.

Sometimes in life
There’s a girl
In the low light
And she’s smiling
.
And you say something nonsensical to her
Once,
Only once,
As an affidavit to your own blood inside you
.
To set swirling mosaics up at the stars,
Within this interface disguised as repetition.

The sky shoots your thoughts ahead of you —
Your little identity is there
In nativity set grey matter and
That is when they want to kill you,
When they are subservient to that.

Hmm, I never knew that,
That life is shingled,
That experiences
Are
Planted
In me
Just as
Hatched there
By self and that
People will
Notice
When I start
Flailing my arms
Around or walking around…
It’s the inner beat.

We are living now in a time of ultimate truth
And the truth,
In turn,
Is just lies.
.
Don’t ever tell anybody the truth:
Keep them on clouds.
It’s the only way and it
Always has been.

We are living in a world that sometimes resembles a combustion engine or the motion of acid inside a stomach, it seems. It consists of constant, compulsive and essentially senseless shifts in rules of how things work. The power to initiate change is true power. This is exactly what we’re witnessing, in my opinion, with Adam Silver and the proposed alterations to the NBA’s playoff format. What is passed off as concern for “progress” is more like a nervous twitch, the result of insecurity of a man uncomfortable with a system that needs no tweaks.
According to a quote on Deadspin, Silver, the NBA’s commissioner, takes dissatisfaction toward the way recent playoff installments have transpired, saying that under the current protocol “‘you could have a situation where the top two teams in the league are meeting in the conference finals.’”
He offers this as a fearful encounter with a hypothetical, but one quick glance at recent history shows that in the last six years, three teams from the Eastern Conference have won the championship, as well as three teams from the West.
To Silver’s credit, he does do a pretty good job in his speech of denoting the overall genus of outlooks on the issue, which is basically “tradition” and “travel.” He insists that “‘the obstacle is travel, and it’s not tradition,’” going on then to sort of offer some pie-in-the-sky optimism that “‘Maybe air travel will get better.’” In fact, though, the “tradition” of the conference alignments is the only hope we have in the NBA of fostering any true rivalries, such as the Bulls-Pistons one in the late ’80s.
His statement on travel “getting better” obviously is just ridiculous and almost seems to dislodge his entire argument as conversation filler, the type of pulp meant to fill conference time and give the allusion of strong leadership, so to speak. In fact, what’s at work is the same epidemic as what we see in the government, the odd notion that running the country somehow entails “getting stuff done.” What is this esoteric “stuff” that people mention in these little diatribes? It remains completely immaterial, even worse, in fact, contributing to the atrocity Elizabeth Warren made public last year, things like the White House’s 500-page health care plan that was voted on before the congressmen even had a chance to read it.
It is in the hopes that Silver’s rhetoric on this unnecessary change is just conversation pulp and will dissipate in favor of true geographical integrity in the NBA. But his mucking up of the All-Star Game into “Team Lebron” and “Team Stephen” is likely resting sourly on the heads of many seasoned NBA fans.
Maybe the NBA’s commissioner is so opposed to geographical allocation because he’s regretful of the side of the country he grew up on. Whatever the case, he is definitely embodying to the utmost extent this all-too-common restiveness of the ruling class.

To witness ESPN’s Rob Parker stumble through an anti-Lebron rhetoric on First Take was to internalize a couple of things, none of which, unfortunately, bespoke too much good for either him or the network itself, or perhaps even the sport.
One, of course, is that ESPN has devolved into a sort of big-headed, entropic mess, trying to pass the buck for sports’ waning entertainment value on to undeserving parties, such as a Lebron James, an exciting player who’s almost undoubtedly good for basketball’s popularity level.
The other is that, sure, there is somewhat of a problem of “anti-parody” in the league, currently, and this All-Star Game is proof. The new schoolyard “pickup” format of choosing two “captains” to pick the teams marks a rigid entrance into a new era of the All Star Game, and of the NBA itself — one that rabidly feasts on individual star power as an antidote for the affective decline of the team game.

We have lost direction,
But we haven’t lost purpose —
.
The overall organism has taken on a shape
Not indicative of the individual cogs,
A fact, of course,
In no way provable,
But by a new, outside organism

There it is —
At 10:49 pm —
That little two-note jingle
From the ESPN app on my phone,
The very mark of lame guy virility,
The thing that never loads,
Never posts full sentences,
.
Only pesters me
As I make my ninth step
Toward bed, when sports
Might as well be
Distended sloth fingernails
For all I care,
.
The sounds knock against
A back nook of my
Mind I
Never even knew existed and
As I haplessly attempt to achieve my bedroom
On this rainy night,
No orchestra was ever so sweet
As that two-note jingle
On the ESPN app on my phone.

15. I hate that number. I rub noses with her. I see what she’s feeling, all across her face. She is my cherub, in bed with me on a rainy night and contouring to my body and then 15 seconds later, I think of it being over, which is just as bad as it actually being over. I want to be a professional crawler across of deserts.

I look around for the RIGHT thing to do and
That proposition itself melds
Heat to people’s patiences
Like raining giraffes kicking
Furiously through the night,
The legions of all hell on an
Arc like shrapnel