The Vanities


		*
In God We Trust.
– the Mint.


*
One Nation, Under God.
– the ribbon sticker on the car.


*
God, Guns & Guts
Made America Great.
Let’s Keep it that Way.
– the bumper sticker on the car.


*
God Damn me if this Defendant’s third victim isn’t my weekend.
– the Deputy Attorney General.


*
We thank God for our great victory today.
– the football coach.


*
We thank God for our great victory today.
– the terrorist.


*
We thank God for our great victory today.
– the Executive of the mortal nation.








A very short poem about Rubber Tree Plants 
and the division of labor



What in the World would make any one black ant

think that it knows more about Earth than another 

black ant, moving a similar amount of Earth, just 

because of the specific kind of Earth – 
	
	for example, a rubber tree plant – 

that it moves?

	Its own self?  A song?  Something it heard?  Read?

*

Now . . . let us consider the red ants . . . 





The Viennese Renaissance

	Max was driving to work.  He had recently finished a collection of poetry by Georg Trakl. After finishing graduate school, years ago, he read at least half a dozen books by Sigmund Freud. While in graduate school, he studied Wittgenstein, and the logicians of the Vienna Circle. When Max was an undergraduate, his “Cultures and Traditions” course included a component on the Viennese Renaissance. Max had also, in just the last week, finished a book of paintings by the artist, Egon Schiele. And the satellite radio station was playing a work by Schoenberg, to be followed by either Webern or Berg.  Stars were aligned in his mind. So Max thought about Vienna, and its wild and weird Renaissance.  
	The Viennese Renaissance is the strangest, and most bizarre, renaissance, in the history of the West and all of its rebirths, Max thought.
	It consisted of a uniquely sordid, twisted, and literally incestuous cast of cultural figures. That, and some really dull, logical thinkers. At a time when Freud was writing about sons and daughters wanting to have sex with their mothers and fathers, making that his paradigmatic framework, the painter Egon Schiele and his younger sister were checking into an inn and selecting the same room their parents shared on their honeymoon. Trakl was also fucking his own sister. They were, apparently, in love. Unsupervised children on a large estate, complete with carriage houses. Wittgenstein, meanwhile, was probably frequenting the docks and dives where someone might humiliate him, anally or painfully, or both, sad and lonely man.
	What he could not speak about, he passed over in silence.
	None of this activity, mental or otherwise, was atonal.  
	It had a tone, its own strange tone. Which sounded . . . off.
	Max sighed. Max shook his head. Max admitted to himself, as he passed tow trucks and police commissions on the side of the road, 65 South, following a terrible accident, one that probably included fatalities, that this one thing resembled the other. 
	The sight of the accident led to a most logical conclusion, after Max had empirically gathered his data:
	“One shouldn’t study the Viennese Renaissance too closely,” he said out loud to himself, passing the carnage.  
	“One should only look it over briefly, quickly . . . like the sight of this wreck . . . and pass it by slowly. Or risk distraction. And further damage.”




When Thorsten Veblen met your Grandpa


Some would have called it old-fashioned – 
These signs of a pride that knows no end.

He would cut the grass, almost daring the dirt,
True to his class in his best white shirt.

As if every day was a chance to say –
To the World at large – 

		“I don’t have to charge.
I pay outright.  I own my day. And also, I own the night.
I own your work and I own my play.
My Capital never has to shirk.  So look at me – neighbor – 
What do you see?  I am the member of your bourgeoisie.”





You put me in a beautiful dizzy



So I think today I will address the birds
the way I might address a letter to you
in hopes of a return . . .

how they always fall in circles
through their sky
singing somber psalms
unwritten by tempted mortal us.

I will address their angelic comportment,
their holy apathy,
their tempestuous singing at our morning window
as I fall in circles in you . . .

or maybe hearing them
I will remain silent unlike them,
but for their beautiful dizzying spirals
& flight
	as I alight . . . 

	J.T. Whitehead earned a law degree from Indiana University, Bloomington. He received a Master’s degree in Philosophy from Purdue, where he studied Existentialism, social and political philosophy, and Eastern Philosophy. He spent time between, during, and after schools on a grounds crew, as a pub cook, a writing tutor, a teacher’s assistant, a delivery man, a book shop clerk, and a liquor store clerk, inspiring four years as a labor lawyer on the workers’ side. 

	Whitehead was Editor in Chief of So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, briefly, for issues 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6.  He is a Pushcart Prize-nominated short story author, a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, and was winner of the Margaret Randall Poetry Prize in 2015 (published in Mas Tequila Review).  Whitehead has published over 333 poems in over 125 literary journals, including The Lilliput Review, Slipstream, Left Curve, The Broadkill Review, Home Planet News, The Iconoclast, Poetry Hotel, Book XI, Gargoyle, and The New York Quarterly.  His book The Table of the Elements was nominated for the National Book Award in 2015.  Whitehead lives in Indianapolis with his two sons, Daniel and Joseph, where he practices law by day and poetry by night.