Sometimes, Knowing Isn't Enough

​So, a sprint into foolishness...

Having just finished George Saunders' wonderful new book (A Swim In a Pond In The Rain) on reading and writing, in which he repeatedly extols the importance of spending time with, and on, the re-write; and, being a long time admirer of  Donald Hall's poignant late essays (Essays After Eighty & Carnival Of Losses) where he reveals that he sometimes changes a word between sixty and three hundred times, I am ignoring their advice: Letting something sail into the world because of the wind behind it, rather than a scrupulous and methodical check on whether it is a sea worthy vessel.

Late last night, as an unexpected snowfall entered its final melting, I sat reading Luke Mogelson's troubling and telling essay The Storm (Among the Insurrectionists) in this week's New Yorker. This followed:


                                        In Him We Trust


God must be sleeping or have died 
a while back, 'otherwise, ' she said
'he would have smite
those motherfuckers' whose twisted mouths
conspire to set fire to truth with their firsting 
dragon breath, their tattooed hands hurling 
history onto the pyre of stories 
that cause indigestion or inconvenience
a roadblock on the pursuit to happiness
"Stop the steal, beat the seal, to death
we don’t like the colour of his pelt 
and how the hell did he sign the ballot paper anyway
Af- af- af- af- af- af- after this
 we are the flippers.  Stop the clocks, the count
this is the end of the world as we know it"


Lady Justice has her blindfold ripped
from her face, her lips painted blue 
so that she can sing a proud boy’s anthem
extinguished dreams have fallen from the mountain
and there he is, god, sliding gleefully down its side 
having abandoned his angels to march with them 
Groyper, they call, slapping his stooped back
and his big old white feet goose along with them
to whose house? "Our House!"
​The fountain has poured 
its black liquid for so long that words are forming 
in its raging foam, parasite, parasitism gurgles and spills
over its stoney lip, staining their green and pleasant land
"Look what it’s done to our lawn, ma"


Somewhere on the floor of a deserted building
a shape with coyote fur, buffalo horns and the body of a man
his wounded animal wrath seethes through megaphone
 “I will be he’rd. We will be he’rd.”
He turns his woolly head in thanks 
to their heavenly father, slumped against a lectern,
slack jawed, breath wheezing from gaping mouth
and a yellow plastic shard embedded in his cheek
                                            “We need more firepower” he barks





© Simon Parker