Why do I feel the need to commodify my every thought?
Why do I seek the validation of likes for my work?
I hate this part of myself.
I want to create for the sheer joy of creation.
What would I make if validation didn’t matter?
We’re Not All in This Together
The most annoying part
Of the pandemic
Has to be
The cloying
Saccharine commercials
Speaking in earnest
Vocal fry
With stock piano Chords
Fuzzy montages
“We care about you.
Don’t get out the guillotine.
Buy a Toyota
In these hard times.”
And then the viewer
Presumably damp-eyed
From all the corporate love
Buys a thing
Because “we’re all in this together.”
Reckoning out loud
Oh to be a philosopher before Kant.
You could just say whatever you reckon
And be lauded for it.
You didn’t even have to think too hard.
Just say stuff in an authoritative tone
And BAM
You’re a philosopher.
This tradition persists in American Conservative thought.
From Locke to Rand to Peterson
Reckoning out loud
Is the same thing as intellectual rigor.
Althusser Dancing on the Head of a Pin [poem]
A communist philosopher storms into
A psychoanalyst’s conference…
Have you heard this one?
He storms in
Claiming divine right
And claims it is
The analysand
Not the psychoanalyst
Who is the proletarian –
The worker –
Of psychoanalysis
He says
The brain is a factory
And we its workers
And it’s the psychoanalyst
Who is the boss
He says we must democratize
The process
He says
The workers of the world
Must own the means of cognition
Althusser looks to Lacan
Expecting the latter to agree.
He says nothing.
Althusser is rushed out of the building.
Millennial [poem]
I, 15 years elder the century, weathered the broke-brawned shelter of millennia.
The diamond dust which glistened the middle 20th, now micro-incisions the skin and teeth, makes rags of lungs.
Colonial, they say we were better. But now post, we look at the masses, zombie-tired, broodbloods’ eternal shuffle.
Nostalgia for sickly things permeates to a time when future existed. Rotary phones and VHS grain stipple YouTube longings.
Feast! Feast! Ye hungry eye. Ye huddled mass! Yearning for 30 day free trials!
The end of history came too soon.
a poem about mozart and poplars
The cat investigates the phonograph
She can’t decide if she likes Mozart
Sniffs at the rotating record
I am reading Kenneth Rexroth
And marveling at his detail
He remembers everything that happens
At his imaginary parties
And like most poets
Talks of poplars
there was a period of time
When all my friends wrote
About poplars
I would say
“You live in Texas.
There aren’t any fucking poplars here.”
But they thought it sounded literary
And indeed it is the most literary tree
I shoo the cat away from the phonograph
She meows in disapproval
I tell her she can deal with it
