Milk & the Brahms 2nd Piano Concerto: Memorial Day

Chugging fresh cold milk right
from the plastic jug – helps to sluice
and moderate the syncopated
slugs that Brahms persists
in drugging me with on this turgid
torrid Monday afternoon – this hollow

lunacy of holiday – this strange
deranged memorialization of a history
of slaughter: wave a flag, imbibe some
stylish water, pass the fat-free popcorn.
Shopworn Brahms in B flat major
on the radio clumps harmonies

like fertilizer on the plain of my
besieged, besieging brain: chords
arrive in thicknesses – like heavy
aromatic Caribbean rain: stewing his
arpeggiated lumps into a further richness:
straining blood into a fertile mud:

war into a distant thunder: seeking
to extract some wonder from its
blunder. Maybe constitutes an answer
to this charmless country’s propagating
fears. Defending war and praising
death is murderously hard, my dears.


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