NAPOLEON CROWNED HIMSELF

cw: drug use, murder, violence, sexual assault, etc. not sure how often these things'll come up, but we're getting into dictatorships and making art under dictatorships, so might as well cover my bases

2025 - I saw you walk out of the wall
2024 - carnival funhouse mirror
2023 - midday moon
2022 - senior year
2021 - I can make going to denny's sad (not posting these)
2020 - spring waits for no one
2019 - sometimes I hear the bell ringing
2018 - the man beneath the lamppost
2017 - How to Deal with the Buzzards Poking at Your Eyes
2016 - these are the words that are an offense to sanity

lili boulanger (august 21st, 1893 - march 15th, 1918)

september 27th, 2022 - ezra pounding the bars of his steel cage

trying to shove
his face through paper
he screams at nobody day and night
his world a few square feet around him
shattering under his feet
threatening to bury him
while the soldiers beyond patrol
the well lit pisa prison camp,
and farther beyond the free italy
buries its dead, grows plants
over the dirt and rotting flesh,
and farther beyond
his heroes have been shot
and strung up upside down
like bundles of rods
and pelted with stones,
their bloated corpses rotting
in the warming sun that bakes
ezra pound's skin parches his throat
chokes him in the dry air
while he begs to know
why he lost, where he went wrong,
how this could've happened,
he was just trying to save everyone
from *them*, why won't anyone understand,
he can't make it cohere.

march 24th, 2026 - mezy-sur-seine

in hindsight, I can't really blame nadia
for deciding she was done composing
after spending a few months cooped up
in a small house north of paris
with her sister bedridden pale as a ghost
mostly hair and bones now
coughing death from her lungs
too sick to even lift a pen
but still begging demanding
to put to paper the music in her head
while she still had the time to,
and can't forget they were fleeing
the artillery that must've roared
like a thousand-mile-long tornado
scouring the earth and snuffing out lives
and choking the rivers in spent casings
and ash and bones and blood,
I wonder if it kept them up at night,
if they ever broke out the candles
or lit the fireplace and got to work,
if it ever drowned out the cantatas
and chorales and symphonies in lili's head
as she dictated them to her sister,
if they ever argued, they must have,
whether this instrument or that
suited the mood better, the vocals
a little too quiet here, too loud there,
would you please just take a break
and go to sleep, I don't want to see you
tearing yourself apart like this
just to squeeze out a fraction
of everything you could've been,
god knows it's eating you up inside
but you can't die drowning in regrets
over everything you didn't get the chance to do
when the world is already so much brighter
for you being here.

march 28th, 2026 - nothing but an ordinary man

can you imagine how tearing his hair out
punching the walls screaming furious
beethoven would be if you could go back in time
and tell him hey everyone in the future
is calling your fifth piano concerto
the emperor concerto?
after all the time he spent agonizing
over his third symphony, god the drama,
the pathos, the quiet, the sublime,
the hero mired in his grand struggles,
beating back his enemies, fighting
until his last breath, his generals
carrying his casket while the masses
crowd the streets to honor a great man
who shattered the ancien regime
and brought with him the dignity
of freedom, liberty, and equality,
a world for everyone to live as they like
and love as they like and do as they like
and wait napoleon just crowned himself emperor
and trampled the corpse of the republic with his horse,
so much for that!! strike his name out
and mourn the abstract generic hero instead,
the napoleon beethoven would've liked him to be,
the europe struggling to be born
out of the ashes of failed revolutions,
god can you imagine the indignity
of putting up with all these rich patrons
who can't understand his music,
are scared off by it, it's a little too
radical, out there, bold, so he has to
play them against each other
or make his music out to be about something else,
anything to get it out there
and not worry about it getting banned,
how infuriating it has to be,
how beneath him it has to be,
the way he thought for a second
he could see the sunlight on the horizon
and now he's not sure if it was ever there
in the first place?

april 1st, 2026 - anna akhmatova burns her poems

write it, recite it, ignite it. a ritual.
these days she collects rituals the way
magpies pick up plastic, trinkets, anything shiny
off the road to bring back to their nests, the way
she paces the gates with the other grieving mothers
and wives lips blue toes numb from the cold
in rags waiting to hear the news, beg their case,
send baskets of food, go back home or what's left of it,
day in day out walk past the stone walls
that stretch out either way to the horizon,
disappear over the edge, the way forever
bleeds time together, what is a year
to two to a decade to two, from here
they all look the same, and she'll wait anyways,
she has to wait, she doesn't have a choice,
she'd never forgive herself if she walked away,
let the jaws of the prison close over them,
and in the meantime she can carry herself
with her, her friends can carry her with them,
and some of her snippets and fragments and pieces
will fade away, drown, get buried, burn up,
it's inevitable, you don't build a nest
because it's perfect, but because it'll hold
long enough for the eggs to hatch and birds
to stumble and fumble and eventually take flight.

april 2nd, 2026 - des canyons aux etoiles...

I saw this older gray-haired caps and khakis couple
walking up the path ahead of me,
half-whispering to each other
what sounded like French to me,
so I nudged my brother and struck up
a loud conversation about how
don't you know olivier messiaen
wrote des canyons aux etoiles...
(said it in my cringe-ass
why bother looking it up
just cut off half the syllables French,
day can-yon aw (or ow?) eh-toh-lay)
after he visited bryce canyon national park
and I listened to it a bunch before we got here
and did you know he commissioned
a barrel filled with little metal balls
that you play by shaking it
so they roll around so they sound like
wind scattering sand across the desert,
and yeah I don't think that couple heard me,
we picked a lower route and passed them,
and god felt myself burning up a minute later,
why do I feel the need to try so hard
to get the attention/approval of strangers,
even if they had heard me would they know
who messiaen is or care, it matters to me,
isn't that enough, why do I need to prove
I'm so Cultured and Sophisticated,
and really what I enjoy about messiaen
is pretty damn personal, he just captures
the incomprehensibility of god to me,
the burning bush I AM THAT I AM god
in all the dissonances and twists
and his massive ensembles
and the range of his pitches
like his pieces are about to swallow
the entire world whole, are the world
in the red earth path winding its way
past the trees shedding their snow
and chipmunks skittering into the brush
and the wind howling past red earth peaks
still towering over my head high as I am,
all rising like a crescendo until the top
when I can look out and see the hills
and valleys and forests and canyons
stretch out before me as far as I can see,
if I squint and look just right I can maybe
make out the grand canyon on the horizon,
and me an ant I'll never be able to understand
how I'm even here at all, how any of this
is even here at all, it's, amazing
isn't nearly enough, I can't put the feeling
into words, I don't think I'll ever be able to.

april 3rd, 2026 - no underpasses aren't safe that's a myth

a thing (one of the things)
that freaks me out about tornadoes
is if the supercell is isolated enough,
grows large enough, has enough inflow,
you can make out a hook on radar,
literally trace out the tornado
just from the rain on its edges
(the largest tornadoes even have eyes
like a hurricane, not sure
if things are so quiet in the middle though),
the storm stretching out like a northeast cape
flinging hail and whatever it can grab
at anyone else unlucky enough
to be in the way, and that's still
not even the actual tornado!
check out the velocity signature,
strong couplet there, one half colored
usually red and orange, the other
usually green and blue, one half
rotating away, the other rotating towards
whatever radar station is picking up on it,
that's the tornado, and god I've seen some
stretch out a mile plus wide before,
make their way through fields, farms,
parks, neighborhoods, suburbs,
switch over to the correlation coefficient
and hey look there's some blue blob
in the middle of all that red,
that's particles that aren't quite
the same size as everything around them,
that's debris, that's people's lives
getting shredded to pieces scan after scan
and even without seeing any of the footage
I can sit back from the comfort of my home
and watch it play out with a couple settings
I can toggle on a website,
I don't know why I keep coming back,
there's got to be something wrong with me,
but now that I know where to look
I keep looking, I can't stop it,
I can't do anything about it,
I'm waiting to see if this one will be The One,
another joplin or moore, and, uh,
thinking about how a few state requests
for federal funds after tornado outbreaks
got denied, sure would be nice
if we could go the next couple months
without anything terrible happening!!

april 4th, 2025 - ideally with robots

a thing that cracks me up
about fictional dystopic dictatorships
(and I have problems with the whole concept
of dystopia and utopia, but that's
a conversation for another time)
is the way a lot of them are big
on casual sex and free drugs,
look at us warping the masses
into hedonistic pleasure-slaves
who will either do our bidding
to get their fixes
or not get in the way of us
as we conquer the earth (ideally
with robots, because otherwise
how the fuck is that going to happen
if everyone's too blissed to function)
and of course struggle with the
straight-laced celibate protagonist
who believes in things like
responsibility and duty,
that's some nerd-ass shit,
do a bunch of coke and get into an orgy already.

just because, like, in reality
a lot of authoritarian governments
are very Weird about sex and drugs.
drugs are a threat that stops workers
from contributing to the Mother/Fatherland,
sex should only make more workers for the sake
of the Mother/Fatherland,
you aren't supposed to "enjoy" things,
you have a responsibility to your country,
you are nothing but your duty
and your loyalty to your superiors
and your service in the fight
to spread your ideology around the world
and crush the nonbelievers.

april 5th, 2026 - downing three shots of vodka at the airport

so he could fall asleep
on the long flight to florida,
at least, that's what I could piece together
from the conversation outside my office
over the hum of the instruments.
nobody ever really tells me these things.
I mean, it's not exactly my business,
and she had told me the important part,
but a solid half of the lab's cool
bantering and gossiping about whatever
while I have to listening in on people
or glance at some of my boss's emails
while my boss is helping me with something else
so I don't say or do some shit
that I might regret. like for instance
talking to him a couple months back
when he was talking about flying
to florida to see family for a week,
and I was like hey at least
you'll get to have a nice vacation,
and he hit me with no my mom's dying
like fuck me, man! I didn't know!
god I hope he doesn't remember that,
with my luck he probably does, just wish
I could say something that'd begin
to make up for any of it. it's grief, man,
I spent so long writing about it
and reading other people writing about it
and none of it ever clicked for me
until it happened to me, and even then
none of it ever really did it justice,
it's strange and surreal and wrong
and it hurt then and it hurt now
and it'll hurt forever and none of those words
are the right ones to describe how it feels
in all its little forms and moments and variations
it doesn't just hurt it isn't just wrong
but I never figured out the words for it
and not sure I'll ever be able to.

april 6th, 2026 - the princelings

there's plenty of leftist-y types
who reflexively whip around
and try to defend socialist states,
modern and/or historical ones, usually
lasering in on the concept
of local/anti-colonial leadership
(fair enough - the modern nation-state
should be a group of people organizing
out of a desire for self-autonomy
and self-determination, upholding
a consistent framework of laws
for everyone in those borders),
incompatible market economies
and the consequences of sanctions
(don't really see what the point is
if people can't drive to work anymore
or light their own homes
or break out the AC or the heat
or keep their food refrigerated
and ventilators are getting shut off
in hospitals to save power
while leadership sneaks in funds
from offshore accounts and splurges
on five star hotel trips and new yachts),
and how much the dissidents
with the money and connections
to represent their communities
just kind of suck ass (wow
your great-grandpa was bautista's
favorite slaver, and castro hung him
off the eaves of his plantation house?
awesome, thanks! can I please
talk to someone who isn't you?),
but christ maybe they're still regimes
and completely full of shit? what self-respecting
classless power to the proletariat society
is just overflowing with nepo baby
sons of revolutionaries growing up in repurposed palaces
shipped off to the best schools
and handed the best posts they can use
to embezzle the everloving shit out of public funds
until the glorious leader catches them
and purges them in favor of someone else's sons?
if we want the future we want,
let's not make up a past that didn't happen
or a present that doesn't exist.

april 7th, 2026 - I think about kim ju-ae a normal amount

like, is that even her name?
dennis rodman thought so, but
some defectors figure he might've heard
something more like 'that girl'
and that was more or less in private
hanging out with a kind of friend,
in official state propaganda
she's showered in honorifics and titles
and watches missile launches
and drives around in tanks
and gets awards handed to her
every five seconds, still no name.
any siblings? maybe? one, two,
maybe a boy, maybe a girl,
maybe older than her, maybe younger,
who knows really, ask 10 people
and you'll get a dozen different answers.
how old is she? maaaaaybe 13?
some sources give 2013, 2012, 2011,
she's old enough to go to china
and stand around looking Important
for whatever that's worth.
and apparently for north korea
that's pretty on brand,
closed doors and tight lips
on the most incredibly specific things
until they decide someone's Ready
to be leader, and then bam,
make their birthday a national holiday
and invents myths about eclipses and earthquakes
and that one volcano up by the border with china
because they're apparently so powerful
the whole world stops on a dime
when they're born and when they die.
sooo, is she going to take over?
maybe? it's all the song and dance
that you'd expect for a future leader,
the public showings and titles and stunts,
but no clue if a super manly man country
is going to let a woman take over,
especially if there's maybe a son involved,
all that pomp and circumstance
doesn't HAVE to mean anything
if the dear leader ever changes his mind
or she was always supposed to be
some kind of fake heir, and long story short
you do not, in fact, have to
hand it to north korea, but I'm a bit amazed
that in this day and age it's possible
to wall off an entire country
so completely and so thoroughly
even their next-door neighbors
can't hear much more than whispers
from the other side.