Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man,
I snarl at her and bark,
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

1924

Today, lonely for my father, I saw
a log, or branch,
long, bent, ragged, bark gone.
I felt lonely for my father when I saw it.
It was the log
that lay near my uncle’s old milk wagon.

Some men live with a limp they don’t hide,
stagger, or drag
a leg. Their sons often are angry.
Only recently I thought:
Doing what you want …
Is that like limping? Tracks of it show in sand.

Have you seen those giant bird-
men of Bhutan?
Men in bird masks, with pig noses, dancing,
teeth like a dog’s, sometimes
dancing on one bad leg!
They do what they want, the dog’s teeth say that.

But I grew up without dog’s teeth,
showed a whole body,
left only clear tracks in sand.
I learned to walk swiftly, easily,
no trace of a limp.
I even leaped a little. Guess where my defect is!

Then what? If a man, cautious,
hides his limp,
somebody has to limp it. Things
do it; the surroundings limp.
House walls get scars,
the car breaks down; matter, in drudgery, takes it up.

On my father’s wedding day,
no one was there
to hold him. Noble loneliness
held him. Since he never asked for pity
his friends thought he
was whole. Walking alone he could carry it.

He came in limping. It was a simple
wedding, three
or four people. The man in black,
lifting the book, called for order.
And the invisible bride
stepped forward, before his own bride.

He married the invisible bride, not his own.
In her left
breast she carried the three drops
that wound and kill. He already had
his bark-like skin then,
made rough especially to repel the sympathy

he longed for, didn’t need, and wouldn’t accept.
So the Bible’s
words are read. The man in black
speaks the sentence. When the service
is over, I hold him
in my arms for the first time and the last.

After that he was alone
and I was alone.
Few friends came; he invited few.
His two-story house he turned
into a forest,
where both he and I are the hunters.

So there’s a lot of yammering out there about OWS, and what it means, or doesn’t mean, and even some opinions that OWS protestors are less grateful than a panhandler, and perhaps more immoral, too, since they are capable, presumably, of working…but aren’t even looking.

What does OWS mean to me? This:

And: This:

Will’s Sign at Occupy Times Square, quote by Conor Friedersdorf from John Grace on Vimeo.

Read more about the genesis of the quote in the Atlantic.

And what’s that sign all about? Listen to this Planet Money podcast.

When you’re finished, head back here and let me know: Are you angry about this too?

Observed:

No comment required, really.

The single most common misconception about [the Texas governor] is that he has been running a large state for the past six years. Texas has what is known in political science circles as “the weak-governor system.” You may think this is just a Texas brag, but our weak-governor system is a lot weaker than anybody else’s.* Although the governor does have the power to call out the militia in case of an Indian uprising, by constitutional arrangement, the governor of Texas is actually the fifth most powerful statewide office: behind lieutenant governor, attorney general, comptroller, and land commissioner but ahead of agriculture commissioner and railroad commissioner.

Via “The Marketplace Morning Report:”

JEREMY HOBSON: Global stock markets are still excited about what the Federal Reserve said yesterday afternoon. That interest rates for banks that borrow from the Fed will remain near zero percent for the next two years. That’s the Fed’s way of influencing the rates we pay for everything from student loans to mortgages.

Keeping rates that low for that long is unprecedented and making such a bold statement… carries its own risks…

Via “This American Life:”

Alan Greenspan: The FOMC stands prepared to maintain a highly accommodative stance of policy for as long as needed to promote satisfactory economic performance.

Adam Davidson: You might not believe me, but that little statement, that is central banker’s speak for, hey, global pool of money, screw you.

Alex Blumberg: Come on, that’s not what he said.

Adam Davidson: It is. I speak central banker. Believe me, that’s what he said. What he is technically saying is he’s going to keep the fed funds rate– that’s when you hear, the fed interest rate– at the absurdly low level of 1%.

And that sends a message to every investor in the world, you are not going to make any money at all on US Treasury bonds for a very long time. Go somewhere else. We can’t help you.

And so the global pool of money– which does speak central banker. They understood what he was saying– they looked around for some low-risk high-return investment. And among the many things they put their money into, there was this one thing that they fell in love with. To get it, they called Wall Street, a guy like this.

Mike Francis: My name is Mike Francis. During the beginning of the mortgage implosion, I was an employee, executive director at Morgan Stanley on the residential mortgage trading desk.

Adam Davidson: Mike was one link in a chain that connected the global pool of money to its new favorite investment, residential mortgages, the US housing market, and guys like Clarence Nathan. Think how attractive a mortgage loan is to that $70 trillion pool of money.

Remember, they’re desperate to get any kind of interest return. They want to beat that miserable 1% interest Greenspan is offering them. And here are these homeowners paying 5%, 9% to borrow money from some bank. So what if the global pool could get in on that action?

Pretty sure if John Rawls asserts a good economy should benefit this at the bottom at least as much as those at the top (latest booms haven’t), then he would also assert that working our way out of a downturn should inconvenience those at the top at least as much as those on the bottom.

Via NPR:

Raising the debt ceiling “simply authorizes Treasury to pay the bills Congress chose to incur when it passed years worth of spending increases and tax cuts that are now law.”

So Congress voted for programs and tax cuts and now is whining about the bill coming due.

See also: Government, drowning in bathtub.

Today is our last full day in the house on Marblehead. I’ve lived in that home longer than any other. Tomorrow begins our new adventure. Thursday we alight in our new home.

I just finished my first trilogy in years. I haven’t read this much in…years. See what going on FBbatical can do for you? Time to begin a new series. Or book. Or maybe I will finish “Heart of Darkness.”

And there are other endings and beginnings that seem apparent through the fog of uncertainty. Those, however, will have to wait for the clear light of another day.