sit naked upon the toilet, your anus dangling, being lightly sucked on by gravity, and you will place your hand along your member, and you, holding the book in your left hand while gazing upon a picture that is perhaps not the most obscene but in some way the most revealing, the most revealing of—if you are kind and moral and lying—her pleasure at receiving his pleasure, or his delight in holding her, or maybe more accurately, in the grand scheme, their utter alienation from one another but their twinning, if foreign, individual pleasures in this unified effort at joy, and you will see all this holiness and you will thrust and throttle yourself until you feel the chemical explosion rising up from your belly, on up into your chest, spilling with the loose lymph of your system into the thoracic duct near the veins of your neck, plumping your cheeks and flooding your head, spilling physical specimen all over your leg and perhaps, if you are really throbbing and prehensile, the corner of the book you are squeezing. Which you can wipe clean rather easily. It is largely water-based, and whoever grasps it next will know nothing of your semen and not be hurt in the least by it, and perhaps we all know deep down that we are constantly touching the fluids that issue and ooze from discrete human beings.

C)
Satire is child-like. Satire is child's play. It is amateur and beautiful. The Satyr was a creature from Ottoman nursery-rhyme. It danced among the children stark stilted. Enthralled and serious. Then it would stop dancing, look down, and find itself naked in a board room or at a community action committee. And it would just be standing there, urinating uncontrollably. And people would make fun of it and fuck it over. Sane, sober people would make fun and fuck it. Vigorously call it stupid and simple.

Aldosterone

D)
“But all there is to say about this, as far as I can see, is that Krauss is dead wrong and his religious and philosophical critics are absolutely right. Who cares what we would or would not have made a peep about a hundred years ago? We were wrong a hundred years ago. We know more now. …And if what we formerly took for nothing turns out, on closer examination, to have the makings of protons and neutrons and tables and chairs and planets and solar systems and galaxies and universes in it, then it wasn't nothing, and it couldn't have been nothing, in the first place."
—NYT Book Review 3/25/12, David Albert

Perhaps in a warm pond. / What does Darwin say? /
Karen thought the origin of species was the antelope. /
That it came first, appeared out of stardust, and everything /
else just went up or down from that. /
“This idea that things progress or grow increasingly complex, /
what chauvinism. Intolerable, really." / Karen was mad. The day had been bad. /
The flowers she'd planted had been trampled by our cat. /
The beautiful orange hibiscus she'd spent /
her last dime cultivating—“I'm not buying shitty plants," she said. /
“I don't eat in shitty boulangeries." She didn't. She ate /
five dollar packages from the bodega /
down the block or red snapper /
from grand Provençal kitchens, none of that mid-range /
bourgeois crap. “They just suck out your money /
while you suck their passing-through-ness, /
all those ugly places that feel like train stations, /
too many entrances and exits, too many choices, / everything so fucking precious." /
Perhaps in a warm pond life began. /
“Become a loser. Give up all that." My advice, really.

Bill would just weep. Saying, “Oh what is it like to be me?" And we'd listen to his album without having heard the best songs on it yet. “You are listening to my album and you haven't even heard the best songs on it yet," and, “the best songs are the certified ones." And he'd add: “Those which I am feminine in, and the ones that I go masculine on…I told a joke in Ceylon, when I was there last, it was something to the effect of, ‘Ouch. And go off. And cook brisket and I have begun to cut my own pasta now.' Or similar—maybe I am butchering it. Perhaps there