Since leaving prison I remembered it
my first beer, first joint, first
Whitman in the lunch room, Neitzsche in
as the teacher lectured on spores
they smoke pot, they do drugs--have I ever heard of drugs?)
Showing signs of intellectual curiosity
(other than the Greeks and Trojans).
they sit and wait for the universe
jousting, learning the art of war,
warehoused like products waiting to be
they must learn to sit and wait,
they need the practice for the
"you can't expect much more of them
I find a copy of National Geographic
with a nice spread on Walt Whitman.
and they will never know it exists,
their more recent forebearers,
mechanics, vending machine lackeys,
used car salesmen, telephone solicitors,
She taught those who wanted to learn,
She died in the Reagan occupation, may as well
have been in the Norman conquest
But, then, why should they care?
They have been robbed of a much more ancient and grand legacy than that of their high school.
Robbed of all legacy, all tradition, robbed of all
I let them go early, in honor of Mrs. Bennett.
Because I do not hope to read again
I never did strive toward such things
(why should the aged consumer not become his job?)
the vanished greatness of that which is
Because I do not hope to be trained again
The feeble prattle in those paper things
The one and only truth, reality transcendent
Except there, where bright products flower
and colorfully clad shoppers flow, for there
Because I know that there is no time but the present
And nothing is more tangible to me than my
I rejoice that things are as they are
I renounce all truth, all joy, but MCI and Mastercard
Because I cannot hope to read again
Consequently, I rejoice, having to construct
a self, in which to hide my emptiness.
And I pray to Reagan to have mercy upon consumers
And I pray that I may forget all I've learned
These matters that I hardly knew to discuss
May the judgment not include penalty or interest
Because these CD's no longer gain two percent
My mentality is now small and dry
Teach us to buy and not to sell
Pray for us consumers now and when we are overdrawn
"Pray for us now and at the hour of our death."
Holy Elvis, Blessed Jackie, suffer us not to mock
Let us ignore that rose-shaped heaven
Let my impulse buying and immediate gratification
"Pray for us now, and at the hour of our death"
For a conference, and such a long conference
The stores crowded, the papers long
And the Taxis hard to get, the hotel crowded,
Sitting in the bustling lobby.
There were times we regretted the chairmanship.
Then there were the colleagues,
Cursing and grumbling at the bar,
And the rooms being cold, and not having
and they couldn't make rum drinks
the restaurant messy and charging high prices
In the end we preferred to stay for all the
The voices ringing in my ears, that I didn't
Than it came time for my paper,
Lots of penises, binary oppositions,
"Ann Landers as Feminist Hero,"
"Christianity: The Topos of Hierarchicalized
Totalistic Logocentracized Oppressivistic
Maleistic Aphasia quaquaquaquaqua Athambia
"Eva Braun: archetype of woman's experience"
"Apaophatic Resonance and Liminality
There was a paper, there was a paper read
I can document on my CV there was a paper read
I have read papers, this paper was hard and
"Frank Sinatra: Image, Taboo, and The Male Gaze,"
no longer at home in the end of the final dispensation,
with a banal people, clutching their PC's.
I should be glad of another publication.
when the dawn is pink and yellow
and the gray mist on the horizon is
while the trees bathed in blue
and violet seem fragile, illusory.
The world is ruled by concrete
The higher abstractions are the
profit margins the greater good.
Compesinos murdered in El Salvador,
children roasted in the orange fire
all merely fragments of higher meaning,
The world is ruled by things we know
the tricks of dead white writers.
The world is ruled by facts at hand
by profit margins and observation
from pure objective rationality.
or a being whose existence is its
with the victims of rationality
The tallow of a thousand nights
Jean D'Arc, Madame Guyon, St. Teresa
Virgil and the poet lost in the deep wood
Frany mouthing the Jesus prayer
SK, Death playing Chess with the knight,
Godard characters writing insults to American
service men on the side of a limo
all bound up in the world without end--amen.
All unreal, all ego, oppression, maleness.
Abstractions are real, and run the world,