Sunday Scaries

March 17, 2024 4:56 PM

there's laundry to do and a genocide to stop. A short prose poem by Vinay Krishnan.

Variations on a theme:

Bo Burnham - "That Funny Feeling"

Female Colonel Sanders, easy answers, civil war
The whole world at your fingertips, the ocean at your door

The live-action Lion King, the Pepsi Halftime Show
20,000 years of this, seven more to go

Carpool Karaoke, Steve Aoki, Logan Paul
A gift shop at the gun range, a mass shooting at the mall

Brittany Howard - "Don't Wanna Fight"

Take from my hand
Put in your hands
The fruit of all my grief
Lying down ain't easy
When everyone is pleasing
I can't get no relief
Living ain't no fun
The constant dedication
Keeping the water and power on
There ain't nobody left
Why can't I catch my breath?
I'm gonna work myself to death

Charles Bukowski - "The Shoelace"

the sink’s stopped-up, the landlord’s drunk,
the president doesn’t care and the governor’s
crazy.
light switch broken, mattress like a
porcupine;
$105 for a tune-up, carburetor and fuel pump at
sears roebuck;
and the phone bill’s up and the market’s
down
and the toilet chain is
broken,
and the light has burned out -
the hall light, the front light, the back light,
the inner light; it’s
darker than hell
and twice as
expensive.

Gil Scott-Heron - "Whitey on the Moon"

Taxes takin' my whole damn check,
Junkies makin' me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin' up,
An' as if all that shit wasn't enough
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)

Ilya Kaminsky - "We Lived Happily During the War"

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

posted by Rhaomi (18 comments total)

everyone i follow on twitter is flaming this as the worst poem ever and everyone i follow on instagram is reposting it sincerely. the great cognitive divide
posted by weewooweewoo at 5:01 PM on March 17 [10 favorites]

These activate my brain's Lou Reed voice.
posted by MonsieurPEB at 5:42 PM on March 17 [1 favorite]

'The Great American Poet of Daily chores.
How A. R. Ammons turned the mundane—garbage, boredom, his car not starting—into art..

'America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don’t feel good don’t bother me.
I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I’m sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I’m trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.
I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.
I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven’t got a ( redacted by metafilter algorithm request) chance.
I’d better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that jetplanes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they’re all different sexes....."

-Allen Ginsberg, America.
posted by clavdivs at 8:20 PM on March 17 [5 favorites]

everyone i follow on twitter is flaming this as the worst poem ever and everyone i follow on instagram is reposting it sincerely. the great cognitive divide

Man, there was SO MUCH hate for this poem on my Twitter feed, and I felt like some people were really going out of their way to misunderstand it. Like, feel free to dislike it as a poem if you want to, but the accusations that the writer was trivializing genocide or reducing activism to another personal to-do list item or appropriating other people's trauma as one's own or whatever were so wildly off the mark, imo, when the very thing the poem is about is the feelings of shame that bubble up when reflecting on how easy it is to allow daily trivialities to drown out the horrors around us.
posted by naoko at 9:27 PM on March 17 [12 favorites]

Honest prose by its nature, at its best evokes and when misunderstood, provokes, failure to see the imagery of compassion as pessimist litanies and the inability to see the prospective of the individuals struggle with external world and ones immediate reality. the criticism almost begs the author to be more of a hero, to alter thier perspective into the change they want to see all the while missing what the author is conveying.
I think it's a wonderful piece.
posted by clavdivs at 10:20 PM on March 17 [9 favorites]

Text version:

there’s laundry to do and a genocide to stop

there’s laundry to do and a genocide to stop.
I have to eat better and also avoid a plague. my rent went up $150. I’ll need to pick up more shifts.
Twenty people died in Rafah this morning and every major news outlet is stretching the limits of passive voice to suggest whole families may have leaped up through the air at missiles that otherwise had the right of way.
I just got a notification that my student loan payments are starting up again and my phone isn’t charged. My cousin got COVID for a fourth time and can no longer work or walk or even feed himself.
The person across from me on the L train seems to fashion themself a punk rock revolutionary, but they’re not wearing a face mask, and that’s the kind of cognitive dissonance that makes me want to steal batteries.
Fascists keep winning primaries for both parties, and I think I gained a few pounds. The CDC just announced there are no more speed limits on highways, and I think this Ativan is finally hitting.
The NYPD farmer’s market only sells bad apples, have you heard that one? Listen it’s warm today, too warm for March. But I don’t have time to think through the implications because there’s laundry to do and a genocide to stop.
posted by Lanark at 1:51 AM on March 18 [7 favorites]

I don't think I love it. I'm not critic but it does fail to like, pierce my heart.

For me, part of the issue is how much it drips American. There's nothing universally "anglosphere" about it, it forces the listener to imagine themselves as a New Yorker, something that is almost an identity of ridicule in how forced upon everyone it is, I'm surprised there isn't a line about the cat in the bodega.
posted by Audreynachrome at 2:12 AM on March 18 [8 favorites]

Then again, if there was a line about a cat in a bodega, it would read clearly as satire.
posted by Audreynachrome at 2:13 AM on March 18 [2 favorites]

This is a solid thing. But, yeah,
it forces the listener to imagine themselves as a New Yorker,

emphatically made with:
The person across from me on the L train...

On which train I've spent so so so many hours it simultaneously hit home and broke the spell. This breaking the spell is also, though, what can divide a good poem from a really good or even a really great poem: I'm gonna argue in this case, though - the L train (which runs from 14th street in Manhattan to Williamsburg, Brooklyn) is such a weighted cultural beast (yeah, bodega cat was all that was missing) that wrestling with it is wrestling with a good thirty years of American pop-culture - and the poem is focused too locally to take that on. If they had referred to the 4 Train, or the 1/9 Train - or just more generically "NYC subway" - it would just be "The person across from me on the subway..." which conveys the urbanity full well without getting into the cultural reference of Williamsburg - which doesn't seem to jive with the rest of the poem, which I really like.

"Whitey on the Moon" is actually a good case of breaking the spell effectively - it's a great poem/lyric punctuated by that one phrase and "Whitey" which is ultimately the focus of the poem, the inequality. Each time it's jarring, but never superfluous or gratuitous.
posted by From Bklyn at 4:00 AM on March 18 [4 favorites]

The response to all the haters (hat tip/ @IBJIYONGI)


Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying

BY NOOR HINDI

Colonizers write about flowers.
I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks
seconds before becoming daisies.
I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.
Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.
It’s so beautiful, the moon.
They’re so beautiful, the flowers.
I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad.
He watches Al Jazeera all day.
I wish Jessica would stop texting me Happy Ramadan.
I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies.
Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.
When I die, I promise to haunt you forever.
One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.


---

Written Before 2021...
posted by lalochezia at 5:43 AM on March 18 [12 favorites]

I think it's an effective poem. I like prose poetry in general. This one made me feel -- a success in itself -- sad and hopeless but yet, as the kids say, "seen." And that's what it was going for, so there you are.

Do I "like" it? No, but that's fine; it's not for liking. I don't "like" vinegar, but it's important, so I buy it. The personal quality of the poem in itself guarantees it won't be universally liked. There's only one solution for that -- not to try to be liked by everyone. The poet was sincere and personal, and so he loses a lot of people for that. But nonetheless it's successful.
posted by Countess Elena at 6:11 AM on March 18 [7 favorites]

It always disheartens me how quickly the right can take a sincere hope for a better world than this one, and throw it back with a sneer as something we should be ashamed of ever having expressed
posted by Jon_Evil at 6:16 AM on March 18 [4 favorites]

When I see the words poem and instagram together I set my expectations accordingly. Yes the work is a bit pedestrian and worn, but I liked it. It resonated in me, and what else does it need to do?

I am deeply baffled by anyone who, looking at an image of some text on the gram, brings out their undergrad critical lit theory? To impress the xhitter crowd? What a bunch of tossers.
posted by zenon at 9:26 AM on March 18 [3 favorites]

As far as protest poetry/songs for I’ve always been partial to Phil Ochs’ song from 1965 “Here's to the State of Mississippi" that rates its own Wikipedia article. It’s from the album “I Ain't Marching Anymore.” which I think captures some of the fatigue of that moment.

It’s a whole 8 verses long, starting with the whole state before addressing its people, schools, cops, judges, government, laws, and church’s in a comprehensive, if exhausting, list. This won’t fit in the gram though:

Here's to the state of Mississippi
For underneath her borders
The devil draws no line
If you drag her muddy river
Nameless bodies you will find
Oh, the fat trees of the forest
Have hid a thousand crimes
The calendar is lyin'
When it reads the present time


[Chorus]
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of
Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of

[Verse 2]
And here's to the people of Mississippi
Who say the folks up north
They just don't understand
And they tremble in the shadows
At the thunder of the Klan
Oh, the sweating of their souls
Can't wash the blood from off their hands
Or they smile and shrug their shoulders
At the murder of a man

[Chorus]

[Verse 3]
And here's to the schools of Mississippi
Where they're teaching all the children
That they don't have to care
All the rudiments of hatred
Are present everywhere
And every single classroom
Is a factory of despair
And there's nobody learning
Such a foreign word as "fair"

[Chorus]


[Verse 4]
And here's to the cops of Mississippi
They're chewing their tobacco
As they lock the prison door
And their bellies bounce inside them
When they knock you to the floor
No, they don't like taking prisoners
In their private little wars
And behind their broken badges
There are murderers and more

[Chorus]

[Verse 5]
And here's to the judges of Mississippi
Who wear the robe of honor
As they crawl into the court
And they're guarding all the bastions
Of their phony legal fort
Oh, justice is a stranger
When the prisoners report
When the black man stands accused
The trial is always short

[Chorus]

[Verse 6]
And here's to the government of Mississippi
In the swamp of their bureaucracy
They're always bogging down
And criminals are posing
As the mayors of the towns
And they hope that no one sees the sights
And no one hears the sounds
And the speeches of the governor
Are the ravings of a clown

[Chorus]

[Verse 7]
And here's to the laws of Mississippi
Congressmen will gather
In a circus of delay
While the Constitution's drowning
In an ocean of decay
"Unwed mothers should be sterilized"
I've even heard them say
Yes, corruption can be classic
In the Mississippi way

[Chorus]

[Verse 8]
And here's to the churches of Mississippi
Where the cross once made of silver
Now is caked with rust
And the Sunday morning sermons
Pander to their lust
Oh, the fallen face of Jesus
Is choking in the dust
And heaven only knows
In which God they can trust

[Chorus]

posted by zenon at 9:42 AM on March 18 [2 favorites]

Full poem at the end of the post:

We Lived Happily During the War
By Ilya Kaminsky

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

posted by foxfirefey at 1:24 PM on March 18 [6 favorites]

I had seen this poem on Twitter and saved it. I'll spend some time this week commiting it to memory. It perfectly captures the feelings of helplessness and spiteful hope that many activists feel.

This may very well be the greatest post I've ever seen on this website. Thanks.
posted by AlSweigart at 3:22 PM on March 18 [2 favorites]

I don't think I love it. I'm not critic but it does fail to like, pierce my heart.

This says anything I might. Though I would like to go pet a bodega cat now.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 4:31 PM on March 18

philip levine
has a posse
posted by MonsieurPEB at 2:31 PM on March 19 [1 favorite]