Ex Officious Authority

What I have here is
a Problem with
Ex-Officious Authority

I ask my self: why it is that
talk about starving children
& spinach, global warming
& televised fire ramping
across the wild west don’t
make a difference that makes
a difference to me.

I mow lawn riding an over-size
Poulon, grill a hamburger late
afternoons; a PBR settles me
down: it’s not my fire or starving
child & the enormous Sunday
paper delivers shiny slick supple-
mental studies & readership
programs I consider by the light
of my new fluorescent bulb.

I am socio-psycho-pathologically
unable to resonate compassion,
empathy, sym-pathetic pity &
proper fear: purged by catharsis-
like geek theatricals full of sound
& fury faking the look, words,
& proper attitude.

I’m not denying the need to carry
shared, collective concern ooo
my gawd what we have here are
problems in communication, but
it’s not what wakes me nights to
worry over: I worry I’m not worried
enough to maintain appearances,
surface-concern sustainability.

Or, say: endogenous chemistry
un-recalibrated: pharmaceuticals
insufficiently regulating restless
legs, aching back, deficient attention
spanning acid reflux, anal leakage,
toenail fungus; not comfortable in
my skin & nickeled-knuckled joint
relationships with family, colleagues
& student body: all bottom-line
symptoms of Mazlovian Higher
Arches of Need & Desire displacing
sincere World Wide Global Village
Sustainability Priorities, Al Gore’s
inconvenient truth not with standing
in our hearts we know he’s right.

Noblesse Oblige: in the “world”
but not of it, talking the talking
conventions & convenient truths
without collapsing, conflating,
con-fusing them with inconvenient
unconventional truth so disrupting
to the natives.



Kurt Vonnegut & some anthropo-
logical textbooks have suggested
Indians could not see the white-myn’s
sailing vessels sitting in the bay: only
white clouds caught in trees. A
convenient truth.

It would have been an unkind
relative act of cultural violence
& inconvenient to map sailboat
notions onto a canoe environ-
mentalism so to speak, political
correctness with standing native
americans like any one looking
& looking, assessing & evaluating:
appraising such as it-is-what-it-is
in terms of our own terms of
desire & meta force.

xxxooo, Presbyter