My manifesto on "shithole countries' is out

http://dispatchespoetrywars.com/dispatches/2018/03/obu-loves-words-susan-schultz/

Manifesto #4

#4

OBU wants a free day. It comes with the contract, doesn't it? She wants to sit on her cushion and gently erase the blood-stains spreading across the internet this morning. She wants to water her doubt until it blossoms into something green. She wants to laugh when her dog hunts raindrops on the lanai.

OBU wants to know how this happens, when what is private separates itself from the public sphere (if it is a sphere). Where is a leaf-drenched space beneath the bushes where she can sit, immune, where birds at late afternoon trade gossip in mad cacophonous gulps of sound? Why can she not parse pain from delight?

OBU thinks to hire a personal trainer, one who can show her how to stretch her hamstrings while avoiding six television screens that hang between her and slogans telling her to CHANGE HER LIFE.

Or OBU might hire a personal musician, a Mexican singer with a blunt steel guitar and tiny speaker, to serenade as if her instruction manual matched his. She hears others say “take care of yourself,” and wonders what that means. Means to an end? Health and humor and the pursuit of?

The poet laureate erased the “Declaration,” that part where early Americans complain about the tyrant across an ocean. What is left when you erase a complaint is another, more abstract, one. To abstract a moment is to bring it dripping into the present, like Marcel slipping on a damp cobblestone.

OBU's dog interrupts her with tug of war toy; she wonders why it's a war between them in the living room, when her arm takes one side and the dog's mouth another. When the growls sound angry but occur in the context of delight? The dog's dream of violence (the white-flecked rooster that struts on the same patch of lawn each morning) dimmed by the knotted toy?

The recipe calls for a strainer. Water runs through the pasta and then tiny holes in the metal bowl. Words run through the mind like agents searching for a cause, or an effect. Starch comes out in the sink.

OBU pesters too much. She expects a lot from others. Some of it comes before the legislature and is voted down. Some of it sits like gravy on her plate, and she doesn't like gravy. She fails to hear her tone in the mirror, says the right thing in the wrong way, at the wrong pitch. To say is to be spontaneous, but what she needs is less of that, more of the considered phrase.

OBU wants everyone to have a free space and time. It's too exhausting any more (“any more” is not a phrase her partner likes her to use) to strain the daily news. It's a real strain. She wants to set up a fellowship for survivors, a place with good jazz and better poems. She'll have to fight the budget cuts, but we might be able to do it on the fly.

Manifesto 3

OBU worries about the weather. Every five minutes her cell phones cry. It's either another nuclear alert (“this is real”) or a flash flood warning. Nuclear winter's got nothing on this constant rain, the coast road closed again, rain falling from the sky, the ceiling, waterfalls chubby and inebriate. It's like fast food, this rain;. Dear Leader would have two for a late dinner, and yes with lotsa fries. He says he'd run into a school building unarmed to save the children. He remembers that phrase, “save the children,” from an ad campaign, because he runs the best campaigns.

But digression's too easy in this campaign era. Go back to the rain, punctuated by feral roosters, and the easily churned mud on the lawns. Ask your students to notice the rain, she says, how much heavier it is now than when they were young. To remember the weather is like remembering a poetry reading, I fear, but we can remember intensity.

The road up the coast closes due to “ponding.” I hear more beeps from my phone. My dog, during a pause in the downpour, hunts for raindrops on the lanai. She digs at concrete to find them. The biologist said that were all the concrete on earth broken in a catastrophic event, the earth would be covered by a thick layer of dust. To be concrete about it, we cannot get out from under ourselves.

Tell them to go to the beach and notice the erosion. In the next 100 years, Waikiki will be under water. Let's organize flood tourism now! You can stay in a hotel (third floor or above) and get there in a dinghy. It's like Venice, except the towers are of glass and the old banyan at the marketplace is dead of drowning. Don't look back, it's all salt out there. No pillars of it, just fountains between ocean and cloud.

OBU wants to organize, but how do you organize with or against the ocean? How do you organize coral or shark or humpback? You can sit back and hope they're all just crisis actors, come up for air, locks dripping with salt, beards drenched in shards of plastic. You can pick up the plastic, but it keeps coming. There's a swath of it a mile long near Molokai. We won't worry about it unless it makes landfall, like an explorer. Perhaps we can eat it, like Captain Cook. What good that did.

That remnant heart still pounds. Pounds fist on podium, pounds propaganda, pounds fake ideas, pounds Brexit on the grand scale. Our infrastructure privatized, concrete runs like rabbits, but we must needs fill in our own potholes. In exchange for Medicare or food stamps, pound your feet on hot asphalt, but do keep moving lest you stick.

It's a problem of scale, they say. Of speeding up. A Daytona Speedway of destruction. Little cars zooming around little tracks, but so many we can't breathe the little air. This island is covered with junked cars. Someone's taken what's needed, like tires or stereo systems, and left the rest. Like geological landmarks. One across the road from the two monk seals who slept on the beach. Seal 2's nose nuzzled a beer bottle, while the other (seal 2's mother, I was told) rested her Lawrentian body beside a blue buoy. There was a cordon, like a net, and we stood in wonder to watch them breathe.

Who stands in wonder of us, our fear-mongering and our mass consumption? Do whales line up to watch us throw junk off our bridges (DO NOT THROW RUBBISH FROM THE BRIDGE I read yesterday)? Is there sublimity in our excess, or just reduction or redaction from the record of our constant use? To use, to be used, these are different verb forms.

OBU demands action, but cannot name it. She doesn't like styrofoam, but her lunch comes in it. She saves her plastic forks and knives. She travels less, or is it more? She evades the news, whether real or fake in the interest of greater or lesser activity. She sits on her cushion and counts through the clutter she otherwise creates. Sit at the head of the bus where the altar is and pray hard we make it around the next turn. It's not a sonnet, but we'd love to adorn it with one. Wrap its laminated paper tightly around your next plastic bottle and throw it in the ever-flooding stream. Cell phones are weeping again. That metaphor should be expunged, lest we drown in our tears. What sonnet do you wish to send into the flood? Send suggestions to #OBUsonnets before the next downpour. ASAP, in other words.

Manifesto 2

OBU wants to “Stop Enabling Her Overly Dependent Adult Child.” He's only 71 years old, but demands rent money and oh so many admiring words. “What a good oral report you did for school,” you tell him, after he reads from a small card he pulled from his suit coat. “What do you want me to know?” is one of the questions. OBU feels an instant of great hope, believing that Man-Child will say the right words and—dare she say it?!--feel them, too. Shortly after, OBU realizes her stupidity. Dumb as rocks.

“Too many times parents overly rescue their children from their problems.” A standing ovation makes the man-child feel better, though the silence of the mirror would make him cry, if he could. “You've been through such pain,” he tells the students and the parents, “and we won't let this happen again.” As if he's Big Brother or something. But he's man-child, so he proposes “a fix.” To their problems, not his.

I imagine Man-Child at the laundromat, trying to wash his clothes. He has no quarters (what billionnaire does?) so he tries to stuff bills in the slots. He's got wads of them, like Drake. Can't find his dirty clothes (his woman-child is reputed to have left him) so he puts wads in the washer. They'll be clean, if only he can get it on.

Man-Child has a woman problem, a Putin problem, a model problem, a nepotism problem, a concentration problem, an ego problem, a hair problem, a bald spot problem, a Korea problem, a gun problem, a debt problem. And that's for starters. Can't decide how to make his list. Would he kill the dog or cut down the tree? Would he kill the horse or the snake? Would he sing that song again, asking his audience to imagine immigrants, legal ones? Will it be hair or Korea, model or gun? What rises to the top, what sinks to the swampy bottom?

Does your president act entitled? Does he require a title, like “45” on his cuff or “45^th President of the United States of America” on a card at his table?

Are you afraid of hurting Man-Child by taking away his privileges? Do you entrust him with the family musket, the one covered by his favorite amendment? Do you leave home while knives are in the drawer, or do you hide them among your clothes, the ones you used your own quarters to clean? Do you try too hard to fix Man-Child's problems? Do you drive him to look-outs to put out brown bags full of cash for playboy bunnies? Do you offer him spending money for his hook-ups?

Do you do Man-Child's homework for him, looking up Korea on Wikipedia, and reading graphs of dubious origin off the internet? Did you tell Man-Child about sources, which are good and which not? Did you tell him his best buddy got indicted for “crimes against the USA”? And how do you respond when he says no, it's all fake?

OBU admires the theater kids in Florida for their #NeverAgain. OBU knows that theater kids recognize the true from the fake, trauma from self-regard. Man-Child's men call them “crisis actors,” brought in from kid-farms to pretend there was a shooting, and that white mothers weep to make good ratings. The actors say he reads his lines pretty well, so they know he's for real. “I hear you” is Number 5 on his card, the one that says “The White House” at the top.

OBU wants to make a pilgrimage to Trump Tower in NYC. She wants to lay a wreath there, or a lei. She wants to weep against the dark granite, and pray for sustenance. She wants to hang out at the restaurant (not many stars for their burgers), resemble a burgher in a Rembrandt, staring out with stolid Dutch eyes in a square Dutch face at what happened to the island where Man-Child resides. She wants to see herself in gold-encrusted glass before she picks up a vase (the one that magically blackened the eye of Man-Child's aide's wife) and flings it.

Man-Child eats raw glass for breakfast. He calls for ketchup to dab around the edges of his mouth. He adds salt, passes the shards to his son, and leaves, nearly tripping on his tie. Man-Child wants his son's teacher to have a gun, because he knows the teacher loves his son in ways he cannot ever feel. That shard of glass in his colon reflects badly on a remnant heart, by which I mean metaphor. You are the bus driver and your passengers all have their own directions. Whose advice will you follow? Or will you pick up your AR-15 and mow them all down, happy to effect a good day's work? Go home to your steak and eggs, and make of your blood-drenched shirt a pillow case. We'll sleep this off. We always have.

Manifesto 1

OBU loves words. OBU loves short words, like “bird” and like “sky.” OBU looks to the things themselves for confirmation they still exist, the “bird” in the “sky” over the “mountain,” with or without “clouds.”

OBU loves words, but finds it easier to lose the “bird” than to flush out the “shithole.” OBU wants to sit with the most beautiful words, suck on them like smooth stones, taste the salt left by sea water, hear the “waves,” see the “surf.” OBU finds this akin to “love.”

But OBU cannot forget the conjoined words “shit” and “hole.” OBU picks up her dog's shit, and doesn't mind. She puts that shit in the dumpster's maw. She doesn't mind.

But the word “shithole” hurts. She cannot get it out of her head, her chest, or off her fingers. It sticks as much as stinks. It's crazy glue but it doesn't pull our torn skin together.

OBU argues with her kids about who makes the house more a shithole than the other. It's a lame effort at humor, because some of us are white and some of us are brown. Some are Norway to others' shitholes.

OBU wants to put “shithole” in a container. Like one of those containers that keeps radioactive materials off our roads, out of our water. OBU wants to wash these words with pure water, to pull them out of their ponds and let them dry in the sun. OBU wants clean words, as Williams said of Moore's lexicon.

But OBU feels the urge to censor, to destroy, to burn the word, to diminish the language in order to save it. OBU has the torch and the word comes with straw attached, as so much attaches to shit.

OBU wonders how to have the word and let it rest. There's a rest in music, and there are commas in the sentence. But is there rest in our politics? It's a shitstorm, after all, though “shit” seems less toxic in that word than in “shithole.”

OBU can find no rest except in taking exception, moving to the rain forest and turning off the Wifi. OBU wants that rest, but feels traitorous for considering it. OBU wants to hear the news without falling in its shithole. Shithold.

The forest of words hides our trauma until it explodes. There are landmines in our language, and we lose arms and legs (as our leader points out in another context). We lose the limbs of our sentences. We bleed particles, but nothing adds up to walking or breathing or bird or sky.

OBU wants her language back. This is not nostalgia or the vatic hope for beauty and lollygagging lambs on the lawn. This is politics and it is spirit. OBU wants a spiritual politics, one that's angry but knows to forgive.

How long until OBU can forgive?