Molly Magpie Hangs Up a Shingle

A murder of crows showed up around here this morning. Or at least that's what I guess they are -- could have been some other kind of bird that travels in packs and squawks and caws instead of chirping. It was 6 am, I didn't get up to look. They seemed dark and foretelling, anyway, without being ominous. (Despite the etymology of "ominous" in "omen," I'll insist on the distinction.) War-goddess dark, Dionysus dark. Interesting, for New Year's, but appropriate.

Though don't read my take on birds all that seriously. I don't even think I get the animate; I'm a plant person. I got a mini phal at Wegman's for $2 the other week, too.

On the topic of murder, this job market is pretty close. Things aren't over, but they aren't looking good.

A friend of mine really thinks I ought to be able to get some unusual job that the rapidly-evolving internet is about to invent for me. He might even be right; if there were things for resourceful, problem-solvey, highly intuitive and highly polymathic poets to do with the web, I'd be the person, but I don't know where I'd look or what it would be. I'm shit at administrative stuff and not really a programmer. And I'd never want to leave poetry, so it would have to be some job, that would pay (and pay well, with the loans I have), where I'd be creating things on the web and that would be or feed my writing and thinking about poetry the way a good professorial job would. He's convinced, though. Pretty sure he thinks I'm a William Gibson character. . . and maybe that's been the deal all along. What comes out of this is something that couldn't ever have been anticipated because it didn't exist while I was getting ready for it.

My name's Iscariot Daviess. For reasons now long buried in my prosaic individual past, everyone calls me Tokyo, even though I don't look like any Tokyo anybody's ever seen. I'm a reasonably-paid corporate poet with a business in the underbelly in real prophecy. I can get you what you need to know, in a pinch.

Pinch me and we'll get started.

Eve

I fled at the face of my rival, and I felt her breath at the back of my neck.

So bloodied and chopped it seemed not even to be the soul of a human being at all, but the soul rather of a corpse.

Proposal For Securing Arts Funding In Western New York

Politically-engaged me grades my students' papers, keeps up with world events (sort of, anyway), transmits that information and my take on it around to whomever I can get to listen, votes, signs the occasional petition, shops as responsibly as I can, recycles, and so on. Not enough, maybe, but that's what I do. Politically-engaged me also trusts escapist-poet me that what we're doing in that role is valuable in some other way, or on some other time scale.