Author: Jeff Popovich

2022 July 5

Periodic reminder my daughter will be my age in 2056
I stole a cooling rack from home to dry the flags I make
guaranteeing a flag won’t be made tonight, rack shamed
I am reading Diana Seuss’ *Frank* and Blake Butler’s *300,000,000*
screaming better than I can scream apocalypse at me so I won’t at you
2056, I’d be 97, laugh, my dad at 90 in fifteen days
got out what he paid into, my 42 years paid into stolen by 2026
I’d buy a ticket today to 2036 for my daughter

2022 May 19

If I thought my poetry ever be accepted by a big small deal I’dv’d foldered all abandoned haikus but don’t don’t but do but don’t not concession to lack of academic scaffolding laugh I know I type arrhythmic cadence as I talk This criticism and pride I forget what saying get to what new thing I say talking past new thing cause old already me voice mail whisperer lords I serve voice mail listener too re: PD hear myself talk each time I need listen, delete delete delete years since anyone talked to me. Monkeypox, huh

2022 May 3

Jeff,RuleNumberOne:Don’texplain
NothingfucksmyjudgmentupmoreaboutsomethingIwritethan
somethingIwritegettingthousandsinsteadofdozensofhits,inthis
caseNapoleon’sdeathannouncement.Ideletedthepoembelowthis
onefromyesterdays’BLCKDGRDpost,fortherecordIlikethepoembelow
Installedstaticinitsplace

2022 May 1

  1. I don’t have a word for these things I made, I don’t make them anymore, I found them rummaging the archives of another dead blog for typed words
  2. When I made the self-portraits that I quit making a year ago I had already stopped writing or typing word on the thing I had made then quit making self-portraits three or four years later
  3. I quit writing or typing on made things when the made thing became more important to me than the written or typed thing, I quit making self-portraits when I liked making self-portraits more than writing or typing and quit writing when I liked typing more than writing so I don’t need daily decipher yesterday’s scribble
  4. My second time through Joy Williams’ *Harrow,* dig this sentence: “The land was bright with raging fires ringed with sportsman shooting the crazed creatures trying to escape the flames”
  5. I believe I can bat away this uh-oh a toothache coming familiar remembering twinge laugh
  6. Spinning the fuck-it compost bin, fat tubes of primary colors in a shoebox in my desk
  7. If I make things again I permit myself to write again and not necessarily just making *then* writing
  8. I always spiral in and out but need just once not spiral up as I spiraled down

2022 April 10

*******
Kensington to Frederick to Hagerstown to Hancock to Breezewood to Toledo to Ann Arbor to JacksonI divided my backpack to bring twice as much stuff including books I will not read and pens I will not useI just received Jonathan Crary’s *Scorched Earth,* it’s his previous 24/7 capitalism theory on Are You Paying Attention!do I need someone w proper academic scaffolding referring back to names I haven’t thought of since grad schoolto confirm our species as fucked up as I’ve fucking yodeled since the last time you told me to shut the fuck up?
*******

2022 April 5

Team leaves stain like creed
on inner-eyelids chiming
in vulnerable uh-ohs
smoked in campfire poison
I saw the hat and wanted
to buy it No, I haven’t flarted
every enemy atrocity
enemy defined by creed
and who I rooted for when seven
Is there a definitive bible
on the English verb *to be*
as in, *to be in the upperdeck
of Memorial Stadium
watching the thunderstorm
cross Greenmount before
electrocution by choice*
Soon I won’t be able to tell
you three times we are being
reprogrammed

2022 April 4

  • At Hilltop now a covid, flu, and strep outbreak
  • Two weeks ago the mask mandate lifted as did mandatory covid testing for undergraduates
  • 80% of people on campus maskless, all aware of the covid, flu, and strep outbreak
  • Myself and my colleagues wear masks because one of us is six months pregnant and worries
  • Our boss doesn’t, sits in small enclosed rooms with us
  • My colleagues are livid at boss and I am livid for them
  • Key component of our shitlord ordered daily reprogramming
  • requires lucratively rewarded amoral shitlord psy-op savants rewiring us
  • to ignore the personal livid for seething hatred
  • against anything and anybody and everything but shitlords
  • Did you know that Disney is Communist?
  • I will ask my boss in our weekly one-on-one to wear a mask at least in the presence of the one of us who is pregnant
  • I’m not hopeful I won’t have to write about it without some increase to my personal lividity, revolution!

2022 March 29

  1. Made the mistake again of attempting a novel recommended by anyone I know in real life or digital who talks incessantly about Blanchot
  2. It hurts, this wanting to give a dimension to life when life is precisely that dimension, Ashbery said
  3. I’m not reseeding MSADI5G but the new Destroyer album versus the new Guided by Voices album, it’s not close, so not close, so I am reseeding: I rescind Guided by Voices elevation to Third Permanent Seat, I can type about this all day every day and my forbidding myself even in digitabletdaily works most days
  4. Destroyer’s new album did it, sparked it, five great songs, two omg songs, two holyfuck songs, one KABOOM, three seconds in, the only reason it will never be one of my five favorite songs ever is I’m old and other songs have up to a fifty year head start
  5. three seconds in, KABOOM JOY! laugh, I’d forgot, kaboom joy like pain kaboom
  6. body remembered, mind-muffled until activated, poof! everyone wants to be engraved as an epitaph
  7. Other than Ashbery, who people call difficult, I don’t want to read geniuses analyzing why they can’t (but *how* Zeno’s dilemma close they got page after painstaking page) capture the ineffable in words, woe and angst (and zero humor)
  8. Ashbery said, Alone with our madness and favorite flower we see that there really is nothing left to write about. Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things in the same way, repeating the same things over and over for love to continue and be gradually different
  9. Destroyer’s new album reminded me I (still love Roxy Music) thrill on tribal trills, their kits and chords, I chimed. There, I tried

2022 March 24

  1. Can’t stop thinking about dinner Saturday night past and my interaction with my not-blood sister-in-law a poster child for upperest middle-class privileged Democrat
  2. – I wrote that part Wednesday morning I’m typing now Wednesday night – when I typed in the morning I didn’t think about N-B S-I-L weirdass mention of Madelyn Albright as a personal hero in our conversations, her smacked expression when I called Albright the war criminal she is and now (by grace of Blessed Serendipity) was (for this poem’s sake) (worth it)
  3. I said as a peace offering, you cannot be a United States Secretary of State and not be a war criminal, but that didn’t help
  4. I saw Albright on campus within the past two months, and the loyalty she inspired in her colleagues and students tells you all you need to know about the curriculum of this Shitlord World Domination Wargame Training Facility, wait til you meet the grad students and faculty of government, business, and economics
  5. I did not say anything when N-B S-I-L (I do have a blood sister-in-law, she’s nice, she and L make each other laugh) tried to Hillary-bait me, I was busy not biting on brother-in-laws baiting me with Steve Miller Band songs
  6. Hilltop killed its mask mandate, don’t think it’s related to Madelyn Albright’s death, just asking, I wear my mask for people who want me to wear my mask as well as me
  7. half Hilltop happily unmasked, seeing the lower half of a face I’ve seen half hidden for two year I think fuck
  8. Do I look like an almost but not me to you too? do you forget my name for a second when you see my mouth for the first time in two years?
  9. This is true, the copy-pasting magic of wordpress over, new bloggerfart, what? deffjump is taken?

2022 March 21

My let’s stay in touch with all past workers except Alexa now on them next
Let me make it on me please. I could be their dad, played one at work
My daughter’s birthday today, she moved away too
The minute you don’t work there you never worked there ever
An app called Classmates badgers me my 45th GHS reunion
approaching rapidly, see who’s RSVPeed
I’d not recognize the names of most, not greet the names I know
I choose not to give them $29.95 to see if I’m right

2022 March 16

No one besides those that like
to be kind will kind any of the songs
I tweeted nor bump the album’s 40th
notice. I’ve been reading Carl
Phillips, this path out of haikus
does not preclude new haikus,
my not tapping knuckles and knuckle
valleys for thirty-one day months

I ask you to give the album a listen
if it doesn’t change your world I won’t
brain you with a garden shovel, I daydream
of braining certain people but so far
no one in real life, fart. I am programmed
to daydream I want to brain certain
people with a garden shovel so I don’t
brain anyone with any say over my life

2022 March 15

Me in a Robert Serra at Glenstone, a rich fuck’s private art collection as laundromat but free, just need a reservation, usually need to make months in advance, it was Sunday morning an hour short because of clocks and the wind chill factor in the lows teens I was told on the eights so I what the fuck tried and got us in at 10AM, only slot open, Saul to Parkwood to Knowles turns to Strathmore to Rockville Pike to Tuckerman to Falls to Glen (the bridge over Watts Branch where Glen, South Glen, and Glen Mills meet still magic) to there
Humanity cannot outgrow its death drive!
Waltzing towards Armageddon
This is a fossil-fuel war
The epidemic of covid complacency
Death of a political animal
Not only the first museum we visited since plague and then not-plague plague, the only shitlord showoff laundromat I’ve ever visited that *didn’t* charge me for the privilege of admiring shitlord’s collection
Low pay, no advancement opportunities
⤋In which I jinx my reading of Wings⤋
Henry James reviews America upon his return from self-exile
I read Ohle’s *Motorman* and loved and ordered the next Mordenke novel but weirdest the sherbet I thought between the two *another* attempt at Henry James, so here I am jinxing not only the having fun! read of Wings of the Dove I am jinxing my reading of the next Mordenke of Ohle
Shitlord loyal to their rubes, MLB edition
Maggie’s weekly{ feuilleton }’s weekly
I will write about work here but for now I’m burying it in grids not because anyone who’d object reads but here is the Kids in the Hall allusion
The cats and dogs of Istanbul
Lynn EmanuelCovering Ishiguro

2022 March 13

Hope for and hope not
I can’t help with that
academic scaffolding
My new five seven
five elephant note haiku
five seven five jug
five font bucks a month
Locals debate whether shock
wave or vaporize
Don’t stop typing to grid this
Don’t stop to digress elsewhere
Don’t stop to rewrite
but stop to reread
tomorrow Stop worrying
annihilation
just hope that it’s quick
Academic scaffolding:
schtick death to this grid