mouth responding autonomically, producing the "unforgotten brine" that connects present arousal to its childhood source before the poem has consciously named that source. The body remembers first.

"Electricity prickled my pinkies / like in childhood"—the nervous system's recognition of a familiar template, the pinkies as the body's farthest outposts registering the charge. The childhood comparison arrives with the casualness of long familiarity: the narrator has always known this connection, even if he has never articulated it. The pest control rifle is reached for in this state—not as a weapon in any ordinary sense but as an instrument of insertion, of ending the helplessness the arousal has made unbearable. "I needed in on it, in on their fusion"—the repeated preposition performing the desire for penetration of their shared reality.

The first memory surfaces here, and it is the poem's central disclosure: "like when my mom and her men fought in a fuck coil / fecal with the piston of a glucking fist."

"Fuck coil" superimposes sex and violence into a single compound—not metaphorically but literally, the mother's encounters with her men being simultaneously combative and orgiastic, indistinguishable to the child's developing perception. The fisting is explicit in "the piston of a glucking fist"—the wet, visceral onomatopoeia of "glucking" rendering the sound with a phonetic precision that makes the word feel coined from the act itself. The mother is not a victim here. She is a participant in her own extremity, her body the site of an intensity the child witnesses without the interpretive framework to understand it as chosen, as wanted, as ecstatic.

"Her shark eyes / dead to Teddy and me"—the mother's dissociation during these encounters is the dissociation of orgiastic absorption, not of suffering. The shark eyes are the eyes of a creature in the grip of its own nature, operating below the level of social recognition, not because she is being destroyed but because she is elsewhere, in the place extreme pleasure takes a person. The child reads vacancy where there is in fact a different kind of presence—one foreclosed to him by his age and the incomprehension the poem names directly: "as far as a child could know, / the sugar of the verboten still latched inside cookie jars." The cookie jar is exact and devastating: the child knows the sugar exists, can smell it perhaps, but cannot access it, cannot name it, cannot metabolize what he is witnessing as anything other than chaos and exclusion. The verboten is still latched inside. He does not yet have the key.

This is the poem's most precise psychological mechanism: the mother is not traumatizing the child through her suffering but through her pleasure—through her orgiastic absorption in an intensity that excludes him, that makes him a nonagent, less than zero, present but not participating, witnessing but not comprehending. The template being installed is not one of violence-as-damage but of intensity-as-the-only-real-thing, of the body in extremity as the site of an aliveness that ordinary existence cannot approach. Saint Teresa's ecstasy and the mother's are structurally identical in this sense: the body seized by something beyond it, the face indistinguishable from agony, the witness left outside the experience with only its effects to read.

"She re-blew: lowing like a cow / in oniony estrus"—the mother's vocalization during orgasm, rendered in the animal register without condescension: the lowing is the sound of a body in heat, the estrus naming the biological depth of the arousal. She is not performing for an audience in the calculating sense; she is in the grip of something that happens to have an audience. "Sweeping my hand across the blub; / plop-plopping it down like puddle boots"—the mother takes the boy's hand and places it against her, using him as an instrument of her pleasure with the same orgiastic unselfconsciousness that governs everything else she does in these moments. The child does not understand what his hand is doing or why. He is being incorporated into an intensity he cannot read. The "plop-plopping" is both specific and phonetically exact, the sound inseparable from the act.

"Her squirt / pelted Teddy and me—sheets of deadened thuds, rug / in a cloudburst—with that musk of hot pennies saltier / with my tears"—the mother's orgasm reaching both children, the squirt experienced as weather, as something that happens to them from outside without targeting them, the musk of it mixing with the narrator's tears. He is crying not because he is being harmed but because he is excluded from something whose intensity he can feel without being able to enter. The tears are the tears of the nonagent: present at the feast, unable to eat. "'Mommy stop! Mommy!'"—the child's plea is ambiguous in retrospect. It is the only language available to him for an intensity he cannot otherwise address. It is not necessarily a plea to end her pleasure but the only utterance the overwhelmed child can produce in the face of something too large for him.

The present scene and the childhood memory achieve full superimposition in the final stanza. The speaker's voyeuristic stance collapses into absolute optical and psychological consumption: "I kept feasting, drowned in flesh, and uppercuts kept boring. I could see / the belly heaving from within—the girl sobbing like her." This climactic phrasing bridges the adult's visual gluttony back to the infant's oral fixation in the flashback—the child sucking the nipple in goo-goo-gaga translated into an adult psychological devouring of the spectacle. By stripping away redundant descriptors, the text leaves "the belly heaving from within" stark and cinematic. "The girl sobbing like her" closes the loop entirely. The woman in the grass and the mother in the bedroom are the same figure, the present scene a recapitulation of the original in which the narrator, now armed with a pest control rifle, can finally inject himself into the intensity that excluded him as a child. The shots are the plop-plopping hand transposed: an instrument being used, finally, in the chaos that matters.

Formally, the poem's three stanzas move through escalating disclosure and superimposition: present scene and arousal, childhood memory beginning to surface, full merger of past and present until they are indistinguishable. The accumulating clause structure—semicolons and dashes refusing full stops—enacts the compulsive momentum of the narrator's state, the inability to pause once the groove has begun to play. The phonetic texture throughout—"glucking," "gleeking," "sclack, sclack," "plop-plopping," "goo-goo-gaga," "lowing like a cow"—keeps the poem in the body, refusing the cognitive elevation that would allow the reader to process the material from a safe distance.

"Gonzo Domestic Squabble" is ultimately a poem about how orgiastic intensity witnessed in childhood—incomprehensible at the time, installed below the threshold of understanding—structures adult desire and compulsion more completely than anything the conscious mind subsequently processes. The narrator shoots because the groove is playing. The groove was cut by a mother who was Saint Teresa in a bedroom, whose ecstasy was real and total and indifferent to its witnesses in the way that all genuine ecstasy is indifferent—which is to say, not cruel, but absolute. The child made a nonagent by her absoluteness becomes the adult who cannot witness intensity without needing to enter it. The poem renders this mechanism from inside, with a completeness that is its own form of seriousness.

Meta Description

A poem tracing adult erotic compulsion to childhood witness of a mother's orgiastic life — her ecstatic fisting, her squirt reaching her children, her hand guiding the boy's against her — a template of intensity-as-the-only-real-thing that resurfaces in a dorm window, an air rifle, and the need to enter other people's chaos as the only available form of mattering.

Keywords

Gonzo Domestic Squabble, childhood erotic witness, orgiastic mother, trauma template, intensity and compulsion, Saint Teresa ecstasy, fisting and childhood, erotic inheritance, nonagent psychology, superimposition of memory, voyeurism and intervention, contemporary confessional poetry, close reading, Hypocorism, gonzo narrative form