"As the ICE agent in question attempts to walk around the SUV,
apparently to assist his colleague in removing the poet from her vehicle,
you can see that her tires are aimed screen right."
Breitbart

An angry lesbian is dead, an ICE agent is under fire, but these predictable, commonplace events do not interest me.  I am far more interested in another commonplace event, the one nobody sees.  I am of course referring to the attitude of disdain toward the arts that is taken for granted as virtuous by literally almost everyone for whom English is a native tongue.  This disdain is so ubiquitous, it's actually kinda funny.  Like winning the lottery 20 seconds before you die.  You would be lying there in a pool of imminent demise, and your number would come in and somebody would say, "you're rich!"  And your only response would be to laugh.  You would look up at the bearer of good news, look down at your dying, mangled body, and it would be the funniest thing you have ever seen.

And then you would be gone.

"I want songs, drugs, Jesus,
(haloes lay siege to the minds of otherwise angels)
to die"
Last Rites of an Idiot

I would like to encourage everyone to appreciate the terrible poetry of Renée Nicole Macklin Good as an attempt at personal reconstruction and spiritual/intellectual definition that is as valid and worthwhile as the efforts of any law enforcement officer, soldier, cook, car mechanic, physician, electrician, political apparatchik, or hyper-nuclear, sub-diaper particle physicalist with a federal grant and a 401K.  Her poem "On Learning To Dissect Fetal Pigs" reminds me of the garbage I used to write myself, back when I was an angry, nihilistic lesbian.  I can immediately see what she's doing, just glancing at the poem from a distance.  At the moment of her exit from this mortal realm, it wasn't great.  Her writing drips with sanctimony and patronizing disdain, both of which are anathema to any work of art.  She makes the rookie mistake of employing abstract language that screams, "I want to be a writer" but leaves nothing but images of thesauruses, instead of concrete language that implants images in the imagination of the reader like antichrist microchips, potato chips, or dreams ("coastal jungle sounds?"  Which sounds?  "Tercets from cicadas?"  What's a tercet?).  Her forced attempts at word-painting and profundity are transparently pedestrian, 

But that's alright.  It doesn't have to be great.

It just has to be true.

"You will write a lot of garbage. The question isn't whether or not
what you have written is garbage, the question is,
'did you have fun while you were writing it?'"
Pablo Smog's Rules For Writing

The pig poem presumes the parasitic nature of the scripture "plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots" (which is a good line), which means that she's still angry enough to get in the way of the pure artistic expression.  Which is an act of artistic lust, not love.  She lusts after artistic purity, unaware that this lust prevents her from attaining it.  She stomps her boot on the face of the muse and calls it poetry.  She impedes the arrest of unlawful, artless garbage on the streets of her own writing, and believes her actions are not only important, but divine.  Which is an educated guess on my part (I know the type, and so do you).  It is both unfortunate and artistically remedial. 

"Empty Words?
You might as well say Empty Stomach."
Rat Food—All You Can Eat

Okay, but... what about her hatred for God?  Does it invalidate her work?  No.  It doesn't.  Does her inability to refrain from wearing her contempt for Him on her sleeve indicate an immature, amateurish heart and mind that is in desperate need of at least another 10 years of constant writing with no celebration or recognition of any kind, and an editor?

Yes.  It absolutely does.  Oh well.

Too late.

"I have bored it seems even God."
Postscript To An Unwritten Suicide Note

Did Renée Nicole Macklin Good bore her creative writing classmates?  Probably.  Did she bore God?  No.  And neither did I, though I thought I did when I wrote "Postscript To An Unwritten Suicide Note" in 1998.  On Ocean Beach in San Francisco apparently, according to the inscription at the bottom of the poem.  A pretty idyllic place to indulge in depressed, self-absorbent nihilism.  Well, the setting isn't really what it's about, is it.  Depression is a state of mind, like Trump Derangement Syndrome.  It gets in the way of the appreciation of the view of the sunset, and the sea.  Such a patriarchal construct, the sun.

Let's write a poem about it.

"Towel wet

with sin and sweat,

I wring the wrath of a hotwater God

into the drain at my feet,

hell"

Sain't

"Sain't" is the first poem in my first book of poetry, Sideburns in the Sun.  It was written at the Sestri Hotel in Chinatown, San Francisco in 1998.  Nobody will care about that, but it amuses me to remember it.  It's not a great poem.  The title is the best part.  But is it true?  Am I a saint, or a sain't?  Is it true that good people go to hell, and that sinners go to heaven?  Unlike Renée Nicole Macklin Good, I did not see myself as good.  I still don't.  Perhaps because my name is "pain" instead of "good," I couldn't stare at the sea from Ocean Beach and lie and say I was in love with the view, or sit in the window of my 3rd-floor room in Chinatown drinking wine and throwing bottlecaps on the street without being aware of the hell opening like a mouth of neverending fire at my feet.  I was neither going to jump into it, nor deny it.  It was obviously there.  I screamed back at the flames, to be sure.  For decades.  In fact I became worse as a person, in an attempt to put the fires out, to scare the hell away.  Titles like "Last Rites of an Idiot," "Postscript To An Unwritten Suicide Note," and "Sain't" are indicative of these attempts.  Rookie mistakes, to be sure, but they are not the titles of the poems of a good person.

And neither is "On Learning To Dissect Fetal Pigs."  Oh well.

Too late.

"Hell doesn't want you
And heaven is full"
Tom Waits

The disdain Breitbart has for "the poet" in the article linked above is hilarious.  It's the winning lottery ticket presented to the real poets, dying on the sidewalk.  "You're rich," it says, as it insults you into not appreciating the sunset, or in impeding federal officers from doing their job.  Don't ignore the ticket, but don't listen to it either.  Laugh at it.  Don't jump in the fire.  Reject it.  Don't accelerate into an armed ICE agent (or anyone).  Stay home and raise your kids, and whatever it is that's driving you mad, keep writing about it.  Even if you're the type that listens to "Dirt in the Ground" on a loop while riding the Greyhounds of hell into San Francisco, resonating with all the funereal vibes within as the golden city opens up before you like a neon sunset, take heart.

It isn't true.  Tom Waits is flipping the script on its head for artistic purposes.  It's a great line, but hell DOES want you.  And Heaven is NEVER full.  Don't believe things just because they're written down.  Test the fires in the ink well.  Some of the flames are true, and some are not.  Some of the flames are true because they're false, and some are false because they're true.  It isn't scripture.

It's a poem. 

Learn the difference.  The life you save will be your own.

Thanks for listening.

Zelle: [email protected]

p.s.  As is often the case, the thought that inspired this article doesn't actually fit anywhere in it.  It's obvious that the writer of the Breitbart article is mocking the idea that Renée Good was a poet, and not the idea of poetry in general,

But if you think about it,

It really isn't.  The disdain for the arts in this society is real.  Decades of outsourcing the arts to one-dimensional identity caricatures has done its damage, and the people elegizing "the loss of the award-winning poet to Trump's Gestapo" <insert whiplash-inducing eyeroll> do as much harm to the arts as those who dismiss them, but even that isn't really the point.  The point is this:

Whatever you do, do NOT engage in sanctimonious contempt for Renée Nicole Macklin Good or her "wife."  That's no different than celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk.  The differences in the circumstances surrounding the events is of no importance.  Did the ICE agent act in self-defense?  Obviously.  But believing yourself to be better than other people is the final frontier, the last stop the soul makes before it arrives in hell itself.  Jesus isn't going to ask you if you voted for Donald Trump any more than He's going to ask if you if you didn't; the moral of this story, perhaps, is that if Renée Nicole Macklin Good should have minded her own business in Minneapolis, perhaps we should mind our own business as well.

Also, if you are following your peer group off a cliff, protesting in solidarity AGAINST a guy who was defending himself, you are removing any and all defenses in the spirit realm against any genuine threat on YOUR life.  If you level a false indictment of MURDER against somebody, and are incapable of considering the possibility that you're wrong, you are welcoming those spirits into your life.  Your self-righteousness has led you into a delusion, which opens a revolving door in the spirit realm.  It's not a matter of IF those demons of death come home to roost.  It's a matter of how severely, and WHEN.

A couple days ago, for some people.  Any minute now, for others.

FYI.

“We were raising our son to believe that no matter where you come from
or what you look like, all of us deserve compassion and kindness."
Becca Good

This is the survivor's press release equivalent of the Tom Waits lyric I mentioned earlier.  The truth is exactly, and in this case demonstrably, the opposite of what is stated in the official lyric.  There was nothing but sanctimonious contempt coming from the Good couple in the final moments of Renée's life.  The contradiction inherent in self-righteousness is deadly.  Life and truth can not breathe in its presence.  It leads to death.

“Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”
Proverbs 16:18

So keep your head down.  Who are you to tell the sheep from the goats, anyway?  Jesus?  Whoever they are, that other person's soul is their business.  You can warn people, but you can't have a revelation for them.  So leave them alone.  Whether they are lesbian poets or ICE agents.  As hard as it can be to believe, you're not better than they are.  “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;” says Romans 3:23.  It's not a poem.

It's scripture.

Learn the difference.  The soul you save will be your own.

Good luck.