WATCHING THE TELLY WITH NIETZSCHE

Sucking up another dumb movie on HBO, it comes to me how boring it is to sit here like a boil on an ass.

Boring, not as in Berryman’s “Life, friends is boring we must not say so…” — life isn’t boring,

just thinking of matters which don’t set my teeth on fire and make the dents in my brain screech is boring.

For instance: I switch to a news channel and a segment about what a Republican president wannabe —

I refuse to utter his name — proclaimed on being caught changing his chameleon mind about something:

“Quoting me is lying about me.” Now that’s not boring, is it? That leaps right into your vault, no?

A person denouncing his own convictions as possibly being too true? My god, Nietzsche himself

(and he was in my philosophical gawk-time all but my god), who growled of our having “gnawed at ourselves,”

and “turned ourselves into torture chambers,” wouldn’t have known what to make of such conscienceless crap …

Wait, though, maybe as my mother would say I’m overexcited — I’ve always been such a weep.

That political lizard and those like him — so many like him — are hardly the worst things in the world.

Think Stalin. Think Mandelstam on his hell-train, shuddering with fever, dying of a line in a poem.

And remember how that Dream Song continues? “After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,

we ourselves flash and yearn…” and they do, and we do, but we’re terrified, too, sometimes of,

sometimes for, and sometimes we can’t tell the difference, because history shudders and Mandlestam dies,

and it can seem only the torturers and tyrants, the venal demagogues and the qualmless deceivers

stand firm, gazing out over the hapless rest of us to decide which will be next, which Mandlestam,

which flash and which yearning will be dragged down and submerged in their political puke …

As I’m dragged down into the ocean of cathode image-scum pumping out at me from the sewer-screen,

rendering me gloomy beyond gloom, not beyond Berryman’s, please, but still, my tail is lashing,

fangs are unsheathing in the lining of my heart … Better turn it off — all of it, off. Jesus Christ, off!