A Monday Morning Walk Through Facebook

Well, well, it’s a Monday morning, and isn’t it time to walk through Facebook?

Bloggers get to do this, you see, or maybe we have to, since there are days when the news is so unremittingly bad that The New York Times and El Nuevo Día are merely siren songs for suicide (sorry for that alliteration—all this poetry stuff I’m doing must be rubbing off). So what can I tell you, or rather, in what new ways can I derich your—perhaps/ probably—difficult Monday morning.

Well, start off briskly with this:

Do I have to? Because—talk about a graphic being worth a thousand words—who needs to make that click? I know perfectly well what’s happening, I know perfectly well how I feel about fracking (essentially, frack that), and so why make myself crazy?

Does it get better? Of course not, because then we have to come to this:

Wonderful! Investigated that just enough to know that vegetarianism is out, too, since the storage tanks holding all that highly radioactive water? Do I have to tell you?

Move on to this:

Why isn’t Congress acting? Do you think I haven’t asked myself that question? Of course, and here’s the answer, if you really didn’t know: Congress is not acting because, for the last six years, a bunch of elderly white bigots ostensibly called Republicans have been in a frenzy of obstructionism. You see, the world changed—you see, they don’t. Oh, and guess what? Because here’s what’s next….

Devoted as I am to you, Dear Readers, who wake every day thirsting to read this blog, whose one reason is to wake…oh, skip it. I checked it out and yes, Thomas reasons that Congress can’t establish religions, but that doesn’t mean that a state can’t. So you Mormons out there in Utah? Feel free!

Well, the Supreme Court is taking a well-deserved rest, having busily fucked everything else up for the rest of us, who are going to have to get busy and do stuff like this:

 

Go to it guys!

At last, I have uncovered the reason for the deeply addictifying nature of Facebook, since the site puts you into such a state of catatonic rage—don’t know how they do that, but they got it figured out—that you then have to turn to stuff like this:

Well of course, of course, I had to spend seven minutes of Monday morning looking at the movie references to Wisconsin—you, Dear Reader, deserve nothing less—but having done that, please don’t waste your time. Somebody, after all, has to keep this world together.

But now, I’m saved by Montalvo, who arrives with the news that his poetry is driving him crazy, since he spent five years making the same mistake, namely writing lines of two words each. I’ve told him, the feeling of reading poem like this is just like bumping down the stairs on your rear-end. So it’s time for a challenge: write a poem of four four-line stanzas, with each line being at least eight syllables each. The first line is “Your memory is a silent ghost,” and you have half an hour to do it. Get to work.

Well, can I do that? I decide to try:

Your memory is a silent ghost

That still cries at night, when the wind,

Cold and unwanted, forces itself through the

Cracks of my empty heart, which even now

Has a ventricle for the eyes that saw no one but me,

Before they misted, clouded, became watery, then pus-filled

And at last, all desire lost, refused to see.

A ventricle to, for the voice, which once was only

Laughter, then turned to song, and then

Hardened slightly, turned as somber as mute swans

In a chill Autumn pond, until your voice, as they, fell silent.

I fled, then, to the other chambers of my heart, places

You were little likely to go, places I might have shown

You, but did not.  I slammed the valves shut, cemented them

With hurt, grief, the usual glues of a deadened love.

I waited, alone, in a dusty corner, and listened—

Thump-thump, thump-thump; you knocking insistently

For a while, but each day more silently, weaker, until at last,

Tired of a call never answered, you left, and it was silence

At last.